Trouble Spreads Underground From Leaking Tanks : Owners Test Thousands of Containers, Clean Up Toxic Spills That Pose Threat to Water Supplies

Even before the state began to require tests of underground tanks in 1984, Ashland Chemical Co. in Santa Fe Springs was keenly aware of the hidden threat such tanks pose.

Ashland, part of an earlier state testing program for large companies, discovered in 1983 that toxic industrial solvents stored in several of its 47 buried tanks on Painter Avenue had leaked into the ground water.

Since then, the company has spent $1 million in an unsuccessful attempt to find the boundaries of the plume of contaminated water and is facing a cleanup expected to cost millions of dollars more.

The Ashland leak case is one of 160 discovered throughout the Southeast area since 1983, when owners of 4,000 to 5,000 subterranean tanks began to test and permanently monitor them as required by state law.

Quick Cleanup Important

Leaks in about 40% of those cases have contaminated ground water with fuels or solvents. Quick leak detection and cleanup are important, water officials say, because delays allow contaminants to spread, increasing costs and the chance that toxic chemicals will sink into deep drinking-water basins.

In the Southeast area, 20 municipal wells and at least three smaller public wells have been closed and 80 other wells are contaminated to a lesser degree.

Contribution Unclear

How much leaking tanks have contributed to the industrial Southeast’s well-contamination problem is unclear, but state officials say ruptured tanks are probably a main source of the pollution.

In the Ashland case, test wells dug into the top two regional aquifers beneath the plant revealed low-level solvent contamination, the company said. Both aquifers supply limited drinking water elsewhere in the Southeast area, but Ashland’s pollutants are not an immediate threat to those water wells. Three deeper water basins that supply much of the area’s well water have not been tested.

Los Angeles County officials who oversee tank testing for Southeast cities say the number of leaks detected in the area could soar during the next year as the county presses owners to test and monitor their tanks by a mid-1989 deadline.

Even now, “we’ve got (leaks) all over the place. I don’t even keep them in my head anymore. There’s too many of them,” Carl Sjoberg, director of the county tank-inspection program, said in a recent interview.

To prove his point, he culled five Southeast cases from a batch of 1988 leak reports.

In South Gate, he said, a layer of gasoline three feet thick was found floating on ground water beneath an oil-company terminal.

5 1/2-Foot Gasoline Layer

In Santa Fe Springs, layers of gasoline up to 5 1/2 feet thick were discovered under two service stations.

In La Mirada, fuel “several feet” deep was detected at another gasoline station.

And in Cerritos, a highly toxic degreasing solvent had leaked from a tank at a small business into the ground water.

Through the end of July, 20 leak cases had been reported in Commerce, more than in any other Southeast city. Whittier and Santa Fe Springs had 19 each, Vernon 13, South Gate and Montebello 11 each, and Downey 10. A total of 57 leaks were reported in other area cities.

Countywide, about 30% of underground tanks have been tested and also comply with local ordinances that require electronic monitoring to detect new leaks.

5 Cities Enforce Laws

This compares with 80% compliance in Long Beach and Vernon, which with Torrance, Santa Monica and Los Angeles are the only cities in the county that chose to enforce tank laws themselves. The county runs the tank program in unincorporated areas and in 80 other cities.

Ground-water cleanups are supervised by the state Regional Water Quality Control Board in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles County has been slower to enforce tank laws than other counties and some cities, Sjoberg said, partly because its fire department, which protects 43 cities, had no inventory of tanks when the state law was passed. A 1984 state-supplied inventory did not include about 15,000 of the 33,000 tanks then in the county’s jurisdiction, he said.

New Tanks Discovered

“We’re still finding tanks,” he said. “Every time I drive down the street I spot a place that’s not on our list. A (tank owner) came in the other day and said, ‘Hey, I just found nine more.’ ”

Sjoberg said many companies simply dug up their tanks rather than test and monitor them, or removed the tanks when leaks were found, instead of replacing them with mandated double-walled containers.

About 10,000 have been removed and not replaced in the county’s jurisdiction, Sjoberg estimated.

The closure of wells in several Southeast cities illustrates the problems tank leaks may cause.

For example, South Gate officials say solvent leaks, perhaps from below-ground waste-water basins now being tested, have contaminated half the city’s water supply. The city plans to build a $5-million plant to clean the water from five closed wells. For now, the city must buy costly imported water to meet its needs.

25% of Wells Contaminated

In the Central Basin, the ground-water basin that underlies the Southeast area and half of Long Beach, nearly 25% of the 430 active wells are contaminated with detectable amounts of toxic chemicals, according to state reports.

Polluted municipal wells have been closed in Southeast cities including Bellflower, Norwalk, South Gate, Downey, Whittier, Santa Fe Springs and Bell Gardens. More than 80 other wells have been contaminated to a lesser degree and remain in use.

Chemicals also have been found in a number of small public wells such as those at St. John Bosco High School in Bellflower, Rancho Los Amigos Hospital in Downey and Alice Birney Elementary School in Pico Rivera.

Mandatory Actions

When contaminants exceed state safety levels, as in at least 23 Southeast cases, wells must be closed or the water mixed to reduce pollutants to recommended limits.

In general, water officials think the pollution is coming from leaking underground tanks, sumps or storage basins, landfills and septic tanks. For years, one water board investigator said, heavy industry disposed of toxic wastes by “dumping them out the back door.”

“We know there are some underground tanks in the Central Basin that are causing some of this,” said Hank Yacoub, supervising toxics engineer for the regional water board. “But we think most of the pollution that’s showing up in these wells occurred during the last 40 or 50 years, when industry had carte blanche approval to do what they wanted.”

Many Southeast tank leaks have been clustered in the industrial zones of South Gate, Commerce, Santa Fe Springs, La Mirada and Vernon, where paint, petrochemical, detergent, steel and metal-coating companies operate.

In Residential Areas Too

But they also have been found along quiet residential streets in many area cities.

Leaks have been discovered at a hospital and county offices, at auto dealerships and a milk producers’ cooperative, at shopping centers and dry cleaners, and at Huntington Park High School and Biola University. Sixty of the 160 Southeast leaks were at service stations.

Fifteen Southeast leaks, nearly all involving solvents at industrial sites or gasoline at service stations, are among the 140 cases considered most serious by the regional water board, which directs ground-water cleanups in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

In at least four of those cases, solvents and gasoline have been found in ground-water plumes that extend beyond tank owners’ properties. Off-site testing has not yet been done in at least six other major gasoline cases.

Vapors May Enter Homes

The plumes have prompted fears that gasoline vapors may seep into homes, as occurred near the Chevron oil refinery in El Segundo in 1985, following undetected leaks of up to 6 million barrels of fuel into shallow ground water.

They have also raised legal questions about liability and have sometimes stalled cleanups because of neighbors’ reluctance to allow testing to determine the extent of contamination.

If tests show that adjoining properties are polluted, owners must declare the potential hazard when they sell their real estate. Financial institutions and escrow companies increasingly require assurance from governmental agencies that environmental problems have been resolved.

“The real estate people call us every day. They’re very much concerned about how clean is clean. They want us to sign off,” the water board’s Yacoub said.

Owners Get High Priority

To help out property owners who are willing to pay for immediate cleanups, Yacoub said he has directed board engineers to evaluate such cases quickly. Giving the cases a high priority is significant, because board engineers each have at least four times as many cases as they can adequately supervise, he said.

The board’s backlog has created problems in cases that do not involve sale of property or are not serious enough to require immediate attention, the county’s Sjoberg said.

“It is a problem,” he said. “In a few cases, we’ve pursued the cleanup even though it was a (water board) case, because the (owners) had been sitting there with a hole in the ground for a good six months--sitting there waiting for somebody to make up their mind what to do.”

Major Threats Found

The Southeast testing program has uncovered significant environmental threats at major industries, but it has also demonstrated how costly it can be for small businesses to comply with the tank law, especially when a problem is detected.

Los Angeles Chemical Co., a 35-employee firm surrounded by large chemical plants, has spent about $75,000 since late 1986 just to begin to evaluate the extent of pollution beneath its South Gate headquarters.

Allen Klingensmith, part-owner of the 75-year-old company, said he could not guess how much it will eventually cost to pump solvents from the ground water. He acknowledged that some of the contamination apparently came from a rupture in one of six old tanks buried beneath his loading docks.

Problem for Small Firms

“This is a big problem. It’s all over the area,” he said. “But when you’re a little company in this business, banks won’t loan to you because they’re afraid you’ll go bankrupt.

“So you spread it out over a year or two, and you’re losing money slow enough that you’re going to survive,” said Klingensmith, 64. “You and I will clean up what’s been going on for a hundred years, and some day our kids will take over and they’ll be doing it too.”

Southeast cities have also struggled with the expense of tank testing and cleanup.

Responding to a leak in diesel-fuel tank piping, Montebello has spent about $100,000 since 1982 to vacuum vapors from the soil at its Greenwood Avenue maintenance yard, Fire Chief Robert King said.

Test Wells Installed

It has spent another $100,000 to test 20 city-owned tanks and install monitoring wells in the soil below. Replacement of three tanks, including two that leaked, will cost $150,000 more. Because of costs, “we’re just going to eliminate several others,” King said.

In Pico Rivera, leaking tanks changed city redevelopment agency policy.

The agency was stuck with a $30,000 ground-water problem after buying an old gas station as part of its newly opened Crossroads Plaza shopping center on Whittier Boulevard. As a result, the city now tests underground tanks before it buys property, Assistant City Manager David Caretto said.

Provisions are also written into purchase contracts protecting the city if unregistered tanks are found, he said.

More Sensitive to Costs

“We have run into the problem on at least three occasions now, and this has made us a lot more sensitive, because the remediation cost can be far in excess of the value of the property,” Caretto said.

Of potentially greater long-term expense to Southeast cities will be treatment of drinking water polluted by tank leaks and other sources.

Statewide, water supplies usually have been contaminated in areas characterized by shallow wells and by sandy soil that allows fluids to sink rapidly.

In the Southeast area, that is also generally true, water officials said.

Soil is most sandy just south of the Whittier Narrows, through which underground aquifers and the Rio Hondo and San Gabriel rivers flow on their way to the ocean. Most of the Southeast area’s polluted wells are within a few miles of the Whittier Narrows.

Most Wells Shallow

A large number of Southeast wells are also rather shallow, many between 200 and 600 feet deep. A 1,000-foot well is considered deep, although Commerce has a 1,500-foot well and Long Beach has wells as deep as 2,500 feet, water officials said.

Cities closest to Whittier Narrows in the so-called Montebello Forebay--Pico Rivera, Downey, Montebello and Whittier--are also particularly vulnerable to leaked chemicals because their wells are not protected by clay layers that sometimes separate water basins.

Coastal areas, such as Long Beach, are blessed with this natural protection from surface contamination, but the clay layers grow thinner and are fewer farther inland, disappearing altogether at the Whittier Narrows, where five major aquifers join.

No Clay to Act as Filter

“If you put a gallon of gasoline into the soil at the Montebello Forebay, there’s nothing to keep it from going into the water supply,” said Larry Larson, general manager of the Long Beach Water Department. “But in Long Beach, there is clay that will preclude that gasoline from soaking through.”

Not that Long Beach and other coastal cities with deep wells are fully protected by the clay layers.

Water officials who once thought the clay impermeable are revising that opinion based on contamination problems in the Santa Clara Valley and Santa Monica and because of pollution found in wells in Bellflower, Norwalk and South Gate. Clay layers overlay the drinking water basins in those areas.

Of the three Southeast cities, only South Gate’s tainted wells are deep.

‘We’re Losing Wells’

“It’s leaking around the clay layers. We thought we were protected. But now it’s saturated or circumvented them, and we’re losing wells,” said Thomas A. Salzano, assistant general manager of the Central and West Basin Water Replenishment District in Downey.

In addition, contamination from the northern half of the Central Basin is flowing slowly through deep aquifers in Long Beach’s direction, Larson said.

“I don’t think there’s any question that what’s in the basin is coming to us like it’s in a pipeline,” Larson said. The Long Beach Water Department has placed a $5-million filtration system in its long-range building plan, with construction expected as early as 1990, he said.

Salzano agreed that pollution is moving seaward from the Southeast, but very slowly. Contamination in shallow wells in Bellflower could reach Long Beach in a few years, but chemicals would not reach the deeper basins from which Long Beach gets its water for decades, he said.

“It’s not like a freight train that’s going to hit you in the face,” Salzano said.

SOUTHEAST-AREA LEAKING TANKS: SOME MAJOR CASES

Since 1983, underground storage tanks have been discovered leaking at 160 locations throughout the Southeast area, including 20 in Commerce, 19 each in Whittier and Santa Fe Springs, 13 in Vernon, 11 each in South Gate and Montebello and 10 in Downey. Cerritos has had 9, Pico Rivera 8, Huntington Park 6, Norwalk 5, Bell and Bellflower 2 each, and Bell Gardens and Maywood, 1 leak each.

Fifteen area leaks, nearly all involving solvents at industrial sites or gasoline at service stations, are among the 140 cases considered most serious by engineers for the state Regional Water Quality Control Board in Los Angeles. More than 1,300 leak cases have been reported countywide.

ASHLAND CHEMICAL CO. 10505 S. Painter Ave., Santa Fe Springs A subsidiary of Ashland Oil Co., the chemical repackaging plant has spent $1 million since 1983 to determine the extent of ground-water contamination from several of its 47 underground tanks. The boundaries of the plume of industrial solvents have not been identified, although 26 test wells have been drilled. An areawide problem, water pollution moves onto the Ashland site from one side and off it on another, the company says. Two aquifers have been tainted, but no drinking-water wells affected. Water cleanup will begin once the problem is fully defined, state investigators say. SINCLAIR PAINTS 3960 E. Washington Blvd., Commerce Ground water 60 feet beneath the plant has been contaminated by industrial solvents and acrylics used to manufacture paint. Several distinct plumes of pollution have been detected up to 500 feet off the Sinclair site, but the tips of the plumes are not yet determined. Leaks from tanks and processing equipment are suspected. Assessment of water contamination is continuing. It is a state Superfund site, but the owner is expected to pay for cleanup. LOS ANGELES CHEM. CO. 4545 Ardine St., South Gate An unknown quantity of acetone from at least one ruptured tank has joined other highly toxic solvents in ground water beneath the small chemical repacking plant. There has been no cleanup so far in the 1986 case. Progress in drilling test wells has been slow, partly because of yearlong negotiations with adjacent property owners, including the city of Cudahy. Located in a heavy industrial area, the facility is one-half mile from four South Gate water wells that have been closed by solvent contamination. Underground storage basins at another facility are the suspected source of the well contamination. THRIFTY STATION

12202 South St., Artesia More than 7,500 gallons of gasoline and water have been pumped from beneath the service station since leaks were discovered in 1986. A layer of gasoline is still floating on ground water at a depth of 25 feet. At least six monitoring wells have been drilled but it is not yet clear whether the fuel has moved onto adjacent properties. GENERAL MOTORS CORP. 2700 Tweedy Blvd., South Gate

Large amounts of gasoline and solvents from tanks and other sources are being removed from shallow ground water through a system whereby bacteria is placed in the water to consume the pollutants. Deeper aquifers have not been affected. The contamination is on three parts of the 88-acre site, but has not migrated onto neighbors’ property, investigators say. State and federal Superfund agencies are involved in the cleanup. ARCO VINVALE TERMINAL 8601 S. Garfield Ave., South Gate A layer of fuel three feet thick was discovered floating on ground water in May. Tests found toxic chemicals up to 5,700 times the state safety level for drinking water. A tank leak was detected. The case has been referred by the county to the state Regional Water Quality Control Board, where evaluation is pending. BORDEN CHEMICAL CO. 1100 Vail Ave., Montebello Investigators say cleanup in the 1983 case still has not begun because Borden has balked at removing from its former facility pollution it insists comes from other locations. Tests show that solvents are in ground water under the site and down-gradient from it. The company must test up-gradient to prove that contaminants are moving onto its site, investigators say. The state acknowledges that other solvent leaks have been discovered nearby in the same industrial area. ARCO AM/PM 12606 Rosecrans Ave, Santa Fe Springs In a leak reported in April, a layer of gasoline nearly six feet thick was found on ground water beneath the convenience store. The case has been referred by the county to the state Regional Water Quality Control Board, where evaluation is pending. TEXACO STATION 14220 Firestone Blvd., La Mirada A layer of gasoline several feet thick has been found on ground water beneath the service station’s tanks at Firestone Boulevard and Valley View Avenue. The case has been referred by the county to the state Regional Water Quality Control Board, where evaluation is pending.