Glendale Hires Consultant to Help Rid Water Supply of Chromium 6

The Glendale City Council agreed Tuesday to hire a Santa Monica consulting firm to study construction of a water treatment facility to purge chromium 6 from municipal water supplies.

Glendale will pay McGuire Environmental Consultants Inc. $50,000 to examine options for facilities to treat chromium 6-tainted water and a timetable to implement a plan.

The 5 to 0 council vote comes less than a month after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency extended for 60 days a deal that permits Glendale to dump millions of gallons of chromium 6-tainted drinking water into the Los Angeles River instead of piping it to homes.

The city was supposed to start accepting the water Sept. 25. Pumped from a polluted aquifer beneath the San Fernando Valley--a federal Superfund site--the water has been treated to remove solvents but not the suspected carcinogen chromium 6.

The EPA initially granted an extension last fall which it extended to March 5 following a meeting of water officials from Glendale and other agencies and municipalities at EPA offices in San Francisco.

Glendale officials asked for more time to consider other options, including building a costly treatment system for reducing chromium 6.

Although the water meets the current state standard of 50 parts per billion of total chromium, a state agency has proposed tougher limits designed to reduce total chromium to 2.5 parts per billion--or about 0.2 parts per billion of chromium 6.