L.A. AGREES TO CLEAN UP OWENS LAKE.

Byline: Associated Press

The people living near Owens Lake can breathe a little easier.

For years, they have been sucking up toxins from swirling dust storms on the dry lake.

But now, a cleanup plan that caps decades of bitter conflict has been forged by Owens Valley's Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control Agency with Los Angeles, whose residents guzzled so much water from the lake that it dried into one of the nation's largest single sources of lung-damaging particle pollution.

``It's about time they did something,'' said Gerry Webb, a waitress at P.J.'s Coffee Shop in Lone Pine, a town near what used to be the lake shore. Webb said that since moving to the area she developed asthma.

``The dust is so thick it sticks to cars and windows, so you can imagine what we're breathing,'' she said.

The fix is expensive. The project is expected to cost Los Angeles $120 million, and the city might permanently lose about 40,000 acre-feet of water a year, enough to serve 80,000 households, said S. David Freeman, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

But to residents who live in the shadows of the Sierra Nevada near the dry lake, that price is just a drop in the bucket owed by Los Angeles for causing the pollution when it opened an aqueduct 85 years ago and drained the Owens Valley of its mountain-fed water.

Where waterfowl and steamships once flourished, there is a barren expanse of white, rock-hard ground covered in a fine, ever-shifting layer of sand and powder. When the wind kicks up, the powder takes flight and coats nearby towns with a chalky fog.

In a single day, as many as 11 tons of particles, laced with arsenic and other toxic metals, blow off the lake. Such pollution can cause respiratory infections, asthma attacks and sometimes deadly complications from respiratory and heart ailments.

``People here were expecting that we would have to compromise in some fashion to get started on this, and I don't think we gave up a great deal to get there,'' said Inyo County Supervisor Michael Dorame, who serves on the Owens Valley pollution-control board.

The agreement reached Wednesday still must be approved by the 15-member Los Angeles City Council and the California Air Resources Board. It was lauded as historic by Los Angeles City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter.

``This avoids probably 20 years of litigation,'' she said.

Under the plan, the city's dust-control strategy will focus on shallow flooding of parts of the 110-square-mile dry lake, planting vegetation and depositing gravel. The lake will not be refilled, but about 10 square miles will likely be permanently soaked with a few inches of water.

Treatment of those 10 square miles by the DWP will be completed by the end of 2001. Then 3-1/2 square miles will be treated in 2002 and three more square miles in 2003.

After that, at least two square miles must be treated every year until Great Basin officials determine that federal clean-air standards are met. The plan will be revised in 2003 to ensure standards are met by 2006.

The new plan also hinges on a five-year extension from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for meeting standards of the Clean Air Act, which requires states to clean up particle pollution by 2001. The EPA has threatened to intervene unless the impasse over Owens Lake is resolved by August 1999.

But some Owens Valley residents remain unsatisfied by the compromise and suspicious of Los Angeles officials.

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