Two wells ready to re-open
Six years after they were shut down because of contamination by a suspected cancer-causing chemical, two of Santa Monica’s drinking water wells are scheduled to begin pumping again within weeks.
Water from the Arcadia wells, located 100 feet south of the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Bundy Drive, has been running through a city water treatment facility for a year and has been clear of Methyl tertiary-Butyl Ether, or MtBE, said Bob Harvey, a chemist at the water treatment plant.
The city is now in the process of obtaining a permit from the state of California that will allow it to use that water, Harvey said. The state has approved an operating plan for the city’s water treatment facility, but it has-n’t allowed the city to begin using water from it.
“Probably it will take another couple of weeks,” Harvey said.
In 1996, seven of the city’s wells tested positive for MtBE, a colorless chemical that at very low concentrations in water smells like turpentine and is a suspected carcinogen. The wells were closed while officials investigated the extent and source of the contamination, which was eventually determined to have come from a nearby gas station.
Once the permit is issued, the treated water will be blended with other groundwa-ter and treated again before it is distributed to Santa Monica residents, officials said.
Before the contamination was discovered, the city imported only 20 percent of its daily water supply and produced the rest from its wells.
Now Santa Monica must import 80 percent of its water from other sources, mainly from the Metropolitan Water District. The opening of the two Arcadia wells will be able to provide 10 percent of the city’s water, or about 300 gallons per minute, officials said.
“It’s a small portion of our water supply,” Harvey said. “The others are still closed down from pollution and, in the scope of things, the other wells put out five to six thousand gallons per minute.”
On an average day, Santa Monica uses 13 million gallons of water.
Another set of drinking water wells, located in Mar Vista and known as the Charnock wells, also were shut down in 1996 because of MtBE contamination. They continue to sit idle while the city pursues litigation against 18 refiners, manufacturers and suppliers of MtBE and MtBE-laden gasoline.
The MtBE contamination in the Arcadia wells was traced to a Mobile gas station at the corner of Wilshire and Bundy. The station’s underground storage tanks leaked gasoline into the water table, which seeped into the wells.
“It was just a regular gas station,” said Gil Balboa, a utilities manager for the city, “and it has taken all this time to design and implement a treatment plant to clean the water.”
The levels were found to be at 70 parts per million, well above the state’s mandatory limit.
The state has since banned MtBE for use as an additive in gasoline.
Exxon, which merged with Mobile last year, paid to clean up the damage and built the city a water treatment plant, which is located where the gas station used to be.
Getting all the wells online again should be considered a serious security issue for the city, Harvey said.
“If an earthquake hits and we loose our (outside) water supply, we would have to turn the contaminated wells back on or go completely without water,” he said.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 1, 2002. Read the original PDF.