Hinkley residents question Lahontan, PG&E face-to-face on clean up

BARSTOW — Chuck Curtis was a popular man Tuesday night.

The water board’s project head for Pacific Gas and Electric’s clean-up of Hinkley’s contaminated water, Curtis, was surrounded Tuesday night by Hinkley residents hailing questions at him. He said most of the questions were about the chromium 6 plume, whether it is moving and whether it will contaminate the water at the Hinkley School.

“It’s not moving much,” Curtis said. “PG&E is installing more extraction wells to keep it from moving to the school.”

Curtis was just one of the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board officials and representatives from PG&E present at the Hinkley School to answer questions and present new information to residents concerned about the clean-up and containment progress. A series of 10 poster boards lined Hinkley’s gym to give more information. Hinkley resident McHenry Cooke said the meeting was an attempt at making the complicated process of cleaning up chromium 6 understandable.

“I don’t agree with everything that happened but you got to keep up on what’s going on,” Cooke said. “If you’re not an expert on this, you don’t know,”

Legal judgments in the 1990s found electricity producer PG&E responsible for polluting area water with chromium 6, a compound used to prevent rust in the company’s cooling towers. The compound was used for 14 years starting in 1952 and thought to have caused cancer and other health problems for nearby residents. The movie “Erin Brockovich” brought national attention to the incident in 2000.

The clean-up process has gone on for years in Hinkley, but on Tuesday, officials presented some new information. Curtis said that within a week, Lahontan will issue PG&E with a new clean-up and abatement order for the Hinkley contamination. That order will set a hard date for when PG&E must stop the movement of the plum or face fines, Curtis said, and include direction to conduct a new feasibility study for clean-up methods. The study will help Lahontan and PG&E draft a final clean-up plan by 2010, Curtis said.

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Timeline

New for many Hinkley residents was a timeline of projected project start and stop times for the remediation and clean up of Hinkley’s water. The timeline only went as far as 2011 though Lahontan and PG&E officials said the clean-up process would take longer than that.

• Plume monitoring: Through 2011

• Operation of Desert View Dairy plume control and land treatment: Through 2011

• In-situ treatment pilot study: To end in 2008

• Operation of central area remediation project: Through 2011

• PG&E plant in-situ remediation project: Through 2011

• Lahontan adopts background Chromium levels for area: End of 2008

• Final clean-up plan submitted to Lahontan: 2010