MOTOROLA

This was an estimated annual discharge rate from this facility that could have been ongoing for previous years,” the report says.

Motorola admits it emitted solvents into the air-in 1987, for instance, 500,000 pounds of solvents were released. But the company won’t say for sure that during the span of time TCE was used that any of that particular solvent found its way into the air around the Motorola plants.

Don Netko doesn’t exactly deny it, either. If we used it [TCE] back in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s-anything exposed to the atmosphere is going to evaporate, some small portion of it.” Instead of talking about the past quality of the environment around Motorola’s plants, Netko prefers to focus on the present.

Look at the tests done by federal agencies, by all the state agencies, and independent tests,” says Netko. Every one of those tests says that the soil, drinking water and air are clean.”

THE CITY OF SCOTTSDALE has always been proud of the Pentagonlike fortress on Hayden and McDowell roads. Perfect emerald turf and yellow-flowered paloverde trees ring the front of Motorola’s secretive Government Electronics complex. Most of the 160 acres are walled off from public view. From the street, one can just make out the bright flag of a helicopter landing pad. Nearby, a tall very white Arabian-looking tower juts into the sky.

An allergy clinic sits just east of the plant. To the north, there is a shopping center with Smitty’s Big Town. Houses and apartment buildings encircle the commercial area.

Just a few feet beneath all of this civilization is the Indian Bend Wash aquifer, which state records say was once considered a potable drinking- water supply for 350,000 people.

Much of Indian Bend Wash itself is a ribbon of green parkway that rolls north into Scottsdale. Because of the abundant water supply, it is graced with lakes, golf courses, playgrounds and jogging paths. It was a shock to everyone when the fish mysteriously died in one of the ponds in 1979.

It wasn’t such a shock when, five years later, the pond was found to have levels of TCE that exceeded health standards by 12 times.

When the lush greenbelt was built, no one knew that someday the aquifer beneath it would become the North Indian Bend Wash Superfund siteÏa ten-square-mile area bounded on the north by Chaparral Road, on the east by Pima and Price roads, on the west by Scottsdale Road and on the south by McKellips Road. In 1991 four companies, without admitting guilt, agreed that by 1993 they would begin to strip TCE out of the Indian Bend Wash aquifer so that the City of Scottsdale would once again be able to use the groundwater.

The companies that agreed to clean up were Salt River Project and three high-tech companies-Smith-Kline Beecham, Siemens Corporation and Motorola. Motorola, the largest company, is suspected of being the chief polluter. If you had to say who is Number One, Motorola is Number One in terms of pollution impact,” says Sandra Eberhardt of the pollution prevention division of the state DEQ, a regulator who once worked on the North Indian Bend Wash Superfund site. My impression is that Motorola is the biggest contributor of pollution there,” she says.

The pollution was discovered in 1981, when officials first tested Scottsdale and Phoenix drinking water for TCE. The readings were so extensive and high that by 1982, North Indian Bend Wash was named by EPA as a Superfund site.

During that first testing, TCE at concentrations four times higher than the allowable federal-health limit was discovered in the huge City of Phoenix drinking-water reservoir at 64th Street and Thomas Road.

Seven drinking-water wells in Indian Bend Wash were hot-one contained TCE that was 50 times higher than the safety limit. Scottsdale estimated that TCE pollution exceeding health standards has existed in this underground source of drinking water for 10 to 30 years,” according to a 1982 Water Quality Assurance Fund report.

Because of the way water was distributed by the City of Phoenix, some of the contaminated water may have poured from the taps of people like the McNamaras, who lived near Motorola’s 52nd Street plant.

EPA was distressed about the health consequences of TCE in the Indian Bend Wash drinking water. The presence of organic groundwater contamination in the Indian Bend area poses a public health concern,” EPA wrote in a Superfund report in 1983. The contaminants in the water, including TCE, are suspected carcinogens at low levels,” EPA said.

Short-term exposure to TCE has been reported to produce liver and kidney damage and central-nervous- system disturbances in mammals, including humans,” the report said.

In 1981 when the TCE was first discovered, the most contaminated wells were immediately shut off. Others were blended with clean water to meet federal drinking-water standards.

The City of Scottsdale was hit hardest by the TCE pollution. Prior to the discovery of the contamination, Scottsdale knew it would have a water shortage in the future. Because state law says no city can expand without sufficient water reserves, expansion-minded Scottsdale purchased the Planet Ranch near the California border, with the hopes of shipping the water, via pipeline, back to the city.

With the discovery of TCE in its local groundwater supply, Scottsdale’s water supply was severely curtailed. So far taxpayers have paid for much of the damage to Scottsdale’s water supply. In fact, Scottsdale taxpayers alone have paid almost as much for the consequences of the groundwater pollution as Motorola has.

Taxpayers paid $350,000 in the cost of pump-and-treat equipment to strip TCE from a key Scottsdale drinking-water well. (Motorola and the other companies say they are negotiating a payback of some of the expense.)

Scottsdale taxpayers paid the City of Phoenix $24.9 million for an alternative surface drinking-water supply from the City of Phoenix.

In an effort to get money for immediate cleanup, Scottsdale’s Senator Robert Usdane lobbied the statehouse to pass the Water Quality Revolving Assurance Fund (WQARF), a fund of taxpayer dollars set aside to clean up groundwater contamination. This year, taxpayers have pumped $15.5 million into the fund.

Motorola has kicked in almost $30 million toward the cleanup.

IRONICALLY, CITY, STATE and federal officials entrusted with protecting Indian Bend Wash contributed to the pollution, too.

They did not force the immediate closure of several wells that were acting as conduits of TCE from the upper level of the three-tiered Indian Bend Wash aquifer to the lower, purest levelÏthe level from which drinking water was drawn.

Ten years ago, Salt River Project workers checking on an irrigation well across the street from Motorola’s Government Electronics complex on Indian Bend Wash heard the unmistakable sound of water cascading from the upper level of the aquifer down to its lower levels.

When state officials investigated, they discovered that because the well was poorly constructed, it was pouring water polluted with high concentrations of TCE down into the lower level of the aquifer.

Several other wells-including one owned by the City of Scottsdale-in Indian Bend Wash were also cascading polluted water into the drinking-water aquifer. The cascading water has contaminated an appreciable volume of the regional aquifer near the well,” SRP admitted.

Motorola blasted the EPA and state health department for not taking action. Why were the wells allowed to cascade? The cascading wells will continue to contribute to the spread of contamination in the Indian Bend Wash area until such wells are plugged,” Motorola wrote EPA. It appears that cascading wells will be allowed to contribute to the problem for at least two more years. To allow such delay in correcting a known source of contamination seems unreasonable and is clearly not in the best interest of the public.”

Five years after the cascading well was discovered by SRP workers, the polluting well was plugged.

When asked to explain the delay, Kevin Wantajja, SRP’s supervisor of its wastewater division, says We didn’t know there was cascading water and when we found out about it, we measured it and immediately took steps.”

There are approximately 20 wells, both public and private, in Indian Bend Wash that have the potential to cascade, according to EPA.

Only two of those wells are cascading today, and they belong to the City of Scottsdale.

EPA has decided to let the wells cascade indefinitely. The federal government says most of the polluted water has cascaded down to the lower level of the aquifer anyway.

It all makes a new generation of regulators regret that EPA didn’t order the wells plugged sooner. If the wells had been plugged ten years ago, the aquifer might not have been so polluted.

Now, the cascading wells are part of the cleanup plan. EPA chooses not to clean the TCE out of the upper layer of the aquifer.

Instead, the agency continues to allow the TCE to pour down to the middle level and the lower level-the once pure drinking-water source.

With this approach, only the middle and lower levels will have to be cleaned.
This is a cheaper and easier method of cleanup, says Dan Opalski, EPA manager for the Indian Bend Wash site. It would be more expensive to clean up all three layers, says Opalski. And it is unlikely the companies would want to pay for it.

Although it would seem obvious when you’ve got a large viable party [Motorola] that it would make sense to build a cadillac system to clean up the site, we, from a perspective of the law, have to approach every site so that we could pay for it,” says Opalski. Otherwise, the companies might try to tie things up in court.”

IF MOTOROLA WANTS to tie things up in court, it’s fine with area residents who are suing the company and considering suing their city governments, too.

A class-action lawsuit in Maricopa County Superior Court may soon add Scottsdale and Phoenix to a list of several defendants-including Motorola. We’re considering adding the cities of Scottsdale and Phoenix because they sold contaminated drinking water to their residents,” says Phoenix lawyer David Dannacher. The lawsuit presently names Motorola and several other large companies suspected of contaminating Valley groundwater with TCE.

Plaintiffs alleging they were exposed to the water are asking for unspecified damages as well as lifetime medical surveillance and counseling.

This enrages Scottsdale Mayor Herb Drinkwater. To our knowledge, there is no respectable scientific connection between low-level exposures to TCE… and human illness, much less cancer,” the mayor wrote Phoenix attorney Mark Harrison, an associate of Dannacher’s.

The mayor accused Harrison and other lawyers of causing unnecessary alarm.”
For its part, Motorola has asked that substantial portions of the lawsuits be dismissed. We are absolutely certain,” says Motorola spokesman Lawrence Moore, that the company and its employees have taken every precaution to protect the health and welfare of employees here and people living in the communities surrounding our plants.”

part 4 of 4

THE AWFUL TRUTH AS L.A. EXPLODED, THE M… v5-06-92