Source: http://www.bakersfield.com, September 5, 2015
By: John Cox
A unique sprinkler system northeast of Bakersfield has run night and day for more than half a century without attracting much notice, despite supporting a healthy-looking green patch that easily stands out from the golden foothills around it.
But lately the installation has received lots of attention as regional water quality officials contend the sprinklers’ constant disposal of oil field wastewater has helped create a mound of groundwater pollution that may one day threaten water supplies as far away as Bakersfield.
Tests performed by the site’s nonprofit operator show the groundwater beneath Race Track Hill contains chloride concentrations up to 19 times the facility’s maximum allowable discharge of 150 parts per million. The groundwater’s boron levels are in some spots 16 times the disposal limit of 1 part per million, and total dissolved solids, the primary measure of water quality, are as much as seven times the site’s discharge cap of 1000 parts per million.
“The groundwater at Race Track Hill is polluted, and there’s no other way to state it,” Clay Rodgers, assistant executive officer of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board’s Fresno office, said during testimony at a quasi-judicial hearing on the matter July 30 in Rancho Cordova near Sacramento.
Board members, unconvinced the operation presents an immediate danger, decided against a staff proposal to shut down the sprinkler system in the middle of last month. They instead ordered more testing and other work in a cease-and-desist order allowing the irrigation system to continue operating through 2017.
On Monday an environmental group appealed the board’s decision to the State Water Resources Control Board, alleging the regional panel had bowed to pressure from the oil industry and neglected its duty to enforce California’s water quality laws.
The operation
The system along Breckenridge Road at Race Track Hill discharges 168,000 to 189,000 gallons a day of Edison Oil Field “produced water,” a naturally occurring fluid that comes up along with crude. Tamarisk trees and bermuda grass —- non-native species selected for their tolerance to the salty, high-boron waste stream — help absorb water using the natural process of evapotranspiration, a combination of evaporation and plant transpiration.
Valley Water and its hydrogeologists maintain the sprinklers pose little risk for a few reasons, and that the mound of pollution more likely was created by large oil companies that operated in the Edison field decades ago, not by the medium and small companies that remain.
Immense quantities of produced water have been disposed of in the Edison area over the years. Often the wastewater was dumped into large, unlined ponds to evaporate and seep slowly underground.
Valley Water still uses unlined ponds at Race Track Hill and at Fee 34, a related but much smaller wastewater gathering site and pumping station the company operates less than two miles to the southwest. In fact, sprinklers handle just 45 percent of wastewater at Race Track Hill, with unlined ponds disposing of the rest.
Regional water board staff have also expressed concern about the ponds’ capacity for containing runoff during heavy rains. Dale Harvey, supervising engineer at the agency’s Fresno office, testified at July’s hearing Valley Water has built nothing to keep runoff on the site, and that signs of erosion at the facility’s edges suggest contaminants built up at the site could wash into nearby Cottonwood Creek, and possibly into the Kern River, in the event of a big storm.
The regional board, cracking down amid a wider, multi-agency focus on produced water disposal in California, has moved to raise pond disposal standards sharply starting in 2017. This may well force pond closures at Race Track Hill and Fee 34, along with hundreds of other percolation facilities across Kern County, many operated by Valley Water.
The company has offered to investigate alternatives for dealing with the wastewater. Watering a nearby golf course might be one option, as might diluting it with enough freshwater to bring the fluid’s contamination down to what regulators would consider a negligible level.
The preferred and most common solution is to inject it deep underground. Valley Water Manager Larry Bright testified at July’s hearing that the company intends to pursue that option, but the permit application process was sure to extend many months beyond the Aug. 15 shutoff date originally proposed at the meeting.
Surprised by the attention
Bright asserted the company would have taken immediate action years ago, had it been aware of the board’s concerns. But he noted Valley Water had received only passing inspection reports for decades, and never got a violation notice until 2013.
“Obviously something changed from (the board’s) perspective,” he said, adding maybe there had been a shift amid “different political influences.”
Regardless, evapotranspiration at Race Track Hill constitutes an inappropriate disposal practice that should halt immediately, Andrew Grinberg, oil and gas program manager for Washington, D.C.-based environmental group Clean Water Action, told the board.
Speaking at the Rancho Cordova meeting one month before Clean Water Action appealed the decision letting the sprinklers continue running, Grinberg pointed out that a state-commissioned scientific panel earlier this summer recommended phasing out ground application of produced water.
“The job of this board is to protect the waters of the state, not to protect the business interests of a few companies,” he said.
Valley Water’s original Race Track Hill waste discharge permit from 1958 neither allowed nor banned the use of sprinklers. And although the water board has had the facility inspected regularly for many years, Rodgers said he stumbled across an inspection report on the facility a couple of years ago. He decided to go take a look at it, which led to ground monitoring around the site and, more recently, July’s proposal for a cease-and-desist order.
Oil producers who send their produced water to Race Track Hill testified that turning off the sprinklers Aug. 15 would have forced them to shut in wells, which would likely cost jobs, investment, property tax revenues and oil royalty payments to people who rely on them.
Chris Morrison, owner of Bakersfield’s Morrison Oil Co., Race Track Hill’s second-largest contributor of produced water, said his company is pursuing other options for disposing of produced water, including reverse osmosis filtration, but that “we just need some time.”
A different direction
Consultants for Valley Water downplayed the risk the groundwater pollution may present. Showing slides of geological diagrams and nearby well data, they concluded the plume is moving north-northwest at about 100 feet per year, not toward Bakersfield’s center, 15 miles to the west.
Moreover, geological barriers including a virtually impermeable layer of shale rock appear to separate the plume from aquifers serving nearby water wells, a hydrogeologist testifying for Valley Water told the board.
Another consultant said storm runoff is not a problem because the facility has pumps to send storm runoff back up Race Track Hill, which they estimated can hold 152 acre-feet of water, nearly twice as much he calculated would fall in a weeklong, once-in-a-century deluge. This assumes the facility’s ponds are not substantially filled when such a storm hits.
Senior water agency staff concluded, and the board ultimately agreed, that more information was necessary before the sprinklers could be shut off responsibly.
The regional board’s executive director, Pamela Creedon, said Rodgers and the rest of the case’s prosecution staff failed to demonstrate Valley Water could still handle its regular incoming waste stream without sprinkling the spray fields. She called for a detailed comparison of the facility’s incoming waste volume with its disposal capacity, as well as more engineering work to bring the operation up to the board’s standards.
The board approved her proposed cease-and-desist order giving the company much testing and investigation to do during the next year, along with a likely closure deadline of Jan. 1, 2018.
Water well owners and operators near Race Track Hill, and others in Bakersfield, generally knew little of Valley Water’s disposal operation or the water board’s proceedings regarding the wastewater sprinklers.
Unaware of the sprinklers
One who was aware of the operation is Jim Nickel, whose family owns the Rio Bravo Ranch development less than a mile northwest of Race Track Hill. He said he thinks the pollution is moving west. At any rate, quarterly tests of his wells to the northeast of the disposal area show his groundwater continues to meet drinking standards.
“I don’t think (the plume) is coming this way,” he said, adding, “I don’t have a dog in this fight.”
Rudy Valles, the Bakersfield district manager of California Water Service Co., which has water wells on the city’s east side, said he had not heard about the sprinklers in his 22 years at the utility, and he was unsure whether potential stormwater runoff from Race Track Hill and Fee 34 had the potential someday to “complicate” Cal Water’s treatment process.
The city of Bakersfield’s water resources manager, Art Chianello, did not return repeated calls requesting comment. Jason Meadors, who ranks just below Chianello as the city’s water resources director, said he was unaware of Valley Water’s disposal operation or the regional water board’s proceedings. But he emphasized the city’s wells are concentrated in southwest Bakersfield, and municipal water taken from the Kern River is tested regularly to screen for pollution.
Edison farmer Dennis Johnston, head of a diversified operation that gets some of its irrigation water from a well not far from Fee 34 on Edison Highway west of Comanche Drive, said he knew about Valley Water’s sprinklers because he had seen them while riding motorcycles at Race Track Hill in the 1960s and ’70s.
Although he had not been aware of the water board’s pollution concerns, Johnston said he hasn’t seen any adverse impacts on his groundwater.
“Oftentimes you hear these things and it’s a matter of degrees,” he said. “A little bit of salt’s OK. A lot is not.”
If ever polluted groundwater from Valley Water’s Race Track Hill operation were found to have impaired the beneficial use of domestic or irrigation water supplies, Rodgers said, the agency could order the company to replace that water. He said the company could potentially be held liable for civil penalties as well.