MORGAN HILL
– Morgan Hill and San Martin residents with private wells
possibly polluted with potassium perchlorate are responding with a
range of reaction from wait-and-see to outright panic, according to
Mike DiMarco, spokesman for the Santa Clara Valley Water
District.
MORGAN HILL – Morgan Hill and San Martin residents with private wells possibly polluted with potassium perchlorate are responding with a range of reaction from wait-and-see to outright panic, according to Mike DiMarco, spokesman for the Santa Clara Valley Water District.
“The majority of them have not been panicky,” he said. “Some are scared to death, some are very angry, but all of them are concerned.”
All municipal water systems – Morgan Hill and San Martin – are perchlorate free; it is only residents with private wells who are at risk.
The water district announced Friday that it had signed a contract with Crystal Springs to provide bottled water free to affected residents who request it from the SCVWD. California law requires that the source of pollution be responsible for paying for cleanup.
The wells in question, as many as 450, are all located in an area bounded by Tennant Avenue to the north, Masten Avenue in San Martin in the south, with Center Avenue and Monterey Road on the east and west.
Only 12 of 100 wells already tested show any sign of the chemical and most of those levels are quite low.
A now-closed industrial plant on Tennant Avenue, just east of the railroad tracks in Morgan Hill is the source of the perchlorate leaking down into the underground aquifer or water table and traveling in a “plume” to wells. The plant, owned by the Olin Corp., produced highway safety flares on the site from 1955 to 1997; the chemical is a by-product of flare manufacturing.
By Monday afternoon the water district had received more than 1,200 requests to its perchlorate hotline to have private wells tested.
DiMarco said that the water district would begin testing more than 400 of these wells this week. Test results will take about three weeks. The district and the county health department sent letters to 701 registered well owners.
“This is new for us,” DiMarco said. “We’re still in the middle of the investigation. We don’t know where it’s going (the plume), how big it is, or if it is still moving.”
While perchlorate pollution may be new to the SCVWD, groundwater pollution is not new to DiMarco. While still in college, he covered another incidence of groundwater pollution in the area. In the 1980s, the now-closed Fairchild plant – near the IBM plant – in South San Jose was found to have leaked trichlorethylene into the underground aquifer. Fairchild was forced to clean it up and to pay damages to affected families living nearby.
Health issues
The California Department of Health Services regards as unsafe any count of perchlorate above four parts per billion, reduced from 18 ppb in January 2002. The state only began to require testing for the chemical last year.
The SCVWD report states that adverse health effects are not expected from levels between 4 and 18 parts ppb. Of the wells tested in the area, one showed a level of 98 ppb, two showed levels of 32 ppb and all others were at 4 to 10 ppb or lower.
The chemical is known to cause tumors and thyroid problems but, so far, the amounts found in local wells are far below the danger levels, according to DiMarco. Dr. Martin Fenstersheib, the county health officer, said exposure to perchlorate can cause thyroid problems and is especially risky to pregnant women and fetuses from high levels of exposure.
It’s elsewhere, too
While the situation in Morgan Hill and San Martin is unnerving, Southern California and Nevada have bigger perchlorate problems. The entire Colorado River, for example, has levels of 8 ppb or more, according to Tom Knox, a spokesman for Olin and Lake Meade is polluted too, he said. The source is the Kerr McGee plant south of Las Vegas.
“There was no testing method for amounts under 400 ppb until 1987,” Knox said, explaining why perchlorate detection and cleanup are still in a primitive stage.
Some Southern California sites have shown levels above 1,000 ppb largely because of the defense industry. Potassium perchlorate is used in solid rocket fuel. Knox said that the water downstream from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena is seriously affected along with much of the San Gabriel Valley and the San Bernardino area. Fortunately, most people in urban areas get their water from municipal water districts, not wells. Unfortunately, most Southern Californians’ water companies get their water from the Colorado River.
“This will be a major challenge for the state,” Knox said.
“Olin wants to be part of the solution,” Knox said. “We’re focusing on outreach – to the people most at risk.”
He said Olin wants the response and cleanup to evolve into a case study of the most effective way to treat such situations.
Knox wants Morgan Hill to know that the perchlorate use was totally permitted and legal at the time – the danger only became known after the plant closed.
“Cleanup won’t be cheap,” he said, “but there should be a long-term solution.”
Because perchlorate was only recently identified as a danger, most cleanup methods are experimental.
Groundwater remediation might be one method, Knox said. In Southern California, water treatment plants have been installed on the site. They pump water out of the “plume” – treat and dilute, treat and dilute until most of the perchlorate out of the ground,” Knox said.
“This is very expensive and very labor intensive,” he said. “It takes years.”
Anaerobic bacteria may have a future in ground water cleanup too. Corn syrup is poured down a hole in the ground; it eats enzymes and encourages anaerobic bacteria to “eat” the perchlorate.
What to do
Boiling water will not help. Perchlorate is not a bacteria that can be killed by boiling the water. Instead, until a well is tested, concerned residents should drink bottled water.
