Olin Corporation will hear by the end of the month
– before sending company officials to a community meeting in San
Martin – if its plans to remove the highest concentrations of
rocket fuel component perchlorate from South County’s water table
are suitable in the eyes of state regulators.
San Martin – Olin Corporation will hear by the end of the month – before sending company officials to a community meeting in San Martin – if its plans to remove the highest concentrations of rocket fuel component perchlorate from South County’s water table are suitable in the eyes of state regulators.
“Our formal response is expected to go out in the next couple weeks,” said Hector Hernandez, an engineer for the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, speaking Friday afternoon at the Perchlorate Community Advisory Group (PCAG) meeting in San Martin.
“The reason for the delay,” Hernandez told the gathering of roughly 20 people, “is we’re trying to understand what Olin’s overall cleanup strategy is.”
The complex project concerns an underground plume of perchlorate stretching southeast from the company’s old road-flare plant on Tennant Avenue, in Morgan Hill, all the way to Gilroy.
Perchlorate, a type of salt, is used in making explosives and is widely used in the defense industry. If ingested, it is known to disrupt thyroid function and prenatal growth and development. Scientists are debating on how much perchlorate it takes to cause health problems.
From 1956 to 1995 Olin and Standard Fuse operated the road-flare plant where the chemical leaked into the ground, possibly from an evaporation pond for factory water, on-site incineration of flares and accidental spills. The evaporation pond was used as an alternative to disposing polluted water into storm drains. The contamination was first reported by the company in February 2001 when it was trying to sell the factory.
The company submitted cleanup plans for the most polluted areas of South County’s water table last December, focussing on roughly 550 acres directly southeast of its old factory. The plan calls for a 20-month schedule to pump water from the ground, clean it, and send it back into the earth – which is a process regulators would like to speed up.
“We want to know what hoops they have to jump through and how we can expedite that,” Hernandez said. “Even though we’re taking longer than we ordinarily do (to respond), it will help everyone in the long run.”
A face-to-face meeting with Olin officials is scheduled later this month to go over details with water board engineers. Afterward, the board’s engineers plan to release their response to Olin’s strategy before officials from the company attend the next PCAG meeting March 29.
“We aim to make Olin move forward as fast as possible,” Hernandez said.
Meanwhile, Olin continues its efforts to track perchlorate contamination northeast of its site in Morgan Hill. The regional board amended its cleanup order in December to hold Olin accountable for perchlorate contamination found in Morgan Hill’s drinking water supply.
“They’re continuing to drill new wells,” said Morgan Hill Director of Public Works Jim Ashcraft, adding the company’s added more field workers to move the extra work along. “They’ve applied for permits to drill four monitoring wells … As they find perchlorate readings of 4 parts per billion or more, the regional board requires them to keep drilling outward.”
