VALLEY WATER GETS BAD GRADE; UNDERGROUND SOURCES HIGHLY CONTAMINATED.

Byline: Dominic Berbeo Staff Writer

Groundwater pollution is so bad in the San Fernando Valley that it will take more than $2 billion and decades to clean it up, according to an environmental report released Saturday.

Some of the main contaminants include degreasing agents used for decades in the manufacturing industry to clean mechanical or electronic components, said the 1999 Southern California Environmental Report Card issued by the UCLA Institute of the Environment.

The report card from UCLA gave Southern California a C grade, up from an F grade because of efforts to prevent past trends of massive pollution during the industrial boom that was sparked by World War II.

``The extent of the damage that was done from the 1940s through the 1970s was enormous,'' said Thomas Harmon, an associate professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, who helped prepare the report.

``The only positive note is that, in most cases, we really did not know what we were doing.''

He said the F grade given to historical prevention efforts can be likened to going to the wrong classroom for weeks and then facing a midterm exam the day you arrive at the right classroom.

Degreasing agents such as trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE), the report said, were first detected in San Fernando Valley water production wells in 1980 after decades of widespread use in the aerospace and defense manufacturing industries.

Due to their adverse health effects, these chemicals are legally regulated at five parts per billion parts water, although much higher levels are present in the water supply beneath the Valley floor.

Long-term exposure to these chemicals, such as drinking and bathing, could result in certain types of cancer and birth defects, the report said.

Water and other liquids seep hundreds of feet down through the ground to subsurface reservoirs known as alluvial aquifers, which contain about two-thirds of the fresh water supply on the planet.

Although it receives most of its water from the Owens Valley and the California Water Project, Los Angeles depends on the underground water to supplement its water supply.

Officials have had to cease using a number of the contaminated wells, but many communities depend in part on water from wells still deemed safe.

According to the Department of Water and Power, about 15 percent of the Valley's drinking water comes from 70 groundwater wells.

In 1987, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency initiated a five-year probe of the groundwater pollution in the Valley's water basin, which found that there is a 17-mile zone in the highly industrial eastern part of the Valley containing roughly 200 trillion gallons of contaminated water.

An interim purification strategy is scheduled to be implemented over the next 12 years, which will take at least three decades to complete, the report said.

Also, the government has made efforts to recover some of the cleanup costs, filing lawsuits against major industrial manufacturers that were found to have contributed to the contamination over the years.

One such lawsuit was filed by local and federal prosecutors on Jan. 20 for nearly $30 million against Lockheed Martin Corp. and ITT Industries.

The lawsuit claims that the two companies are the largest contributors to volatile organic compounds contamination of groundwater basins that supply Glendale and much of the Valley.

Lockheed was found to be responsible for groundwater contamination caused by its jet plants in Burbank, which released such chemicals as TCE and PCE. The company has since agreed to pay its share of the cleanup and help build a groundwater treatment plant in Glendale that will be able to treat 5,000 gallons of water per minute.

Besides TCE and PCE, officials are concerned over high levels of the cancer-causing heavy metal hexavalent chromium, which has been found in wells in the areas of Burbank, Glendale and North Hollywood.

In the San Fernando Valley, more than 30 monitoring wells have been found to have levels higher than the health standard of 50 parts per billion, according to a city report in January.

Another major source of water contamination resulted from a growing use of gasoline additives to reduce air pollution caused by vehicle emissions.

One key ingredient in these mixtures was methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MTBE), which has steadily made its way into Southern California groundwater.

Drinking wells in Santa Monica in the Charnock and Arcadia well fields were closed in recent years because of high levels of MTBE contamination.

California gas stations were obligated to double their tanks to prevent leaks, and in March 1999, Gov. Gray Davis ordered MTBE to be phased out of gasoline mixtures over a five-year period.

Other factors that contribute to the contamination include agricultural wastes, septic systems and sea water intrusion, the report found.

Further studies showed that the situation in the San Fernando Valley is reflected in other major valleys, such as San Bernardino and San Gabriel.

The underground water basins, or aquifers, are formed through thousands of years of erosion of surrounding mountains into the floors nestled in the valleys below.

The UCLA report also found that Southern California was doing slightly better in preventing storm water pollution, with an overall B grade.

Michael Stenstrom, a UCLA professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Institute of the Environment, prepared the storm water report.

He said that overall, Southern California was winning the war against refuse running out into the ocean via storm drains, but there were still great problems to overcome.

Litter carried by storm water made up 50 percent of the solids captured in drains during recent UCLA studies, he said, adding that the state Department of Transportation has reported that 20 percent of the volume found in the basins that catch solids is cigarette butts.

Some of the region's building codes actually encourage storm water pollution rather than helping to prevent it, he said.

One example is requiring property owners to run rain gutters out to the street instead of onto their lawns, where the water can be filtered and seep into the soil.

He also recommended the state adopt a series of measures he helped design to filter out trash and heavy liquids from making it past storm drains into the ocean.

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Map

Map: Burbank - Glendale

SOURCE: UCLA Institute of the Environment

Traci Wooden/Staff artist