This was on Agua Dulce Town Council letterhead

Aqua Dulce Town Council submission to
California Regional Water Quality

Revised 04/02/97 09:45 AM

March 27, 1997

This report was approved by the Aqua Dulce Town Council for submission to California Regional Water Quality, Los Angeles Basin.

This program is offered as both mitigation and continual monitoring to insure and protect the ground water in Agua Dulce from all potential contaminates including Nitrates. It will be used to trace sources of polluting land fills, illegal dumping and other contaminates to the ground water of Agua Dulce.

Summary: The residents of Agua Dulce will develop a voluntary groundwater monitoring program. Such a program would be used to determine safety of the ground water and actual changes in nitrate and other contaminates.

The University of Riverside's February, 1996, report indicates that there are a number of possible sources of the nitrates (rocks, septic tanks, animal wastes and fertilizers) in the well water of Agua Dulce. A good start is a statement made by Ken Schmidt in a 2/26/96 letter.

"There has been no routine ground water quality monitoring program in most of Agua Dulce."

Agua Dulce has private wells as its only water supply. Normally, private wells are rarely tested as neither L A County nor the State have control over private wells. You can think of Agua Dulce (and similar communities) as a public water system without pipes and water quality monitoring. Individual private wells share the same water pools. Someone could dump toxic waste in Agua Dulce and you would never know about it unless it reached a "public" well or made a number of residents sick.

To provide protection of water, a representative number of wells need to be tested. This would be voluntary as neither the State nor L A County have control of private wells. We should have 100 to 200 owners volunteer to have their wells tested four times a year.

In addition, the 20+ public water wells in Agua Dulce would be tracked as they are currently being tested by L A County.

The well tests will be identified by the latitude and longitude of the well. This would allow advanced computer techniques and if water depth can be obtained, a three dimensional computer simulation of contaminate flow could be plotted.

We propose:

1. Tests done by state licensed labs. 10% of the volunteer wells would be given the full panel tests and the rest nitrates only. The cost to each volunteer will be about $30 per quarter ($120) year.

2. Outreach program with educational information on wellhead (Ground water) protection for the community, with the hazards of ground water pollution by direct mail, news releases to the local papers, and on the Internet.

3. Institute the already approved program of low cost animal waste removal.

We also wish the board would:

1. Encourage the County to enforce the laws that are already on the books such as preventing the dumping raw sewage directly onto the ground by illegal trailers with no septic tanks.

2. Help with starting the clean up of the existing pig farm dump.

3. Help change the county code to stop Feed lots and sludge and manure spreading uses without a CUP and impact study.

4. Require waste discharge permits on all commercial uses. The monitoring wells should be the private wells which are tested under the vcolunteer testing program.

Water quality would be protected, as this community would have one of the few private monitoring programs for an area served by private wells, which would insure top quality water.

When sufficient data is obtained, a Hydrologist can be hired to interpret the data in conjunction with the community. The board can then take actions based on the data.

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