Water flowing from city taps contains trace amounts of the cancer-causing element, but city officials have said there is no threat to the public health because local water is blended with untainted majority imports from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
But a massive underground plume of contamination that has migrated to Glendale from the San Fernando Valley has kept the city at risk of increased levels of chromium 6 as state officials consider setting a public health goal “that we think is going to be pretty low,” said Leighton Fong, an engineer for Glendale Water & Power.
Also on Tuesday, the City Council unanimously approved a $431,122 contribution from Glendale Respondents Group LLC, a private-industry coalition that already pays roughly $2.7 million a year to operate the Glendale Water Treatment Plant as part of a 1994 agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The group was formed to represent a consortium of companies that were determined to have either potentially caused the underground water contamination decades ago via leeched chromium 6 and other toxic elements, or acquired the firms that did.
The majority of the former hazardous sites are within the San Fernando Road industrial corridor, which over the past several months has seen two EPA orders for further chromium 6 soil contamination investigation.
Glendale Respondents Group made the contribution amid EPA pressure to find a way to reduce chromium 6 levels at the treatment plant so that emergency discharges into the Los Angeles River meet strict environmental controls.
