Water Quality Board to decide if Olin Corp. is responsible for
northeast perchlorate plume
San Martin – The city of Morgan Hill’s aggressive lobbying to have the Olin Corp. held responsible for the city’s perchlorate contamination is beginning to pay off. The Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board will decide by the end of March if there’s enough evidence to pin Morgan Hill’s pollution on the company.
“To determine whether we have enough credible evidence to assign responsibility to Olin, that will be the tough part,” said water board engineer Hector Hernandez, who oversees Olin’s cleanup of South County’s groundwater. “It may mean we find out we don’t have sufficient information to assign responsibility to Olin.”
Olin doesn’t dispute that its Railroad Avenue road-flare factory, which it operated from 1955 to 1987, caused the 9.5 mile perchlorate plume that stretches south through San Martin and east of Gilroy. But the company claims it’s not responsible for the so-called northeast flow because groundwater moves south from the factory site.
Morgan Hill officials have hotly disputed that claim, and were incensed when the water board’s order to Olin to clean the southern plume, issued last year, didn’t include the northeast flow.
Buoyed by recent tests that showed evidence of south-to-north groundwater flows, the city has pressured the water board to name Olin as the discharger so the city can attempt to recoup its costs for treating the water it supplies to 36,000 residents.
In a letter to the water board last week, City Manager Ed Tewes said that if the water board staff did not make a determination by May, the city would appeal directly to the water board for a ruling.
“[The lobbying] is paying off at least in terms of the time frame,” city public works director Jim Ashcraft said. “We are happy. If the staff finally looks at all of the evidence by the end of March and makes a recommendation by May, that’s great. It will be better if the board names Olin the discharger.”
Hernandez, who took over the Olin case late last year, said he would review the entire case file along with new data to make his decision.
“There’s a lot of new information, a lot of new studies on different sources of perchlorate,” Hernandez said. “We think it is a really important issue to deal with.”
Perchlorate is a salt known to interfere with thyroid activity. It was discovered at the Olin site in 2000 during an environmental review. The pollution was publicly revealed in 2003.
