Tiny Supplier’s Water Cleanup Is Faster, Cheaper Without EPA Aid

The tiny Hemlock Mutual Water Co. in El Monte discovered seven years ago that its two wells were producing water unfit to drink.

So the company’s 240 owners--who are also its customers--chipped in $100 apiece toward a $40,000 filtration system, which the board of directors installed as a do-it-yourself project.

The equally tiny Richwood Mutual Water Co., also in El Monte, found contamination in its two wells at the same time. But its officials turned to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for help.

The government ordered a number of studies, scrapped one design that proved unworkable and spent $1.5 million.

But Richwood’s 217 customers are still waiting for their state-of-the-art system, designed by a firm called CH2M Hill, one of the EPA’s major Superfund contractors, with 4,000 employees and 50 offices nationwide. Hemlock’s system, designed by a 20-employee water equipment and welding shop in Downey, has been running for three years.

The EPA estimates that it will cost the federal government and the state nearly $100,000 a year to treat and test the Richwood water. Hemlock pays for its own system and this year will spend $4,000 to run it and less than $5,000 for tests.

Rep. Esteban E. Torres (D-La Puente), who will chair a special congressional hearing in Baldwin Park today on massive ground-water contamination in the San Gabriel Valley, has called EPA’s expenditures on the Richwood system “ludicrous.”

“It’s like those $7,000 coffeepots at the Pentagon,” said Torres, who plans to question EPA officials about the project.

To be sure, the Richwood system is larger and more sophisticated than Hemlock’s. Under the Hemlock no-frills approach, customers have their water supply cut off for half an hour every Sunday night while the treatment system is regenerated. But both systems use the same process--carbon adsorption--and the Hemlock system meets state and federal standards, just as the Richwood system will.

Both systems are equally effective at purifying the water.

The EPA offered to build a water treatment system for Hemlock just like Richwood’s, but the company refused, fearful that government aid might bring government control. “We would have been under their thumb,” said Hemlock President Jim Ford.

Neil Ziemba, who manages the San Gabriel Valley Superfund ground-water cleanup project for the EPA, said he understands why questions would be raised about the Richwood project, saying that after all, “look at the amount of money we spent.” But he added: “We’ve learned a lot from this project.”

One of the lessons is not to do it again. Or, as Ziemba put it: “One of the things we have learned is that we don’t want to get involved in projects set up to benefit water purveyors.”

The Richwood project will provide clean water, Ziemba said, but it will have little impact on the regional ground-water contamination problem that is the EPA’s primary concern.

More than 25% of the 400 wells in the San Gabriel Valley are contaminated with industrial solvents, such as trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE). The EPA has estimated that it will take decades of work and hundreds of millions of dollars to contain pollution in the area, which provides the primary water supply for 1 million people.

Most water companies that have closed contaminated wells have been able to maintain an adequate supply by tapping other wells or by importing water.

No Alternative Supply

But three small El Monte water companies, Richwood, Hemlock and Rurban Homes, with a combined 750 customers, were left without an alternative clean water supply in 1982 when tests showed that all of their wells were contaminated with PCE. Since the companies are small cooperatives, owned by the property owners in the blue-collar neighborhoods they serve, they did not have the resources to do much about it.

At first they kept pumping bad water. The state Department of Health Services required the companies to notify customers that drinking the water could expose them to a risk of cancer and liver or kidney damage. To avoid that risk, the notice said, customers should buy bottled water or drink tap water after boiling it outdoors or in a well-ventilated room, taking care not to breathe the vapors.

But most people, Ford said, just kept drinking water from the tap, figuring that the health risk was slight or that they had already consumed so much contaminated water over the years that it was pointless to stop.

Both the state and federal governments put the San Gabriel Valley ground-water contamination problem on their Superfund priority lists and began looking for ways to help the three companies.

The EPA also began an investigation to find out how the water became contaminated but has reached no conclusions. Possible sources include leaks from chemical storage tanks, seepages from landfills and careless handling and dumping of chemicals.

Ziemba said it was clear from the beginning that the cheapest alternative for the three companies was to shut down the polluted wells and connect the systems to the privately owned San Gabriel Valley Water Co., which has 70,000 customers. An EPA study said that could be done for less than $200,000, but the mutual shareholders in the three smaller companies, who would have had their water rates nearly doubled, refused to give up their independent systems.

Towers Recommended

So, undertaking what Ziemba describes as a “quick and dirty feasibility study,” EPA concluded that the best alternative would be to build air-stripping towers, using an aeration technique to transfer PCE and other pollutants from well water to the air by dropping the water down towers 35 feet high.

John Kunz, a member of the Hemlock board, said he could see immediately that the air-stripping plan would not work.

Hemlock’s two wells sit on a small strip of land next to homes on Hemlock Street. “The noise would have been too much for the neighbors, plus we didn’t have the real estate for it,” Kunz said.

Ford said the EPA and its contractor on the project, CH2M Hill, held a series of meetings with residents to explain how the system would work. “They were pushing air-stripping real bad,” he said. “They would talk through the night trying to convince us.”

But, Ford said, an alternative system of removing pollutants by running water through activated carbon seemed a more promising approach.

So, he said, Hemlock’s shareholders “got together at a church and said, ‘Hey, let’s look into a charcoal filter on our own.’ ”

Carbon Experiments

Kunz, a plumber, said he bought a simple carbon cartridge filter, hooked it up to his kitchen faucet and began running tests that showed the device was effective in removing PCE.

Then Hemlock solicited the help of George Cade, who runs a welding and industrial water equipment manufacturing company in Downey. Cade built a prototype about the size of a water softener and then a full carbon filtration system to be installed next to Hemlock’s wells.

Most of the system was installed during a three-day holiday weekend by Ford, a former truck driver who now runs a bird farm; Bud Selander, an electrical contractor, and Kunz.

Meanwhile, EPA’s contractor started to design air-stripping towers for Richwood and Rurban Homes. But, according to subsequent EPA reports, the contractor found that the system would be too complicated for the companies to operate with their limited part-time help and that the towers would not fit on the available sites. In addition, the contractor reported that noise from the towers could bother neighbors and that power surges might disrupt electrical service. In addition, the process would pollute the air.

So, EPA scrapped the air-stripping alternative. The project was then delayed for more than a year while the state Department of Health Services resisted carbon treatment systems because of their operational cost. The issue was not resolved until passage of a bill by Assemblywoman Sally Tanner (D-Baldwin Park), that compelled the state to help pay the operational costs of carbon filtration systems for Richwood and Rurban Homes.

By September, 1986, when the EPA formally adopted the carbon alternative, Hemlock was running its own system and the amount of PCE in wells belonging to Rurban Homes had declined sharply, making a water treatment system for it unnecessary.

Temporary Solution

That left Richwood as the only company needing the project, but by then it had been given another source of clean water. In 1985, Richwood’s water became so contaminated with PCE that state health officials decided it was no longer safe for bathing, let alone drinking. The company’s wells were shut down and an interim connection was built at state expense to supply customers temporarily with water from San Gabriel Valley Water Co.

Michael Whitehead, president of San Gabriel Valley Water Co., said his company offered to take over the Richwood system, paying shareholders for equipment, but Richwood refused. Instead, he said, the government has “funded a very expensive state-of-the-art water treatment system” for a small group of consumers while “we sit on the sidelines, shake our heads and wonder.”

Robert Berlien, general manager of the Upper San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District, said that of the $8.5 million the EPA has spent on ground-water pollution in the San Gabriel Valley, $1.5 million has benefited only Richwood. “To spend over $1.5 million to provide water service to 200 homes cannot be cost effective,” he said.

Although Richwood’s carbon filtration plant is complete, the company cannot begin treating water until a back-flow prevention device is installed at the connection with the San Gabriel Valley Water Co. system. The treatment plant would have opened in April if the back-flow device had been in place.

Ziemba said the delay is not the EPA’s fault. “We’re not involved in doing the entire water supply planning for any company,” he said.

David Waterman, president of Richwood, said the device will cost his company about $12,000. It is one of the few costs on the project that are not being borne by the government.

‘We’ve Been Satisfied’

Waterman said that despite the length of time it has taken to get the water treatment system in place, he has no criticism of the EPA. “We’ve been satisfied,” he said.

Unlike Hemlock, Richwood was never tempted to install a treatment system on its own. “We didn’t have the financial resources,” Waterman said, “and we didn’t have anyone who knew how to do it.”

But Ford, at Hemlock, said installing a carbon treatment system wasn’t a big project. The hard part, he said, was getting government permits to run the system. It took more than two years to get authorization to put the backwash from the system into a storm drain.

The system runs water through two tanks that contain activated carbon, which traps PCE and other chemicals. Once a week, water is moved backward through the system to remove dirt particles and “fluff up” the carbon, forcing a brief shutdown in water service to customers.

When the carbon becomes saturated with PCE and other chemicals, it is removed and reconditioned or replaced. That happens once or twice a year.

Ford said the Richwood system is superior to the one Hemlock installed but added: “Nobody is unhappy with the way we went.”

And even Ziemba of the EPA said he admires what Hemlock has accomplished on its own. “I think it’s great that they did that,” he said.