CHROMIUM 6 GAMBLE VARYING STANDARDS SHOW SAFE LEVELS JUST A GUESSING GAME.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

Until ``Erin Brockovich'' hit the theaters last March, only inhabitants of the High Desert town of Hinkley and a handful of researchers and government regulators worried about chromium 6 in drinking water.

But the Julia Roberts blockbuster, which told how massive amounts of chromium 6 sickened hundreds of residents in Hinkley, ignited public and media interest in whether people elsewhere are drinking it.

People are, in fact, drinking chromium 6 all over California. It was found in 30 of 80 wells tested in the San Fernando Valley, though the amounts are thousands of times smaller than the Hinkley contamination.

But no one is offering worried residents a convincing answer about whether the low levels of the substance poses a threat to their health.

``I think that when people make the statement that chromium 6 in the water can't hurt you, they are really misstating the facts,'' said Edward Masry, a Westlake Village attorney - and the real Erin Brockovich's boss - who won a record $333 million judgment for Hinkley residents.

``The question is, how much can hurt you? Nobody really knows at this time.''

The federal Environmental Protection Agency sets one chromium level as safe. The state Department of Health sets another half as high. Then a California EPA office suggests 1/40th the federal number.

And the numbers they are dealing with are for the amount of total chromium. No agency sets any limit specifically on chromium 6 - which researchers universally agree is the most dangerous.

Blame it all on technological shortcomings and a shortage of research.

California's chromium standard for drinking water was set in 1977. The federal standard was set in 1991.

The California EPA's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment issued its much more restrictive chromium goal just last year, but its main basis was a 1968 German study on mice - in which a large portion of the mice caught a virus and died part way through the study.

And the main estimate of what portion of total chromium is the carcinogenic chromium 6 comes from a 1993 study of two lakes in North Carolina - which new testing is showing is far short of reality in Southern California.

One of the reasons for the lack of information is that it is difficult to measure the amount of chromium 6 in the total chromium count, scientists say. There is a troubling large margin of error in measuring the substance at the low levels under consideration.

Two different laboratories given the same water to test have been known to come to entirely different conclusions over whether it contained chromium 6 or the less toxic chromium 3, an essential human nutrient, one researcher says.

As a local example, tests in Palmdale at U.S. Air Force Plant 42, where chromium 6 is sprayed on metal airplane parts before painting, showed chromium 6 at concentrations of both 10 parts per billion and 20 parts per billion in two samples taken the same day from the same monitoring well.

Now, prodded in part by the ``Erin Brockovich'' movie, regulators around California and the United States are trying to catch up.

The Groundwater Resources Association of California has scheduled a day-long workshop in Glendale on Jan. 25 to discuss the issues of hexavalent chromium being found in local groundwater supplies.

State health officials have told water agencies to start testing for chromium 6 in drinking water, down to 1 part per billion. State officials had already embarked on a five-year re-examination of the chromium standard, but lawmakers ordered them to hurry up and have an assessment of the risk to the public by the end of next year.

The federal EPA, which says the carcinogen risk of swallowing chromium 6 cannot be determined, plans to re-evaluate its chromium standard next year.

A Los Angeles County Public Works report is due out this month on what can be done about the 30 Antelope Valley wells that contain chromium 6 measured at amounts up to 17.6 parts per billion.

And Los Angeles, Burbank, Glendale and San Fernando have teamed to finance a study on how to clean up contaminated water from San Fernando Valley wells.

For Los Angeles alone, if all the wells that pass a new state public health goal for chromium contamination are simply capped, buying water elsewhere to replace what they supply would cost $47 million a year, one state report says.

University of California, Los Angeles, researcher John Froines says he thinks the news media is over-emphasizing the standards issue. Existing science, he says, can't measure the difference in risk between 1 ppb and 20 ppb of chromium 6.

But he says existing research convinced him that chromium 6 can cause cancer when swallowed, and he believes cleanup or control efforts should start in the places with the highest concentrations - starting at, say, about 20 ppb.

By comparison, the state allows drinking water to contain up to 50 ppb of total chromium - both chromium 6 and chromium 3. The federal government allows up to 100 parts. The California EPA's public health goal issued in 1999 for total chromium is 2.5 ppb, but that is not a standard that water agencies must meet.

Hinkley's well water was contaminated at up to 24,000 parts per billion.

``The science is going to take a few years. So protect people as best as you can in the worst cases and work your way down as the science gets better,'' said Froines, director of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health and a professor at the UCLA School of Public Health.

Brockovich says the standards debate frustrates her.

``We get lost in technical issues that take you off the real point, which is you've got poison in your water,'' the Agoura Hills resident said in a phone interview recently. ``For God's sake, you've got a problem. Let's work together and clean it up.''

CHROMIUM 6 BREAKDOWN

Chromium in a natural element used widely in the production of metal alloys and in other industrial purposes, from coating metal at Burbank and Palmdale aircraft plants to inhibiting corrosion in electrical system cooling towers in Hinkley, Calif.

There are several forms including chromium 3, a necessary human nutrient that is the most chemically stable, and chromium 6, a known carcinogen.

The effects of chromium 6 on metal workers who breathed contaminated air has been studied for years. Test results show that inhaled chromium 6 can eat away at the nasal passages and cause lung, stomach or liver cancer.

But researchers disagree on whether swallowing chromium 6 can cause cancer. Some researchers say stomach acid converts the chromium 6 into chromium 3.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the World Health Organization and the Agency for Toxic Substances Disease Registry are among the agencies that do not consider chromium 6 to be carcinogenic when swallowed.

However, the California Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment disagrees. In a 1999 report, it says chromium 6 should be presumed to be carcinogenic when swallowed.

The California researchers base their belief on the known toxicity of chromium 6, laboratory tests results showing it damages DNA, and evidence that stomach acid doesn't change all the chromium 6 into chromium 3.

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