The Devil’s Advocate

Perhaps the best testimony to Phyllis Currie’s insistent and persistent leadership came last January when, amid ongoing celebrations of the successful Mars rover mission, NASA Deputy Administrator Fred Gregory came to Pasadena to attend two community meetings and assure locals that the space agency was working hard to resolve their decades-old problem--water more than 200 feet below the surface of the renowned Jet Propulsion Laboratory that was contaminated during JPL’s early rocket testing days.

Since coming aboard as general manager of Pasadena Water and Power in 2001, Currie has made it her mission to hold NASA responsible for contaminating nine of the 15 wells that Pasadena has used to supply water to its residents. Last year, NASA, which owns JPL, offered to fund construction of a water-treatment plant and pay to refurbish two of the four wells it acknowledges having contaminated. Currie accepted the offer, but made it clear that she would continue to press for the cost of replacing the bad water and cleaning the other five wells she feels NASA contaminated. “I told NASA, ‘Write us a check and let’s just quit arguing about it,’ ” Currie says. “This has gone on long enough.”

That Currie got the attention of Gregory and other NASA top brass testifies to her success, but it’s her no-nonsense approach that established Currie as a woman on a mission to resolve an environmental problem that has been mired in finger-pointing, red tape and indecision. Its history dates to 1936, when rocketry enthusiasts as well as students and scientists from the California Institute of Technology began experimenting with rockets in the Arroyo Seco, a gulch that separates the cities of Pasadena and La Canada Flintridge. JPL sits above and adjacent to the Arroyo, near an area nicknamed “Devil’s Gate” because of a rock outcropping downstream that some see as the face of a devil. JPL is a government-funded facility staffed and managed by Pasadena’s Caltech.

In 1980, Pasadena detected in the city’s groundwater a chemical stew of degreasing agents commonly used to clean jet engines. Many of those chemicals, including carbon tetrachloride (CTC), trichloroethylene (TCE), dichloroethane (DCA) and tetrachloroethylene (PCE), are known by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to cause cancer. Chemical levels rose so high that the city closed two wells in 1985 and two more in 1989 after they failed to meet state water standards. Lincoln Avenue Water Co., a nonprofit privately held company that serves the northwest portion of Altadena, also had been forced to close the only two wells it operated. To make sure residents were getting safe water, NASA paid to build treatment plants beginning in 1990 to extract the contaminants, and Pasadena and Lincoln Avenue reopened their wells and began serving decontaminated water to customers. In 1992, the EPA declared JPL a Superfund site urgently in need of cleanup.

Things got more urgent in 1997, when Pasadena water testers found traces of perchlorate, a common byproduct of rocket fuel believed to cause thyroid disease. When new technology detected higher levels of perchlorate than originally thought, Currie in 2002 took the initiative and closed nine wells that she suspected might be dangerous.

“I decided it was ludicrous to tell people, ‘There may be something wrong with this water, but we’re going to have you drink it anyway,’ ” Currie says. She began buying water from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and providing it to those who lived near the contaminated wells. Current estimates suggest that contaminated water is spreading at about a foot a day beneath neighborhoods east of JPL, underscoring the need for prompt action.

“We want to make sure that Pasadena is in a position to tell NASA what the solution is, not to hear what NASA says it is,” Currie says.

Raised in South Los Angeles by a single mother who worked as a secretary, Currie received a bachelor of arts in political science from UCLA, a master’s in business administration from UCLA’s Anderson School of Business, and then attended a summer program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She retired in 1999 as chief financial officer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, taking the Pasadena job three years ago because “I was bored and I like to get things accomplished.” She has done that from a sterile office that looks as if she has just moved in. Cardboard boxes and framed awards lie on the floor. On one recent morning, she was typically hands-on, making sure that customers who experienced a power outage the night before had their power back on. While other Pasadena officials are pushing NASA hard--Assistant City Atty. Scott Rasmussen filed a claim against the space agency last January, a necessary first step in the filing of a lawsuit, in case progress again bogs down--City Manager Cynthia Kurtz and City Council member Joyce Streator credit Currie for spearheading the effort.

“That’s not to say that we hadn’t started a process before she came, but it was going through a bureaucratic maze,” says Streator, explaining that NASA, JPL and Caltech continually shifted the blame. “The very fact that NASA has come to the table, has admitted responsibility and has begun a whole cleanup approach is a direct result of Phyllis’ leadership.”

Currie deflects such praise, pointing instead to her department’s field staff and engineers, the city’s leaders and officials, and to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who helped her get NASA’s attention. She also insists that her success is just a matter of timing, something she learned growing up. “My mother got paid on the 10th and the 25th, and since she paid the bills on the 10th, I learned early on that if I was going to ask for something, to ask on the 26th.” When Currie learned that NASA had funds earmarked for environmental cleanup, she made sure Pasadena was first in line.