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SAN FERNANDO VALLEY GROUNDWATER TREATMENT PLANT CONSTRUCTION UNDERWAY

Release Date: 8/5/1998
Contact Information: Randy Wittorp, U.S. EPA, (415)744-1589

    (San Francisco) -- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced today the ground breaking for a water treatment plant in the Glendale unit of the San Fernando Valley Superfund Site.  Once the plant becomes operational in 1999, the City of Glendale will again be able to tap into a water supply that has been unusable for more than 18 years.

     The plant is designed to extract and treat contaminated groundwater in the San Fernando Valley groundwater basin at a rate of 5,000 gallons per minute.  The City of Glendale will operate the plant and use the treated groundwater, which will meet all federal and state drinking water standards, as a drinking water supply.

    The groundwater basin is contaminated by volatile organic compounds, primarily trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE), which were widely used in industries including aerospace and defense manufacturing, machinery degreasing, dry-cleaning, and metal plating.  Some contamination can be traced as far back as the 1940s, when chemical waste disposal went unregulated throughout the Valley.

    To protect public health, the water supply wells were shut down after contamination was first discovered in 1980.  A groundwater monitoring program conducted from 1981 to 1987 revealed over 50 percent of the water supply wells in the eastern portion of the Valley were contaminated. The shutdown of these wells resulted not only in the cities turning to more expensive sources of drinking water, but in the loss of water in an area where this resource is already scarce.
 
    The Glendale unit of the San Fernando Valley Superfund Site covers approximately 6,680 acres near the Crystal Springs Well Field in the Cities of Los Angeles and Glendale.  This area is part of the San Fernando Valley groundwater basin, an aquifer which, prior to the discovery of contamination in 1980, had provided drinking water to over 800,000 residents of the Cities of Los Angeles, Glendale, and Burbank, and the La Crescenta Water District.  

     U.S. EPA has other treatment plants in the San Fernando Valley.  These are the North Hollywood unit, which delivers water to the City of Los Angeles, and the Burbank unit, which delivers water to the City of Burbank.

     EDITORS: U.S. EPA is planning a community meeting for September 16, 1998, at 7:00 p.m. at the Glendale Public Library, 2nd Floor Auditorium, 222 East Harvard Street, Glendale.  At the meeting, EPA will explain plans for both the treatment facilities and construction activities.

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