SALINAS
– Impatient South Valley residents and city officials took the
Olin Corp. to task Friday at the Central Coast Regional Water
Quality Control Board’s quarterly meeting in Salinas, insisting
that cleaning the Olin property of perchlorate was just fine, but
in addition they wanted to see some action
on their own wells.
And they want it to happen now.
SALINAS – Impatient South Valley residents and city officials took the Olin Corp. to task Friday at the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board’s quarterly meeting in Salinas, insisting that cleaning the Olin property of perchlorate was just fine, but in addition they wanted to see some action on their own wells.
And they want it to happen now.
“The horse is already out of the barn,” said Sylvia Hamilton, chairwoman of the San Martin Perchlorate Citizens’ Action Group. “They need to work on the site but they also need to protect the quality of life of the residents.”
Mayor Tom Springer of Gilroy summarized his feelings about Olin cleaning up its own site, before it helped residents downstream when several big city wells are right in the plume’s path.
“It’s not about Olin,” Springer said loudly. “It’s about people, about their drinking water; it’s about cleaning up all of the problem.”
He pointed out the bottled drinking water at each board member’s place on the dais.
“Is this our future?,” he asked.
“We’re all in the same boat,” Springer said, showing Salinas downstream from Gilroy, asking how long it will take until perchlorate reaches that city. Springer asked the board to make Olin stop the plume before it reached more Gilroy wells.
“The pace is too slow,” he said. “We don’t have years; we only have months. We need to stop it now.”
Hamilton urged the regional board and the Santa Clara Valley Water District to have Olin study wells west of Monterey Road, an area originally thought to be free of perchlorate and outside the contamination boundaries of Tennant Avenue, Foothill Avenue, Monterey Road and Leavesley Road in Gilroy. Several wells west of Monterey have shown detectable levels of the chemical.
The regional board did order Olin Corp. Friday to begin sampling wells northeast of the source site at Tennant and Railroad avenues.
In the past, Olin has refused to acknowledge any responsibility for perchlorate appearing in wells outside the boundaries.
Hamilton urged the Board to order Olin to install a perchlorate treatment plant on the East San Martin Water District wells, as it has done on the West San Martin Water Works wells.
Hamilton wanted to see a comprehensive health risk study and analysis, and she wants to see remediation on “point of service,” or treatment systems on all wells, small and large.
The problem, she and the board agreed, is that no system has yet been certified for home use.
The meeting had begun several hours before Hamilton spoke for residents, with officials from Morgan Hill and Gilroy addressing the board.
Harvey Packard, senior water resources engineer for the regional board, first brought the board up to date on the perchlorate situation in south Santa Clara County. The board is the lead agency in the perchlorate matter.
Packard said his staff had reviewed Olin’s plan to clean up the contaminated soil on its property and treat the groundwater underneath to keep it from moving off site. The plan is to infiltrate clean water onto the soil and leach it down to the aquifer, extract the water and run it through a treatment plant on site.
“In practice there are lots of questions – it wasn’t very specific,” Packard said. “The trick is to ensure complete control.”
Packard said the board would ask Olin to “decouple the soil from the water cleanup.”
The groundwater treatment plant, Packard said, would be installed and operational by the end of the year.
“We’ll also ask them to go back and look at other potential clean-up options,” he said.
The trouble spot for Packard and several of the board members lies in Olin’s plan to treat the soil instead of excavating it as has been the choice in other clean-up operations.
“They must tell us why excavation is not feasible,” Packard said. “They could get away with excavating less than three acres.” Only one-third of the 13-acre site is said to be heavily contaminated, though the chemical has been found in soil on the northeastern corner of the site.
Several speakers and board members mentioned that Olin was not present.
“I am deeply shocked that Olin isn’t here today,” board member Russell M. Jeffries said.
Rick McClure, who’s in charge of Olin’s clean-up operation in South County, said Thursday Olin would not attend on advice of its attorneys but did issue a statement declaring the firm’s position.
“We will have people in the audience,” McClure said, “but they will not speak.”
The statement reiterated everything Olin has done to date to mitigate the perchlorate problem including providing well testing and bottled water for affected wells and residents and a treatment plant for the WSMWD.
“We trust that Olin’s demonstrated record of responsible environmental stewardship to the communities of Morgan Hill and San Martin, will lead to regional board, Santa Clara Valley Water District and community acceptance of this sound, science-based approach to soil and groundwater remediation,” the statement read.
Officials followed each other to the podium to make sure the board members clearly understood what was at stake for their communities.
SCVWD board member Rosemary Kamei, a Morgan Hill resident, told the board that all of the South Valley area gets 100 percent of its drinking water from wells, both private and municipal. She also commended the several cities and agencies on how well they have worked together to get quickly on top of the perchlorate problem.
“The working relationship has been very, very positive,” she said. “And we’ve come a long, long way (since the extent of the plume was discovered in January).”
Santa Clara County Supervisor Don Gage said the county public health officer and the county agricultural commissioner are looking into the potentially harmful effects of the chemical on people, animals and plants.
“Well pollution could have a negative affect on the agricultural business in San Martin,” he said. “Any plan for clean up must make it better, not worse.”
Gage was followed by Mayor Dennis Kennedy of Morgan Hill.
“This is a terrible threat to the health of residents of our communities,” Kennedy said. “We don’t know how many lives have been affected by 40 years of negligent acts by Olin.”
Kennedy asked the board to force Olin to meet its responsibilities to area citizens.
Even though some residents and officials most definitely want faster action, board member Roger Briggs praised what has been done by the water district and the regional board.
“We’ve been calling this (perchlorate) our highest priority,” Briggs said. “It is the most massive amount of sampling and characterization of a site in a short period of time that we’ve ever seen.”
