JPL seeks water treatment

Lab wants to pay $1 million for treatment expansion to clean aquifer of toxic materials. LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE -- Jet Propulsion Laboratory is proposing to expand a water treatment program to hasten the removal of perchlorate and other toxic materials from underground aquifers contaminated in the 1940s and 1950s, when the U.S. Army dumped jet fuel and solvents in the ground.

Perchlorate is used in rocket fuel and when ingested at significant levels, can disrupt the proper functioning of the thyroid gland, according to the state Department of Health Services.

But neighboring La Cañada Flintridge residents should not be alarmed, said Mark Ripperda, who manages the cleanup of hazardous waste projects for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The water under the plant site is not feeding into drinking water wells that affect La Cañada Flintridge residents, he said.

But contaminated groundwater has been seeping southeast toward Pasadena through the Arroyo Seco area, prompting the shutdown of wells in Pasadena until a treatment project can be implemented, Ripperda said.

JPL has been "very, very successful and the future project looks great," Ripperda said. "La Cañada is safe because it's up-gradient and wells that are up-gradient are not affected. The Pasadena wells were turned off so nobody is exposed to that water.

The NASA-funded space exploration campus spent about $4 million in NASA clean-up funds to construct a water treatment plant, an extraction well and an injection well on the contaminated area in 2004, said Steve Slaten, remedial project manager for JPL.

"For several years we've been studying what the problem was and what was the best way to fix it," Slaten said. So last year we constructed the plant," Slaten said. "It worked so well we proposed expanding it to accelerate the removal of [contaminants] from the ground water."

The facility pumps contaminated water out of the underground aquifer, treats it then pumps it back into the ground, Slaten said.

It has been so effective over the last nine months that JPL engineers decided to expand the facility by adding another injection well, another extraction well and the pipelines to connect them to the existing plant, Slaten said.

The expansion will cost another $1 million and will increase the plant's treatment capacity from 160 gallons of water to 350 gallons of water daily, Slaten said.