Pasadena sues Caltech over groundwater contamination

(CN) — The city of Pasadena, California, filed a lawsuit against the California Institute of Technology on Thursday over groundwater contamination caused by rocket research done by the Jet Propulsion Lab, which is owned by NASA but operated by Caltech. 

Starting in the 1940s, and continuing well into the 1960s, JPL researchers used a wide variety of chemicals to test and make rocket fuel. Some of those toxic chemicals ended up in the groundwater, through the seasonal Arroyo Seco nearby or by being buried in the ground.

“The JPL facility reportedly continued to discharge wastewater contaminated with chemical waste into the Arroyo Seco at least as late as 1990,” the city says in its complaint. “Specifically, it was reported that on at least three separate occasions in 1990, approximately 600,000 gallons of wastewater contaminated with PCE was released by Caltech into the Arroyo Seco.”

Much of the history of JPL’s water contamination is well established. A page on JPL’s own website, written in 1991, states, “As was common and accepted practice during the 1940s and 1950s, JPL disposed of wastes through cesspools. As sewers became accessible to the laboratory in the late 1950s, JPL discontinued the use of cesspools.”

In 1991, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency designated the JPL facility a Superfund site, a polluted area requiring long-term cleanup, and identified both Caltech and NASA as “potentially responsible parties” liable for the cleanup. Since then, cleanup has focused on one area in northwest Pasadena, identified in the suit as the “Monk Hill wells.” In 2011, a water treatment center near those wells funded Caltech and NASA began operations. 

But according to the city’s groundwater testing, the contaminants have migrated south and have polluted a number of other wells throughout Pasadena. The city gets about 40% of its water from local groundwater, and the rest it purchases from the Metropolitan Water District. That water can be costly, especially as drought conditions worsen. 

“If any of the city’s remaining wells experience problems that require them to be shut down for repair, the city will be forced to purchase more costly MWD water than it currently anticipates, rather than shifting to other wells, as it would have prior to the advent of contamination impacts limiting its operational flexibility,” the city says in its complaint. 

Lawyers for the city could be reached for comment by press time.

Steve Slaten, NASA's groundwater cleanup manager at JPL who has supervised the cleanup for the last 18 years, said the cleanup is almost finished. When it is, it will have covered all the contamination from the facility.

“Over the decades, we have carefully studied the full extent of chemical releases from JPL, and our state and federal regulators agree, the impact from JPL is within about one mile of JPL, and we are cleaning up all of the impact from JPL,” Slaten said.

He added: "In the early days of JPL, the practice that was common at the time was to dig pits and pour waste into pits. That resulted in chemicals going into the groundwater. That practice ended by the time NASA came into being in 1958."

A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office published this past January found progress had been made in the JPL cleanup. According to the report, JPL had “decreased its environmental liabilities by approximately $24 million, about 30%, between fiscal years 2014 and 2019."

The suit names a number of toxic chemicals found in some Pasadena’s groundwater, including 1,2,3-trichloropropane, perchlorate, and carbon tetrachloride, which is classified by the EPA as a “probable human carcinogen.”

JPL began in 1936 as a research project run by a group of Caltech graduate students and a professor which involved testing rocket engines in the soil bed of the Arroyo Seco. It evolved into the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory and was funded, at first, by the U.S. Army to develop rockets for World War II.

The laboratory formally changed its name to JPL in 1943 and its mission gradually pivoted to space exploration after the war. 

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