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On behalf of the Mayor and
City Council of the City of Santa Monica I want to thank you for the opportunity
to give testimony before this subcommittee. I am the Director of Environment and
Public Works for Santa Monica and one of my major areas of responsibility is
management of the City’s drinking water production and distribution system.
I would like to share with you today the key lessons we have learned from
our painful experiences with underground fuel storage tanks and MtBE in Santa
Monica. Santa Monica is a city of
nearly 90,000 permanent residents and over 200,000 daily visitors. The City depends heavily on groundwater for its drinking
water supply. After many years of effort, by 1995 we had been able to maximize
the use of local groundwater supplies and achieve 70% water self-sufficiency.
This was an extraordinary accomplishment in arid Southern California. By using
our sustainable local water resources we were therefore able to reduce our
reliance on increasingly scarce water imported from Northern California and the
Colorado River. This all changed in
1996 when Santa Monica was hit with a drinking water catastrophe caused by MtBE.
Within a six month period in 1996 MtBE forced Santa Monica to shut down most of
its water wells. These wells had accounted for one-half of the total daily water
supply in Santa Monica. We must now import more than 80 percent of our drinking
water, putting further strain on California’s already fragile water supply
system. The effects of MtBE can be
devastating:
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Once released from
a tank or pipeline, MtBE travels quickly and readily dissolves in water
unlike the other chemicals in gasoline;
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MtBE has an uncanny
ability to find its way into drinking water wells. Although gasoline has
been around for decades, it is only the relatively recent addition of MtBE
that has caused widespread water contamination in Santa Monica and
elsewhere;
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MtBE attacks
swiftly. Once discovered, MtBE
levels in the City’s wells rose more quickly than any other water
contaminant we had ever encountered. At the time that one of our first wells
was shut down, the MtBE contamination had soared to 610 parts per billion,
nearly fifty times the current state standard; and
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MtBE strikes at the
heart of public confidence in the safety of drinking water supplies.
People will not drink water that smells and tastes like turpentine,
nor should they be expected to.
With hard work and
perseverance, Santa Monica will eventually overcome this MtBE crisis, but the
price will be steep. The projected cost to just clean up Santa Monica’s main
well field is well over several hundred million dollars. Current estimates for
the total cost of nationwide MtBE clean-up are $30 billion and counting.
Clearly, the costs for remediation of MtBE and other water contamination must
ultimately be paid for by the polluter. But, unfortunately, those companies
responsible for causing the MtBE pollution in Santa Monica and many other
communities have not yet stepped forward to do what’s right. Until they do,
the significant financial burden to start the MtBE clean-up process is placed
unfairly on the backs of our water customers.
We need to make sure that we
are doing everything that we can to keep underground storage tanks from leaking
in the first place. Even the newest underground storage tank systems leak and
the leaks are often not in the tanks themselves but in the piping that connects
the tanks to the fuel dispensers. A primary focus needs to be placed on
underground storage tank inspection, training and enforcement. Too often in the
past, operators of underground fuel tanks have been able to act irresponsibly
because the threat of enforcement was remote or even nonexistent. Let’s make
sure that the tools and resources are in place so that non-compliant tanks are
taken out of service and the public and environment are better protected.
Most importantly, we need to
stop using MtBE as quickly as possible. The longer we continue to widely
distribute, store and dispense MtBE the worse the water contamination problem
will become not only in California but throughout the country. It is extremely
difficult to concentrate our efforts and resources on cleaning up the widespread
MtBE pollution that has already occurred while we continue to be plagued by new
MtBE leaks.
In conclusion, the two
irrefutable facts that have emerged from Santa Monica’s odyssey as the
“poster child” for MtBE water contamination are:
1) underground storage tanks leak; and 2) it is extremely difficult to
get polluters to pay for the clean-up of their pollution.
We must change our current policies with respect to MtBE and underground
storage tank management if we hope to have a better chance of not repeating the
mistakes of the past. Thank you for
the privilege of testifying before the Subcommittee today.
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