Chromium 6 Released Into L.A. River for Years

Industrial runoff water with dangerously high levels of chromium 6 was discharged for two decades into storm drains that flow to the Los Angeles River, according to newly released city records.

The records provide the first clear evidence of a route by which the large amounts of chromium 6 used by industry during the Cold War may have led to today’s ground water contamination, officials said. They also document the fact that manufacturers at the time allowed the chemical to flow at toxic levels into the region’s waterways--a practice that was largely unregulated until the mid-1960s.

Chromium 6, suspected of causing cancer and other illnesses, appeared in the waste water between 1945 and the mid-1960s in concentrations that at times reached as high as 80,000 parts per billion according to records compiled by the city of Los Angeles as part of a pollution study but not disclosed to the public. Any chromium 6 concentration in the thousands of ppb in surface water is considered dangerous, health experts say.

The records, obtained by The Times last week, were unearthed by water officials studying the levels of chromium 6 in ground water and the threat it may pose to public health.

Water experts say some of the runoff probably seeped into the San Fernando Valley aquifer and contaminated ground water pumped by Los Angeles and other cities for drinking water, starting in the 1940s and 1950s.

“What it means to me is surface water had the opportunity to percolate down into the ground water,” said Mel Blevins, the court-appointed water master who oversees pumping rights and water-quality issues for the upper Los Angeles River area. “That pollution is some of the main sources of the problem we’re seeing today.”

The discharges into storm drains continued even into the early 1980s, but at considerably lower levels--typically below 3 ppb.

“The high readings are very dangerous, for even surface water,” said Max Costa, head of the Department of Environmental Medicine at New York University. “If it gets into drinking water that would be very serious,” he said.

Because the city study mainly tested water in storm drains, not in wells, the records shed no light on how much chromium may have seeped over time into ground water or on its health impact.

Officials say tap water pumped from the basin today is safe because wells are closed when chemicals exceed prudent limits. Water pumped from San Fernando Valley wells by the Department of Water and Power now makes up about 15% of Los Angeles’ water supplies.

“A lot of this is a historical problem and the big question is, was there a pathway to humans,” said John Froines, a toxicology professor at UCLA’s School of Public Health. “If it had a potential to get into drinking water, then it’s something to be more concerned about and it would be potentially a more dangerous situation.”

Debate Over Standards

The disclosures come amid a fierce and sometimes emotional debate about the safety of some cities’ water supplies and the potential costs and benefits of tighter standards for chromium in drinking water.

The safety of the current water supply is being studied by state officials. One state agency has proposed a public health goal of 2.5 ppb for total chromium, which officials say would reduce levels of the toxic chromium 6 (also known as hexavalent chromium) to 0.2 ppb. The current standard for total chromium is 50 ppb. The levels recorded in runoff, according to the old city logs, are hundreds of thousands of times higher than that.

The state Department of Health Services is reviewing a recommendation to toughen chromium standards in water. After a department official was quoted in the Times Aug. 20 saying that the process could take up to five more years, state and local officials demanded faster action.

Gov. Gray Davis signed legislation Sept. 29 requiring state health officials to report by Jan. 1, 2002, on the risk posed by chromium 6. The cities of Los Angeles, Burbank and Glendale are in talks to jointly hire consultants to develop technology that would reduce or remove the chemical from ground water.

Nonetheless, water officials, including Blevins and Freeman, have urged local governments to be prudent. They say the proposed public health goal is scientifically flawed, and in the San Fernando Valley basin alone could force the cities of Los Angeles, Burbank and San Fernando to pay up to $50 million a year to buy imported water.

DWP General Manager S. David Freeman said he received the documents last week. “To me, it’s encouraging that it is getting out of our system,” he said. “This stuff was in the river back then in large quantities. It’s gone now.”

Officials could not say what percentage of tap water came from the aquifer during the 1940s and ‘50s. Nor could they say whether methodical testing of drinking wells was conducted before it became required in the 1960s.

Blevins said the chemicals could have entered the aquifer along a 7-mile stretch of the Los Angeles River near Glendale that is not lined with concrete. He estimated that it would take less than a year for chemicals there to reach the aquifer.

Chromium 6 may also have seeped directly into the soil in areas surrounding industrial facilities, then into the ground water, because not all runoff water goes into storm drains, said Dixon Oriola, a senior engineer with the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board.

“Percolation over a 30-year time period in any unlined water conduit would impact the soil and possibly the ground water,” Oriola said.

Decades of industrial pollution--much of it from aerospace manufacturing--turned the San Fernando Valley aquifer into a federal Superfund site. Chemical contamination in water wells remains an issue for area residents who say they were sickened by drinking poisoned water.

Since 1996, thousands of San Fernando Valley residents have sued the Lockheed Martin Corp. and other area companies alleging they were sickened over the years by chromium 6 and other toxins in the air, soil and drinking water.

Lockheed Martin has paid $60 million to date to settle claims, but has not admitted liability and says toxin concentrations were too small to make anyone sick.

Toxic Levels in Drains, Wells

Until the 1960s, industrial discharges were not regulated and water officials say they have no indication any laws were broken. Lockheed Martin spokeswoman Gail E. Rymer said the company has always complied with government regulations.

“Our record is very public on our use of chromium,” Rymer said. “We’ve always said we’ve used chromium and hexavalent chromium in our operations, as did many other companies in the area.”

The city records detail monthly chromium 6 levels in storm drains and a few water wells in Burbank, Glendale and Los Angeles between 1945 and 1982. The records were compiled by the DWP’s Sanitary Engineering Division, now known as the Water Quality Division.

Pankaj Parekh, the DWP’s manager of regulatory compliance, said the department conducted the studies at the request of a Los Angeles County task force studying pollution in the Los Angeles River.

Because the records only recently came to light, Parekh and other water officials could not say how the information was used.

The records were recently found by Blevins while preparing a report on chromium pollution for the Los Angeles City Council. After the existence of the records was hinted at in a public hearing, Blevins provided copies to The Times.

Blevins, 65, has studied upper Los Angeles River water issues for more than four decades, first at the DWP, then as water master. He was appointed in 1979 by the Los Angeles County Superior Court, which oversees the legal rights to pump water from the aquifer.

The records show that the highest level of chromium 6--80,000 ppb--was found in a storm drain near the former Glendale Grand Central Air Terminal on May 24, 1961. The highest sustained concentrations of the chemical were found in the Burbank Western Wash, a storm channel that discharges into the Los Angeles River, where levels reached 70,000 ppb in May 1955.

The DWP records show there were 37 days in the 22 years between 1945 and 1967 when chromium 6 was recorded at 1,000 ppb or higher.

In one instance, on March 23, 1955, workers tested for chromium 6 in the Burbank storm drain every 15 minutes for two hours, according to the handwritten DWP logs. The levels ranged from 5,000 to 17,500 ppb.

Chromium 6 concentrations dropped to under 1,000 ppb for all but a few months after February 1957, records show. There was another increase in chromium 6 levels in 1962, ranging from 1,500 to 4,000 ppb from March to August.

After 1967, the contamination levels dropped to less than 3 ppb for most months.

The documents do not identify the sources of the chromium 6 contamination, but the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board has targeted more than 200 manufacturers in the east San Fernando Valley as potential polluters.

The board is overseeing chromium 6 cleanup at former and current sites of Lockheed Martin, ITT Industries and Menasco, all in Burbank, and Courtaulds Aerospace and Drilube in Glendale, board documents show.

Scientists Divided Over Threat

Chromium is a metallic element found in nature. Relied on to harden steel, make paint pigments and other tasks, it is used in everything from aircraft manufacturing to electroplating. Chemical reactions can transform some amount of total chromium into chromium 6, a toxic form of the metal that can be dispersed as particles into the air, or into soil and water.

Although chromium 6 is considered a carcinogen when inhaled, scientists are divided over the threat posed by chromium 6 in tap water. The state does not require water agencies to test for chromium 6. Instead, agencies test for the presence of total chromium, which is limited to 50 ppb.

The city has monitored for total chromium since 1962, and has more recently conducted spot surveys on chromium 6 levels. Levels of chromium 6 in area ground water can vary widely. A June 1999 survey showed 13 of 14 DWP wells and three imported water sources contained chromium 6 varying from trace amounts to 4.7 ppb, Parekh said.

Two North Hollywood wells containing about 20 ppb of total chromium were closed by the agency in August, though officials said they did not test for chromium 6 there.

The San Fernando Valley aquifer was designated as a Superfund cleanup site by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1986. Since then, Lockheed Martin and dozens of other Burbank-area industries have paid $265 million to remove solvents PCE and TCE from the basin. They were not required to remove chromium 6 from the ground water.

Lockheed, in addition to the $60 million it has paid to residents, agreed this month to pay $5 million to about 300 other residents to settle more recent state lawsuits. A separate federal lawsuit by other residents is pending.

Chromium 6 has been blamed as a cancer-causing agent in several high-profile lawsuits. In a 1996 case made famous by the film “Erin Brockovich,” residents of the California desert town of Hinkley won a $333-million settlement from Pacific Gas & Electric when its tanks leaked high concentrations of chromium 6 into ground water.