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 they wanted to see
some action on their own wells as well. And they wanted it to
happen now.
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 they wanted to see some action on their own wells as well.
And they wanted 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.”
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 Masten Avenue, now Leavesley Road in Gilroy. Several wells west of Monterey have shown detectable levels of the chemical.
Hamilton urged the Board to order Olin to install a perchlorate treatment plant on the East San Martin Water District wells – the district serves about 200 homes – as it has 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.
“It’s not like calling up the Culligan man,” said Daniel Press, a RWQCB member.
“Actually it is just like calling up the Culligan man,” Hamilton joked back. She encouraged the board to look at other systems besides the ion exchange arrangement currently the system of choice and installed by Olin and the City of Morgan Hill on large municipal wells.
“Look at EXTi,” Hamilton said, of a perchlorate-removal system now under development that works by hydrolysis of water.
A test in March of San Martin resident Bob Cerruti’s well by the EXTi system took his water from 10 parts per billion down to below 4 ppb and without the brine residue that ion exchange system produces and must dispose of. Her point was that the state should look at all available options to find the best one, not necessarily the one currently most popular.
Hamilton told the board that Rick McClure, Olin’s project manager for the Tennant Avenue clean up, told her that the money was there for private well treatment if certified systems can be found.
Hamilton, who said she had pneumonia, attended the meeting against her doctor’s orders.
“I had to be here,” she said.
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.
Bruce K. Daniels, chairman of the Regional Board whose area of concentration is water quality, said it would seem best to him to “dig it up and dispose of it.”
Several speakers and board members mentioned that Olin was not present.
“I am deeply shocked that Olin isn’t here today,” said board member Russell M. Jeffries.
McClure said on Thursday that they would not attend on advice of their attorneys but they 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. It gave the company credit for reimbursing the City of Morgan Hill for part of its expenses in digging a replacement well for the Tennant Avenue well, across the street from the Olin plant and closed in April 2002 because of temporarily high levels of the chemical.
The statement summarized the treatment plan for its site and emphasized again that it was taking responsibility for the contamination.
“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.”
Officials followed each other to the podium to make sure the board members clearly understood what was at stake for their communities.
Santa Clara Water District 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 effect 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.” The Olin plant operated for 40 years though perchlorate has only recently been acknowledged to be harmful.
Kennedy asked the board to force Olin to meet its responsibilities to area citizens.
Mayor Tom Springer of Gilroy took over the microphone and 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.” Referring to conversations he had with Assemblymen John Laird and Simon Salinas, Springer pointed out that the 2004 legislative elections would be here soon.
“What have you done to help us,” he said he would ask.
Board member and vice chair Jeffrey Young asked Springer if he wanted them to order remediation off site.
“Stop it, clear it, remove it and never see it again,” he answered back. “Cut it off and kill it.”
Springer was followed by Ward Wadlow, chief operating officer of the Santa Clara Valley Water District who told the Regional Board that he wanted Olin to continue to share its data (resulting from testing and investigation) with all members of the Perchlorate Working Group so there would be a simultaneous release of information.
“We’d like the response by Olin, frankly, to be more timely than (it has been) to date,” he said.
Board member Young asked if the perchlorate was restricted to a certain level well. Wadlow replied that perchlorate has been seen in shallow wells and in those hundreds of feet deep. Much of the data available is from private wells of unknown depth, he said, and not from the official monitoring wells the district screens.
“A string of monitoring wells straight down the area (Morgan Hill to Gilroy) should be done,” Daniels said.
Morgan Hill City Manager Ed Tewes delineated his city’s problems because of the Olin-caused perchlorate. One problem issues from most of the city’s contaminated wells being located northeast of the Olin site, and for which Olin takes no responsibility. The second problem continues over the Tennant well, which is south.
“Morgan Hill is directly impacted,” Tewes said. “ There are unknown health effects (from serving perchlorate-laden water to residents), there are costs and this summer we were faced with a water supply challenge.” During a heat wave at the end of June, Tewes said he and Public Works Director Jim Ashcraft were extremely concerned when the water supply in reserve went to an all-time low because five of 13 wells were off line.
“We were in trouble before the treatment system was installed on the Nordstrom well on Aug. 2,” Tewes said. Nordstrom pumps 1,000 gallons per minute.
If the five wells now off line cannot be turned back on, he said, 30 percent of Morgan Hill’s water source could be lost and there is no alternative source available.
Olin, he said, has assumed responsibility for some of the problem, emphasizing the word “some.”
This restricted area of responsibility may widen with the Regional Board’s order to study the northeastern wells.
The struggle over installing a treatment plant at the Tennant Avenue well stems from Olin’s belief, Tewes said, that pumping on that well might alter Olin’s results.
“Olin said not to treat and pump,” Tewes said. “because it might affect their studies.”
“Do it,” responded Roger Briggs, a board member.
Even though some residents and officials most definitely want faster action, 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.”
Predictions of a wet winter ahead – Jeffries cited the Farmers Almanac – highlighted the urgency of finding a solution to the contamination and finding it quickly since, the more water that falls on the perchlorate-laden soil, the faster it leaches down into the ground water to make its way into drinking water supply.
