Department of Water Resources
California Water News
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
March 26, 2008
4. Water Quality
PERCHLORATE:
Pressure mounting; Officials push cleanup action in Rialto - Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
Rialto presses case for U.S. help with water pollution - Riverside Press Enterprise
PERCHLORATE:
Pressure mounting; Officials push cleanup action in Rialto
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin – 3/26/08
By Jason Pesick, staff writer
RIALTO - Pressure is mounting on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to get tough with companies accused of contaminating the city's drinking water.
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-San Francisco, is calling on the EPA to take action against the parties it believes are responsible for the contamination, primarily the chemical perchlorate.
"We immediately need water orders to be issued," Rialto City Councilman Ed Scott said at a news conference at Rialto City Hall on Tuesday.
The city of Rialto, the West Valley Water District and members of the Riverside-based Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice held the news conference to criticize the EPA for taking too long to issue orders against the polluters.
Although Rialto has identified more than 40 suspected polluters, the three getting the most attention are Goodrich, Black & Decker's defunct Emhart entity and the Rialto-based fireworks company Pyro Spectaculars.
In a March 4 letter to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, Feinstein wrote that the EPA should order polluters to provide the community with water until the underlying dispute is resolved. She also said she wants to meet with Johnson.
"It is critical that the EPA take a more aggressive role in addressing the problem now in order to ensure adequate clean water supplies and prevent further hardship to these communities," she wrote.
Perchlorate, which interferes with the thyroid gland, is flowing through the water supply along with chemicals used for industrial cleaning. Contaminated water is not being served to residents.
If the suspected polluters, many of which are defense contractors and fireworks companies, are forced to provide clean water to the communities, they will be more likely to move quickly toward an overall solution, said Barry Groveman, West Valley's attorney. That's because they won't want to keep paying to provide clean water forever, he said.
Groveman represented the city of Santa Monica in 1999 after it discovered the gasoline ingredient methyl tertiary butyl ether in the water supply.
Within six months, the EPA issued orders compelling some of the parties responsible for the pollution to provide clean water, he said.
Perchlorate was discovered in Rialto in 1997.
"They (the EPA) act quickly in upper-class white communities," said Penny Newman, executive director of the Center for Community Action, of cleanups elsewhere.
"In the city of Rialto, we're hard-working people and we're apparently not as important to them," Scott said.
In addition to the Santa Monica comparison, Newman mentioned a state cleanup of contamination in Redlands that was faster than Rialto's cleanup.
The contamination in Redlands was discovered in 1980, and the cleanup did not begin until 1998, said Kurt Berchtold, assistant executive officer of the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board.
"Our work in Rialto has moved more quickly than our work in Redlands did," he said, noting that the Rialto case is much more complicated and involves many more suspected polluters.
Compounding the city's case is that after years of holding the EPA at bay because of concerns its work would take too long and put a stigma on the city, the Rialto City Council only invited the agency to town in December. #
http://www.dailybulletin.com/search/ci_8699106?IADID=Search-www.dailybulletin.com-www.dailybulletin.com
Rialto presses case for U.S. help with water pollution
Riverside Press Enterprise – 3/26/08
By Mary Bender, staff writer
RIALTO - The quest to clean up polluted water from the Rialto-Colton Groundwater Basin has been a seven-year study in bureaucratic frustration, amplified by costly water purification measures and legal battles, city officials say.
On Tuesday, they added preferential treatment to the list of complaints.
Rialto is appealing to the U.S Environmental Protection Agency for help addressing the problem of perchlorate tainting its drinking water supply. For years, city residents have been bankrolling the technology that filters the chemical from wells before the water is sent to customers' faucets.
Rialto has sagged under the expense of the cleanup and of mounting lawsuits against companies and government agencies believed responsible for fouling the aquifer.
The city of Santa Monica didn't have to fight that long before the federal government came to its aid, Rialto City Council and water company officials argued during a news briefing Tuesday in front of City Hall.
Santa Monica was granted a "water replacement order" in 1999 by the U.S. EPA because its drinking water supply was polluted with methyl tertiary-butyl ether -- more commonly known as MTBE -- a chemical added to gasoline to enhance the octane.
"We're apparently not as important to the EPA," said City Councilman Ed Scott, comparing Santa Monica's coastal beauty, affluent residents and largely white population to Rialto's working-class, racially diverse demographics.
Representatives at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., weren't familiar with the perchlorate and MTBE cases, and said they couldn't immediately comment on Rialto's water problems or assertions of environmental injustice.
Earlier this month, representatives of the city and the West Valley Water District visited Washington, D.C., to lobby for help in getting an estimated 42 "potentially responsible parties" to pay for the well-head technology and fund the cleanup of the underground plume of perchlorate pollution that spreads at a rate of six feet per day. Each month, roughly another 360 million gallons of Rialto's drinking water is contaminated. Perchlorate, which prevents the thyroid gland from absorbing iodine and is believed to affect developing fetuses, has been found in 22 wells in the Rialto-Colton Groundwater Basin. Most of Rialto's residents get their drinking water from either the city's utility or the West Valley Water District.
Rialto's utility has no other source from which to purchase water, Scott said.
Only five of Santa Monica's wells were affected by the MTBE pollution, and Santa Monica could purchase water from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
The U.S. EPA considers MTBE to be a "probable human carcinogen," or possible cancer-causing chemical. According to a unilateral administrative order issued by the U.S. EPA in September 1999, Santa Monica officials had discovered the city's water wells were tainted with MTBE in August 1995.
Santa Monica shut down the polluted wells in June 1996. The source of pollution was traced to a gas station in neighboring Culver City.
The EPA issued water replacement orders to Shell, Mobil and other oil companies requiring them to pay Santa Monica for the costs of securing an alternate water supply. Rialto officials said that sum totaled about $54 million between 1997 and 2007.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, has taken up Rialto's cause -- as she did with Santa Monica in the 1990s.
She sent a letter March 4 to Stephen Johnson, U.S. EPA administrator, asking that the agency order the alleged polluters to pay for replacement water to meet the community's water needs until a settlement can be reached.
Among those at the Rialto rally were 31-year city resident Marene Deischer, and her 22-year-old son Jerry, who uses a wheelchair. He has had numerous health problems since birth, including low IQ, inability to speak, limited walking ability and loss of hearing, his mother said.
Deischer's two older children, both born when the family lived in Los Angeles County, are healthy. She said she believes Jerry's condition and the death of her fourth child, Patrick, nine days after his birth in 1995, are the result of the perchlorate-tainted water she drank and that her developing fetuses absorbed.
"He has a low thyroid problem, and will suffer the rest of his life," Deischer said of her son. #
http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_Local_B_bwater26.f7391b.html
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