By Marc Lifsher
The LA Times
March 21, 2005
Arizona environmental officials are worried that a plume of polluted water
under a Pacific Gas & Electric Co. facility near Needles may be threatening
drinking water wells on their side of the Colorado River.
Arizona's concerns, repeated as recently as last week in a letter to the
California Department of Toxic Substances Control, are complicating what is
already a thorny problem for the utility and its parent, San Francisco-based
PG&E Corp.
Pollution from PG&E's Topock natural gas compressor station in the Mojave
Desert has created alarm at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern
California, which serves Los Angeles and 25 other cities and local water
agencies. And five Indian tribes that live along the Colorado River fear
that a sacred tribal site will be despoiled by the utility's planned cleanup
effort.
The Topock plant, which pushes natural gas through a pipeline from West
Texas to markets in California, sits atop a pocket of at least 108 million
gallons of water tainted with hexavalent chromium, a chemical compound that
can cause cancer if inhaled as dust or steam.
The chromium 6 threat was at the center of the 2000 movie "Erin Brockovich,"
which focused on a sister PG&E plant in the desert community of Hinkley,
near Barstow. Chromium 6 was used at both plants and at a third station at
Kettleman City in Kings County to control corrosion and mold in cooling
towers. At Topock, PG&E dumped untreated wastewater in the ground between
1951 and 1969.
"The plume of hexavalent chromium may have already moved beneath the
Colorado River and may now be contaminating Arizona's groundwater,"
Environmental Quality Director Steve Owens wrote to California officials on
March 14.
Owens said Friday that he had no evidence of PG&E-generated pollutants
migrating to Arizona. PG&E has offered to pay more than $350,000 for a study
of possible groundwater contamination in several communities on the Arizona
side of the river, which marks the border between the two states.
Owens' latest letter was a response to a Feb. 22 announcement by California
regulators that they detected high levels of chromium 6 in a monitoring well
just 60 feet from the Colorado River, a source of drinking water for more
than 18 million Southern Californians and 4 million Arizonans. The sample
found concentrations of 354 parts per billion for total chromium, seven
times greater than California's safety standard.
California officials said that they had no indication that the chromium 6
plume had reached the river. But as a cautionary move, they ordered PG&E to
increase pumping from extraction wells to try to draw the plume back from
the river. Also, Toxic Substances Control Director B.B. Blevins told PG&E to
increase its monitoring for contaminants.
Owens, however, contended in his letter that the discovery of heavy levels
of chromium 6 at a depth of 90 to 100 feet below the surface, so close to
the river's edge, signaled that "the potential threat to Arizona's
groundwater and surface water resources from the plume has increased
significantly."
He urged California to begin sampling Colorado River at a variety of depths
and to test river sediment for possible chromium 6 contamination.
In an interview Friday, Owens said Arizona's worries were "not taken
seriously" by PG&E and California officials a year ago when the danger posed
by chromium 6 to the river first became public. He said he couldn't
understand why officials in California "would be so dismissive of the
concerns of a fellow agency whose interest is protecting the health and
safety of its people" on the other side of the river.
"This isn't some fantasy that our technical people have conjured up," Owens
said.
California's Department of Toxic Substances Control complained in January
that Arizona officials hadn't contacted them directly with concerns about
the possibility that the toxic plume might be moving under the Colorado
River. At the time, Karen Baker, chief of the department's geology,
permitting and corrective action division, said that "at present, there are
no data indicating any contamination has migrated to Arizona."
Baker later suggested that any chromium 6 that might turn up in Arizona
wells could be caused by the presence of naturally occurring background
readings, or could be linked to alleged pollution from a nearby El Paso
Corp. natural gas compressor plant on the Arizona side of the state line.
California regulators and PG&E executives contend that studies of local
geology and hydrology seem to indicate that it's unlikely that an
underground plume of liquids would travel under the Colorado River's bed.
"It's got to go uphill," Baker said.
Local Indian tribes also accuse PG&E and the toxic substances department of
rushing to build a treatment plant that is blocking access to the entrance
of the adjacent Topock Maze. Members of the nearby Fort Mojave tribe believe
that the ancient site marks the portal for spirits of the recently dead to
enter heaven. The tribe is mounting a fight in the state Legislature and the
courts to force PG&E to move the treatment site away from the maze, said
tribal attorney Courtney Coyle.
"The tribe is going to aggressively pursue every option it has to protect
its sacred place and try to reverse some of the destruction that's been
caused by PG&E," Coyle said.
Dan Richard, a PG&E senior vice president who met with the tribal leaders
last week, said the utility "wants to step up and do whatever it has to do
to keep hexavalent chromium out of the Colorado River" without impinging "on
a great cultural resource for the people who live right in that area."