The water beneath a large swath of Phoenix isn’t fit to drink.

A plume of toxic chemicals has tainted the groundwater for decades, and it's now at the center of a bitter fight over how the aquifer should be cleaned up and what should happen to the water in the future.

At issue are questions about why the cleanup has proceeded slowly, which government agency should lead the effort, and whether the polluted water, which isn't flowing to household faucets, is releasing chemicals into the air at levels that may pose health risks for people in the area.

For years, industries from dry cleaners to metal factories dumped harmful chemicals around their plants and left a legacy of water polluted with solvents that can cause cancer, damage immune and nervous systems, and lead to birth defects. These chemicals have gradually moved through the aquifer, tainting a source of groundwater that, if cleaned up, could someday help the fast-growing city meet its water needs.

The plume of contaminated groundwater, called the West Van Buren site, has been on Arizona’s priority list of toxic cleanup sites since 1987. It's part of a larger polluted zone that stretches across 15 miles of central and west Phoenix, and state officials are seeking to have portions of the site added to a federal cleanup effort.

Progress on the cleanup has been delayed by disputes over how much the alleged polluters will have to pay, which entities should be doing the work, and which approach should be used in treating the water. The disagreements involve companies blamed for the contamination, state and federal agencies, multiple water districts, private consultants that have banked on the cleanup, and dozens of lawyers.

This struggle over cleaning up the toxic groundwater has also become a fight over accusations of powerful players hindering solutions, and over control of the water and the ability to sell it.

On one side are lawyers for the Roosevelt Irrigation District, who say the airborne chemicals may pose health risks in one of Phoenix’s poorest areas. On the other side are city water officials and others who disagree with the district and argue the fight is really about a “water grab” — an attempt to take control of a groundwater source once it’s cleaned up so that it can be sold for a profit to water-hungry cities west of Phoenix.

While the battle has dragged on for years in court and in letters between lawyers, most people who live in the West Van Buren area have been unaware of the toxins in the groundwater beneath their neighborhoods.

The irrigation district runs about 20 agricultural wells that pump out contaminated water and send it flowing through canals to irrigate cotton and alfalfa fields in the West Valley. But residents don’t drink the water because their homes are supplied by the city, which gets water from other sources.

Tests have shown that, as the water gushes into the canal system, it releases measurable amounts of trichloroethylene (TCE) and tetrachloroethylene (PCE) into the air. These volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, quickly become airborne once the water is flowing through the canals.

The latest measurements of the chemicals released into the air were collected during a study in 2011. Since then, no additional air samples have been taken in the area to track the levels of the chemicals in the air.

The carcinogen TCE is linked to kidney cancer, liver cancer and lymphoma, and studies have found harmful effects on the immune system and the nervous system, and risks of heart defects in developing fetuses. The federal government classifies PCE as a likely carcinogen, and studies show it can harm the nervous system, vision, the liver, kidneys and immune system.

State environmental regulators say the chemicals are being released into the air at such low levels they pose no significant risk to public health, and officials with the federal Environmental Protection Agency agree.

But Rolf Halden, a professor at Arizona State University who specializes in assessing and cleaning up toxic sites, said the huge plume of VOCs beneath Phoenix, including both state and federal Superfund sites, warrants more attention.

“This is certainly one problem that needs to be addressed and has been around for a while,” said Halden, who leads the ASU Biodesign Institute’s Center for Environmental Health Engineering.

He said it’s important to make sure no one suffers hazardous exposures to chemicals, and he’d like to see the cleanup accelerated.

“The agencies are moving very, very slowly," Halden said. "And they are hampered by a lack of funds. It’s regrettable.”

WATER CLEANUP DELAYED FOR YEARS

Environmental consultants who work with Roosevelt Irrigation District argue there are important reasons to clean the water as soon as possible after years of delays. They say the lack of funding and attention to the problem is leading to an environmental injustice for people who don’t know that polluted water is pouring out of wells in their neighborhoods.

“This is the only contaminated site in Arizona that actually has emissions into the environment, that actually is exposing people — the community, the neighbors,” said Joel Peterson, an engineer who works for Synergy Environmental, a firm that runs small water-treatment plants for Roosevelt Irrigation District.

“We don’t really know what chronic effects may be accumulating in this population, but we are definitely concerned that no one is paying attention to this as an issue,” Peterson said. He said it’s frustrating to see more progress at other contaminated sites in Arizona, while this site remains neglected.

Roosevelt Irrigation District has taken initial steps on a plan that involves pumping and treating groundwater. The district got started in 2011 by signing contracts with a private water-treatment specialist, who invested to build treatment plants at four contaminated wells.

That investor and other consultants got involved believing that a settlement with alleged polluters was coming, and that they had a viable cleanup approach that would also work as a business.

But the remedy that the consultants and the irrigation district have pursued, along with another competing proposal, have been held up amid disagreements. And Peterson’s firm is now on the verge of running out of money to keep the treatment plants running.

As the dispute persists, Arizona officials recently turned to the EPA asking that the agency take over responsibility and designate parts of the area as a federal Superfund site.

State regulators haven’t received a response from the EPA, and steps toward a cleanup have stalled.

The West Van Buren site is part of one of the biggest zones of polluted groundwater in the country. It borders the large federal Superfund site around the Motorola 52nd Street Plant, where cleanup efforts have been underway for three decades.

Much of the contaminated plume, which falls under state jurisdiction, spreads out in a vast finger-shaped area from Seventh Avenue in the east to 75th Avenue in the west, extending from West McDowell Road on the north to West Buckeye Road on the south.

Peterson said the failure to clean up the polluted water seems to be by design.

“Largely, we believe, it’s because the people who are responsible for this pollution are very influential, very powerful,” Peterson added. “They have pretty much put the brakes on this over the last 30 years. They don’t want anything done here because it’s going to come back to them to pay for these actions.”

Other water suppliers that oppose Roosevelt’s plans, including the city of Phoenix and Salt River Project, argue that the irrigation district will soon no longer have a right to continue pumping the water. They accuse the irrigation district and its lawyers and consultants of using the environmental cleanup as part of a scheme to secure lucrative water deals.

Peterson acknowledges that the irrigation district intends to sell the water to cities once it’s treated, and when it does, his firm and the law firm Gallagher & Kennedy will share in the proceeds.

“We do hope eventually to sell this water, but RID has always hoped to sell this water,” Peterson said. “It’s not really the primary driver in this project.”

The main goal, he said, is to clean up the groundwater. And Peterson said he’s concerned that while pollutants are floating in the air, “no one has done anything to protect the public and to clean up RID’s damaged resource, which is their water.”

How chemicals got into groundwater

After World War II, Phoenix saw a manufacturing boom, with new factories from metal-plating facilities to electronics manufacturing plants to dry-cleaning businesses. The factories expanded in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, and many of them used industrial solvents in large quantities.

Workers applied the chemicals to clean and degrease metal parts, among other things. The companies pouredwaste into unlined ponds, leach fields and dry wells.

The toxic solvents soaked down into the soil and seeped into the groundwater.

In the early 1980s, as water testing methods improved, people began finding groundwater contaminated with solvents across the country.

In the Phoenix area, the electronics manufacturer Motorola in 1982 reported a release of chemicals from an underground storage tank at its semiconductor plant at 52nd Street and McDowell Road. The federal government listed the contaminated plume as a Superfund site in 1989, and the Environmental Protection Agency has been overseeing the cleanup, which includes two water-treatment systems that remove TCE and PCE.

By the mid-1980s, toxic chemicals were also discovered in groundwater in a list of other areas in Phoenix and Tucson.

The problem of tainted aquifers was so widespread that, in 1987, it helped prompt state leaders to create the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. The same legislation that set up the agency launched the state’s Superfund program, called the Water Quality Assurance Revolving Fund, or WQARF, to prioritize work on cleaning up sites polluted with hazardous substances.

By then, contaminated groundwater had already been found in the West Van Buren area.

State officials designated the West Van Buren area as a WQARF site in 1987 and put it on their registry list in 1998.

Since then, the plan has been to clean up groundwater and soil tainted with TCE, PCE and other toxic chemicals such as 1,1-dichloroethane.

As state officials tested the water, they traced the hazardous pollutants to companies that had factories within the 24-square-mile site.

Some of the property owners with partial responsibility for the contamination reached settlements with the state. In 2001, Union Pacific Railroad Co. and Maricopa County settled for $450,000.

In 2002, Reynolds Metals Co./Alcoa Corp., which had dug up and removed contaminated soil from its property, settled with the state for nearly $2 million.

Records released by the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality show the state has received about $4.9 million from eight companies in settlements related to the West Van Buren site.

Since 1999, records show the state has spent about $7.3 million on cleanup efforts at the site, though spending has dwindled during the past several years. The agency says the work has involved removing 13,000 pounds of VOCs and 3,100 tons of soil, as well as treating about 118 million gallons of groundwater.

A 2012 “Remedial Investigation Report,” which consultants prepared for the Department of Environmental Quality, described the extent of the problem and listed nine companies and government agencies as "contaminant sources."

They included the former Reynolds Metals aluminum plant; the Van Waters & Rogers chemical distribution facility, owned by Univar; the Dolphin Inc. metal casting facility; the commercial dry cleaner American Linen Supply Co.; the ChemResearch Co. Inc. metal-plating facility; the Air Liquide America Specialty Gases LLC plant; a property owned by Maricopa County Materials Management where the company Southwest Solvents once did business; the former industrial dry cleaner Prudential Overall Supply; and electrical facilities owned by the federal Energy Department.

Tests of the groundwater in the West Van Buren site have shown some wells contain TCE and PCE at levels above safe drinking water standards.

But more than three decades after the problem was discovered, environmental regulators still haven’t settled on financial responsibility for the cleanup among “potentially responsible parties.”

“ADEQ has not yet completed allocation, which is when responsible parties and their contribution to the contamination are determined,” said Erin Jordan, the agency’s public information officer. She said ADEQ Director Misael Cabrera wouldn’t talk to The Arizona Republic about the issue, citing possible litigation. Jordan instead responded to questions by email.

Some of the companies and agencies that have been identified as "potentially responsible parties" belong to an association called the West Van Buren Working Group. In 2014, lawyers for the group submitted a letter asking ADEQ to investigate about 3,800 other potentially responsible parties in the area. They included more than 1,000 auto repair shops, as well as hundreds of metalworking and metal-plating businesses, dry cleaners, electronics manufacturers, chemical facilities and other businesses.

The lawyers said in their letter that they were passing along “significant new information” for state officials to follow up on.

Five years later, the state still hasn’t determined the individual contributions of the many parties, illustrating the complexity of establishing liability and proving how much each one contributed to the problem.

Under Arizona law, ADEQ can hold a polluter liable only for its proportional contribution, not for the total cost. The state is supposed to be responsible for the remainder, for which liability can’t be determined. Under federal law for Superfund sites, in contrast, any "potentially responsible party" may be liable for the entire cleanup.

In response to the accusations by Roosevelt’s lawyers and consultants that state officials are failing to uphold their responsibilities, Jordan pointed to ADEQ’s request that the EPA consider expanding the Motorola 52nd Street Superfund site to include the West Van Buren site.

“One of the strongest actions a state can take is to ask the EPA to designate a Superfund site,” Jordan said.

Meanwhile, the two camps — Roosevelt Irrigation District and its consultants and lawyers on one side, and the companies and public agencies that belong to the West Van Buren Working Group on the other — haven’t agreed on a solution. Jordan said that presents an obstacle to further progress.

“That disagreement is based, in part, on water rights and is in litigation,” she said, referring to a federal court case pitting Roosevelt Irrigation District against Salt River Project.

Jordan said the agency is looking to clean up the groundwater at this site and others around the state. She stressed that people in the area are supplied with safe drinking water from the city's water supply, not from the tainted groundwater.

That’s an important distinction, because chemicals in drinking water have long been a major problem in parts of Arizona and across the country.

In the 1980s, TCE and other chemicals were found in the groundwater on the south side of Tucson near its airport, and a series by then-Arizona Daily Star reporter Jane Kay revealed a spate of cancer cases in the area. In the early 1990s, Hughes Aircraft Co. reached an $84.5 million settlement with about 1,600 Tucson residents who sued because of TCE-tainted water.

In Phoenix in the late 1980s, health officials confirmed the existence of a cancer cluster after documenting a high rate of children dying from leukemia in the Maryvale area from the 1970s through the mid-'80s. Residents blamed industries for polluting the water with TCE and the city for sending tainted water to their taps.

Those and other cases of tainted groundwater led to lawsuits and in some areas prompted officials to shut down wells and start cleanup efforts.

Starting in the early 1990s, according to a state-commissioned report, wells in the city of Tolleson that were deemed too close to the contaminated groundwater in the West Van Buren area were shut down.

Toxic chemicals are widely used

Both TCE and PCE have been widely used in a range of industries.

In addition to cleaning grease from metal parts, TCE has been an ingredient in making other chemicals such as refrigerants. Dry cleaners have long applied the chemical to remove stains from fabric. Companies have also used it as a solvent for oil, wax and tar, and in making adhesives, paint removers and rug-cleaning fluids.

PCE has been used as a solvent, metal degreaser and dry-cleaning chemical, and as an ingredient in products such as wood cleaners and paint removers.

Environmental advocates say TCE-contaminated drinking water remains a problem in places across the United States. While the EPA’s legal limit for the chemical in drinking water has long been 5 parts per billion, environmental groups point to recent research that suggests the chemical may be harmful at lower levels.

The Environmental Working Group has criticized a decision by the Trump administration to retreat from an earlier proposal to ban certain uses of TCE. The group analyzed 2015 water testing data from utilities nationwide and found that TCE was detected in 321 water systems in 36 states, affecting the drinking water of 14 million people.

The U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) in July released a toxicological profile for TCE, citing research that has found risks for children and developing fetuses.

The agency said in its report that some studies indicate TCE "may cause developmental effects such as spontaneous abortion, congenital heart defects, central nervous system defects, and small birth weight."

At the West Van Buren site, TCE and PCE are contained underground in the aquifer until the water comes out of wells and the chemicals are released into the air.

ADEQ says the levels are so low that there isn’t a health concern. Jordan, the ADEQ spokesperson, said data gathered by Roosevelt as well as the Arizona Department of Health Services “show no significant risk to human health when used for irrigation.”

Salt River Project also recently asked Steven C. Curry, a University of Arizona College of Medicine professor, to assess any health concerns. Curry is chief of the college’s division of toxicology and also leads the toxicology department at Banner-University Medical Center Phoenix.

Curry reviewed previous assessments and visited Roosevelt’s wells, pump stations and canals. In an April letter to SRP reporting his conclusions, Curry wrote that he considered activities such as walking, running, bicycling, sitting at bus stops or working in businesses near the pump stations and canals.

“I find nothing to suggest there is any public health concern,” Curry wrote. He said his conclusion relates to carcinogenic effects as well as other potential health effects.

The groundwater in this part of Phoenix flows gradually westward. The contaminated water moves underground beneath mobile home parks, supermarkets, schools and auto shops along West Van Buren Street.

ADEQ says the water table is relatively deep in the area, from 94 feet to 144 feet underground.

“Data indicate the plume is contained and is not spreading due to existing irrigation pumping by RID,” Jordan said. In other words, the wells are helping to prevent the plume from spreading further by sucking in polluted water.

Jordan said cleanup efforts have already addressed known sources of contamination within the state-administered site.

“The last remaining known significant contributor to the Site is upstream contamination from the Motorola 52nd Street Superfund Site,” Jordan said. And that, she said, was partly why the state asked the EPA to designate parts of the West Van Buren area as a Superfund site.

debate over health risks from exposure

TCE and PCE are colorless liquids. If they’re in the air at high enough concentrations, both have sweet-smelling odors.

The compounds can remain in groundwater for a long time. When the water is pumped out of the ground, the chemicals quickly evaporate and driftthrough the air.

“It is a public health issue right now. This community is being denied the protections every other community in the state of Arizona is given,” said attorney David Kimball of the law firm Gallagher & Kennedy, who represents Roosevelt Irrigation District. “This is the only place in Arizona where you have direct exposure that’s not being addressed by ADEQ or EPA in some fashion.”

Kimball said polluters and the state are both legally obligated to pay for remediation but are avoiding those obligations. He said state officials’ failure to pursue polluters and provide funding is outrageous.

“Someone’s telling them not to exercise your enforcement authority to go after parties,” Kimball said. “Someone’s telling them to back off, and allow others to see if they can’t scuttle this project.”

The law firm’s environmental consultants have used Roosevelt’s pumping data and state water testing information to calculate estimates of the quantity of VOCs that have either evaporated from the wells or been removed through treatment between 2004 and 2015. They estimated that during those years, an average of nearly 3,000 pounds of VOCs were released into the environment each year.

For comparison, ADEQ cited an estimate from the Maricopa Association of Governments that cars and small trucks in the Phoenix area release approximately 100,000 pounds of VOCs into the air per day. VOCs are also emitted from other sources, including gas stations and dry cleaners.

Even though the chemical releases in the West Van Buren area are relatively small, the environmental consultants say the pollution is still cause for concern for the people who live next to the wells and canal.

“It blows around and people are breathing it,” Peterson said.

His firm conducted a public health assessment in 2011 for Gallagher & Kennedy and looked at the levels of three chemicals in air samples: TCE, PCE and 1,1-dichloroethene. The study said the results “suggest that there is not an imminent (acute) risk to the public from the contamination being released from the RID water systems.”

The study also found, however, that many air samples taken in the area “exceed the screening-level guidelines for chronic exposure to TCE and PCE.” It said the long-term effects are uncertain and the unchecked releases into the environment aren’t in line with ADEQ policy.

The Arizona Department of Health Services prepared a report in 2015 evaluating whether there are health risks. It concluded that, based on the available data, “exposure to chemicals in groundwater and canal water … is not expected to harm people’s health.”

Jordan, of ADEQ, pointed to those findings and said the health agency used “realistic exposure scenarios, including inhalation, and found no significant risk to human health.”

She said the 2011 assessment by Synergy Environmental contains the most recent air sampling data for the area.

“Based on an analysis of the data, a person would have to be breathing the air directly at the wellhead for extended periods of time for there to be any risk of exposure,” Jordan said. She said the highest level of chemical vapor detailed in the report, inside a canal access area, was one-30th of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s limit for workers during an eight-hour day.

Roosevelt’s environmental consultants argued that the state health assessment misrepresented and underestimated the risks. In a letter to ADEQ, Peterson called the 2015 report “very limited and incomplete” and said it fails to consider the long-term health effects of inhaling the contaminants.

The federal government has drinking water standards for TCE and PCE, and regulates the chemicals as “hazardous air pollutants” under the Clean Air Act.

Since Synergy Environmental’s 2011 study, regulators haven’t done more air sampling in the area. Jordan said ADEQ hasn’t done so “given that even biased-high locations did not yield a significant risk to human health.”

The agency said more than 4,500 groundwater samples have been collected in the West Van Buren area over the past four decades, including a site-wide water-testing effort in 2013 and 2014, and sampling of some wells in 2015 and 2017.

The state plans to again sample water throughout the site at the request of the city of Phoenix.

Roosevelt’s legal team and consultants say environmental regulators should be doing much more.

Dennis Shirley, Peterson’s partner at Synergy Environmental, said it’s flabbergasting that after a decade of trying to put in place a solution, “we’ve hardly gotten anywhere.”

“The community has just unfortunately been exposed in a way that no other site in Arizona has,” Shirley said. “For most of a lifetime, for everybody that’s lived here.”

Over the years, some people have come in contact with the polluted water. In 2010, journalists with KPHO-TV captured footage of adults and children bathing and splashing in an open section of the canal.

Soon after that, Roosevelt Irrigation District responded by putting in a pipeline so there was no longer an open canal at that location. The polluted water now flows mostly underground until it emerges in an open canal near 79th Avenue.

Health studies in other parts of the country suggest living near a Superfund site before it’s cleaned up increases the odds of birth defects. A 2011 research paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research examined the health of infants from 1989 to 2003 within 5 kilometers of Superfund sites in five states — Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Researchers compared births that occurred before and after cleanups. They examined the births to mothers living within 2,000 meters of each site, as well as those living farther away within a 5-kilometer radius.

They found that proximity to a Superfund site before a cleanup was associated with a 20% to 25% higher risk of birth defects.

Water district presses for a cleanup

If you walk down parts of West Van Buren Street, you’ll see chain-link fences with signs reading “High Voltage” and “Keep Out.” Inside the enclosures are pumps that hum as they draw out groundwater.

The water gushes out of pipes into concrete basins and sloshes down into culverts that run beside the street. The water emerges sparkly clear in an open canal, flowing westward to irrigate farm fields, parks and lawns.

The wells belong to Roosevelt Irrigation District, which was founded in the 1920s. The district was created to help alleviate a problem of waterlogged lands in the low-lying area near the Salt River, and it signed a series of contracts with Salt River Project in which it agreed to pump groundwater.

For decades, the district has been delivering water through its canals to irrigate about 38,000 acres in Avondale, Goodyear and Buckeye.

Removing the chemicals from the water has been a long-term goal for the district, and could eventually allow it to sell drinking water to cities at a higher price.

“I think that’s the natural progression for most irrigation districts is to be moving water from farmers and then ultimately to start moving water for municipalities or other folks who want to buy wholesale water,” said Donovan Neese, the district’s superintendent.

Roosevelt has a board elected by the area’s landowners. The district has been pressing to treat the water for more than a decade.

In 2009, the district submitted comments to ADEQ calling for action to address the contamination affecting its wells.

Roosevelt’s officials met with representatives of the “potentially responsible parties” and submitted proposals to the state.

The district quickly ran into opposition from the companies and agencies in the West Van Buren Working Group, which disagreed with Roosevelt’s approach. But Roosevelt moved ahead with its proposals for treating the water.

The district also went to court in an effort to force those responsible to pay, filing a lawsuit in 2010 against a list of companies and government agencies. The 100 defendants that were named in the suit included government agencies, such as the city of Phoenix, Maricopa County, the U.S. Energy Department and Defense Department, and a wide variety of companies, including Honeywell International, Nucor Corp., Cooper Industries, Holsum Bakery and others.

(The original defendants also included Phoenix Newspapers, Inc.,now a subsidiary of Gannett Co., which owns The Arizona Republic. The irrigation district said in its complaint that the company was a “potentially responsible party and potential source of the hazardous substances in RID’s wells.” The district cited records indicating that chemicals including TCE and PCE “are present in the soil” at The Republic’s former building at 120 E. Van Buren St.)

Roosevelt later amended the suit to focus on about 25 defendants, eliminating the rest. The defendants challenged Roosevelt’s claims in court, arguing the district could recover only the costs it had actually incurred.

Meanwhile, the law firm Gallagher & Kennedy hired environmental consultants to plan the water-treatment effort.

Roosevelt also began partnering with Jim Madole, a friend and former colleague of Peterson’s, who offered to help finance water-treatment systems to carry out the district’s plan.

Madole, a chemical engineer and water-treatment specialist who lives in Denison, Texas, formed the company Spinnaker Holdings LLC for the project and submitted the only bid in response to Roosevelt’s request. He agreed in 2011 to design and build four water-treatment systems for Roosevelt, with the expectation that the project was a solid investment.

Madole, his parents and his then-wife took money out of their retirement accounts to invest. They were able to take advantage of tax incentives and together invested several million dollars.

Madole said he expected to recoup the funds and earn a profit once the district concluded its litigation, and he also thought the project would have a positive effect for the community.

“I believed in my heart that within six months we would be paid back at a very modest margin of profit,” Madole said. “I got into this with people that I knew and trusted, and I got into it to do what I thought was a good thing.”

With the funds from Spinnaker Holdings, small treatment plants were built in 2011 and 2012 at four of the most contaminated wells. Around that time, Roosevelt’s team circulated flyers in the community.

“Initially, four wells are being treated in order to demonstrate the systems’ effectiveness as a solution for treating groundwater,” the flyer said. It explained that chemicals would be removed, and that the district was suing more than 60 parties to recover the costs.

Madole expected the companies involved in the litigation would view the treatment approach as an economical solution and would settle.

“I thought that the corporations would see the brilliance in somebody seizing this and putting it all together, and taking all the bureaucracy out of it,” Madole said, “and doing the right thing for the West Valley and doing away with this source of contamination for the poorer neighborhoods.”

While the lawyers sparred, the state-led process of considering how to clean up the site continued.

Roosevelt eventually proposed putting treatment systems on eight wells.

Phoenix and more than a dozen other entities opposed Roosevelt’s approach. They objected to how Roosevelt was essentially overtreating water that it used for irrigation, and they questioned the underlying motives.

In a 2012 letter to ADEQ, Phoenix, Salt River Project and a dozen companies called Roosevelt’s latest proposal “a thinly disguised attempt to gain advantage” in its litigation against other parties.

“RID continues to seek approval for the installation of unnecessary treatment systems in an effort to create a supply of remediated water that it can claim as its own, and to make the defendants in the litigation pay for upgrades to its antiquated irrigation system,” the group said in the letter, which was signed by Philip McNeely, then the city's manager of environmental programs. They said "there is no current risk" and that Roosevelt's water supply "is suitable for its current irrigation use."

After a series of meetings, letters and modifications of Roosevelt’s proposals, ADEQ in 2013 approved an initial work plan submitted by the district.

Roosevelt Irrigation District presented its “remedial action plan” in June 2015, proposing what it called a “less aggressive” groundwater remedy that involved installing treatment systems at two additional wells (for a total of six), drilling one replacement well, and blending water at six other wells so they would meet drinking water standards.

The proposal, which was prepared by Synergy Environmental, called the approach “reasonable, necessary, cost-effective.” It said the plan would yield usable drinking water, protect other wells on the periphery of the zone, and reduce “the risk of hazardous VOCs being transferred to surrounding communities.”

Some of the companies and agencies in the West Van Buren Working Group took issue with the proposal and six months later submitted an alternative plan. The entities that participated in preparing the plan included the city of Phoenix, Dolphin Inc., Freescale Semiconductor, Honeywell International, Prudential Overall Supply, Salt River Project and Univar USA.

They proposed continuing to monitor the groundwater and putting in a new well near 35th Avenue. They said that well would “provide a proactive approach through additional control of plume migration in the highest concentration area” until the mid-2020s.

The Working Group said there were “numerous issues and errors” in Roosevelt’s proposal. It said that “there is no current risk to public health that needs to be addressed by RID’s ‘remedy’” and that “the water produced from the RID wells is fit for its current use without treatment.”

After receiving the two proposals, Cabrera of ADEQ asked the groups to agree on a single path forward. In a 2016 letter, he asked both sides to withdraw their proposed plans and said the agency was “suspending new work on the West Van Buren Area WQARF Site.”

Cabrera has met repeatedly with both sides, but a resolution hasn’t been reached.

A federal judge ruled in 2016 that Roosevelt couldn’t recover some costs — those incurred by Gallagher & Kennedy, Synergy Environmental, and Spinnaker Holdings — under the federal Superfund law. Salt River Project said in an emailed statement that after the ruling, “the defendants agreed to settle the case with RID for a nominal amount to avoid further costly litigation, with the defendants not admitting any liability.”

A list of 20 companies and agencies agreed to pay Roosevelt more than $1 million.

But the settlement didn’t end the litigation. The law firm Gallagher & Kennedy sued separately in 2016 to recoup its costs, as well as costs incurred by Synergy Environmental and Madole’s company.

The law firm initially listed 31 defendants. It later sought to expedite the case by eliminating most of the defendants. Now Gallagher & Kennedy is suing just three parties — the city of Phoenix, Maricopa County and Prudential Overall Supply — saying regulators have identified their properties as contributing sources to the contamination.

While the fight continues in federal District Court, Madole is hoping to get back the money he sank into the water-treatment plants. The original plan, he said, was that Roosevelt would pay him and take ownership. But he still owns the treatment systems.

“I can’t believe the way this has gone,” Madole said. “I have spent every dollar I have to this end, and now I just try to support my quest to see it to the end and get the money back.”

Madole is 61. His ex-wife is 68. And his parents are 82. Madole said his former manager, who is 70, also contributed to the investment.

“What I hope for is that I can put an end to this madness and I can get exactly what I owe, to those who I have guaranteed it, out of this and be free of it,” Madole said. “I’m just trying to get paid and get on with my life.”

‘The biggest water grab this state’s ever seen’

Cynthia Campbell, Phoenix’s water resources management adviser, said the city supports a cleanup but not the way Roosevelt Irrigation District proposes to do it.

She said that Phoenix’s involvement stems from contracts with companies and other entities that have been tenants on city property at the airport, and that the city is not legally responsible.

She argued that for Roosevelt’s legal team, the real driving motivation is the chance to eventually profit by piping drinking water to the West Valley and selling it.

She pointed out that Gallagher & Kennedy has an agreement with Roosevelt to not charge the full cost for its services and instead eventually get a share of the proceeds from selling drinking water.

“It’s a water grab. And it’s a frightening one,” Campbell said. “You have a law firm that has set themselves up to become a water provider on the back of the city of Phoenix, by stealing water from the city of Phoenix, and they’re using an environmental contamination to do it.”

Normally, cities in central Arizona have rights to pump groundwater within city limits and are required under the state’s groundwater law to demonstrate that they have assured water reserves, or have acquired long-term storage credits by paying for surface water and recharging aquifers.

But in the case of an environmental cleanup, the law allows for water to be pumped and used without the same regulatory requirements. To pump the water, all that’s needed is a permit from the Department of Water Resources, called a poor-quality groundwater withdrawal permit.

In this case, Roosevelt has been trying to get that permit, but the Department of Water Resources hasn’t granted it.

“There is an intent here to basically profiteer off of an environmental cleanup by using that loophole,” Campbell said. She accused Roosevelt and its team of trying to exploit the loophole and “drive a truck through it, to do the biggest water grab this state’s ever seen — $1 billion plus.”

She pointed to a document that came out in the litigation (and was released by ADEQ) showing the value of the water over 30 years was estimated at more than $1.9 billion.

Roosevelt’s consultants rebuffed the claims that they're involved in a scheme aimed at securing windfall profits.

Peterson said in an email that Roosevelt has been selling water for nearly a century. He said Roosevelt officials have long planned to shift from agricultural water customers to cities as expanding development replaces farmlands.

The district’s approach in seeking funds was to form a public-private partnership with Gallagher & Kennedy, Synergy Environmental (originally a different firm, Montgomery & Associates) and Spinnaker Holdings to begin to address the problem.

“RID assigned some of the planned proceeds from the sale of remediated water to repay the private partners for our capital investments and support services,” Peterson said. After 10 years of work, "it is not unreasonable to expect to recoup some if not all of our expenditures of time and monies invested.”

Shirley said Synergy Environmental provided legal and technical services to Roosevelt at no cost, expecting to recover expenses under the federal Superfund law.

The potential for selling drinking water would be years in the future because the district would need financing to build a pipeline. Shirley said because there are no contracts yet, it’s unclear how much the water sales might generate.

“This is hardly a get-rich scheme,” Shirley said, “and thus far it has been the opposite.”

Water-treatment systems have been built elsewhere in Arizona to remove TCE and other pollutants that were dumped decades ago by industries.

Tucson Water operates a plant at the Tucson Airport Remediation Project, which since 1994 has been pumping and treating groundwater to take out TCE. Scottsdale also has a plant called the Central Groundwater Treatment Facility, which removes TCE.

Those plants and others elsewhere in Arizona use a process called “air stripping,” which removes VOCs by injecting air into the water, combined with systems that prevent the chemicals from being released into the air.

Campbell said the water in the West Van Buren site needs to be cleaned but Roosevelt’s approach is “overkill” because it involves pumping water from the ground, treating it to drinking water standards, and pouring it into a canal where it mixes with treated sewage effluent and flows to fields of alfalfa and cotton.

“I think the only reason they’re doing that is to justify the fact that they want to take it and use it,” Campbell said. “You’re stealing a water resource, and you’re doing it in the name of environmental cleanup.”

Alongside the fight over the cleanup, Roosevelt Irrigation District is also in a separate court battle with Salt River Project over its ability to pump groundwater in the coming years. The dispute revolves around contracts that Roosevelt and a predecessor irrigation company signed with the Salt River Valley Water Users' Association starting in 1921.

That first contract granted the right to install an unlimited number of wells and required the irrigation district to pump at least 70,000 acre-feet of groundwater per year for 99 years, increasing to at least 85,000 acre-feet per year under a later contract.

SRP has argued that the contract expires in October 2020, and that Roosevelt will no longer have a legal right to pump water and transport it out of the area.

Roosevelt has argued the 1921 contract obligated it to pump the wells for a minimum of 99 years but did not suggestthe district must stop pumping after that time.

The case that will decide the contract dispute and determine whether Roosevelt will be able to keep pumping is pending in federal District Court.

Dave Roberts, SRP’s associate general manager of water resources, said his agency’s position relates to its establishment in the early 1900s by the U.S. Reclamation Service, the predecessor to the Bureau of Reclamation. The Salt River Federal Reclamation Project was intended to use water from the Salt and Verde rivers and groundwater for lands within its area.

“Once the 1921 contact expires, no legal basis will exist for RID to withdraw water" and transport it out of the area, Roberts said in an email. “Groundwater beneath the Project must be used on Project lands.”

That stance aligns with Phoenix’s position.

Campbell said the city will support a “reasonable remedy” to clean up the water.

“It’s our drought resources. So, at some point in time, we’re going to need it,” she said. “The water belongs to Phoenix.”

For now, Phoenix relies largely on surface water from the Salt River and the Colorado River. But the Colorado River is overallocated and the flow has shrunk during a 19-year run of mostly dry years, a pattern that scientists say is being exacerbated by the effects of global warming.

The city has plans to pump more groundwater in the future, and cleaning up contaminated sites would add to the usable supply. But Campbell said the argument by Roosevelt’s legal team that people who live near the wells are at risk due to airborne chemicals doesn’t hold up.

“The levels of toxicity are not high enough to cause any risk to anyone,” Campbell said. “We’ve looked at this closely. We see no risk to public health right now.”

‘The system has failed us’

Next to an auto shop, beige metal tanks stand in a fenced lot near a whirring pump. Water flows through a series of pipes.

Peterson has worked on maintaining the treatment plant for years, but the funds are running out and he’s concerned that soon he may have to shut down the system.

“We’re out of money, and no one’s coming forward,” Peterson said. “It’s going to be a sad day when I have to go out there and flip the treatment off and have the volatile organic compounds spilling back into the neighborhoods again.”

He said his firm, together with Roosevelt and its lawyers, has tried hard to get the issue addressed working through the proper channels with state, federal and city officials.

“We're just out of patience with them,” Peterson said. “The system has failed us.”

He accused Arizona environmental regulators of failing to meet their responsibility to clean up the chemicals and protect the public, saying they appear to have bowed to pressure from powerful interests.

Peterson pointed out that state funding for the site dropped over the past several years. He said officials have “just washed their hands of the entire thing because it was too much of a political hot potato for them.”

About a dozen of Roosevelt’s wells have levels of chemicals at concentrations exceeding safe drinking water standards, Shirley said.

“If we were trying to do it all, we’d have to put wellhead systems on every well that exceeded a drinking water standard,” Shirley said, standing beside the treatment plant. “Our approach has been to say, if we put treatment on the six most highly contaminated wells, we’ll take care of about 70 percent of the problem.”

Setting up two additional well treatment systems as Roosevelt proposes would cost about $5 million more, he said, plus maintenance costs.

Shirley said ADEQ should have prioritized funding for the site and pursued polluters to get them to pay for the cleanup. He said the fact that the agency hasn’t done that represents an environmental injustice for the low-income, largely Hispanic community.

Shirley previously worked as Motorola’s project manager for a Scottsdale groundwater cleanup site, where he said the government responded much more effectively.

“What I saw from Scottsdale when I came to work on this project was, they’re doing everything they can over here in this neighborhood, which is more affluent and more white,” Shirley said. But at the West Van Buren site, he said, “nothing is being done, by anybody, or has been done, to really address issues.”

At the North Indian Bend Wash Superfund site, in contrast, the EPA required water treatment to remove chemicals and prevent their release into the air after an outcry from people in Scottsdale and Paradise Valley, who didn’t want to be exposed to air emissions, Shirley said. The EPA put in place similar remedies at other sites in Goodyear and Tucson.

Shirley said he’s concerned that state and federal regulators are treating the West Van Buren site differently from other contaminated sites.

State officials have identified West Van Buren as Arizona’s costliest toxic site. In a 2014 report, the Department of Environmental Quality estimated the total future cleanup costs at more than $139 million.

Yet public records also show that during the past five years, the state has spent less on the West Van Buren site than on other contaminated sites in Phoenix.

Jordan said cleanup costs are based largely “on the size of a plume, not on exposure risk.” And the state prioritizes sites, she said, based on the risks of exposure. If people were drinking the water, she said, it would be treated, no matter the cost.

Residents unaware of the issue

Some environmental activists have tried to raise awareness about the contaminated groundwater.

Scott Meyer, vice president of the nonprofit group Don’t Waste Arizona, said he’s concerned about the environmental justice aspect of the issue and believes people in the area aren’t being treated fairly. If it were a predominantly white or richer neighborhood, he said, the problem likely wouldn’t have gone unaddressed for so long.

Meyer said he was appalled by what he called the “illegal delay” of the cleanup remedy. Other areas with similar problems get the needed money to filter out these toxic chemicals, he said, but not the West Van Buren site.

Although the levels of chemicals in the air may not violate current standards, he said, those standards should be lowered over time based on the latest research on TCE, which points to risks even at minute levels. Meyer said he doesn’t understand why the state and feds will take a gamble on an “acceptable risk” in any area with this problem.

Meyer has written to the state to demand action. In a November 2016 letter to Hunter Moore, the natural resources policy adviser to Gov. Doug Ducey, he pointed to previous toxic air monitoring studies in the Phoenix area showing “levels of TCE and other air toxics at high enough levels to be of great concern.”

Meyer’s group has been following the issue since the early 1990s. In 2014, he recalled, ADEQ held an evening meeting on the issue at the agency’s building, but few people showed up.

He said he thinks residents may be reluctant to get involved, skeptical of government and also busy with their daily lives.

In interviews on the street, more than a dozen people who live near the wells told The Republic that they didn’t know the contaminated groundwater site existed.

Rodrigo Vallejo lives just down the street from one of the wells, off of Van Buren and 28th Avenue.

He said living in the neighborhood comes with costs and risks: Prostitution, drugs and disagreeable neighbors have long made it a tough area. Vallejo said he and his neighbors also have concerns about air pollution, but there’s not much they can do about the many sources that are fouling the air.

“All of that, and now this doesn’t surprise me at all,” Vallejo said, adding that he and others feel helpless and don’t bother complaining because they don’t think it would do any good.

One of Vallejo’s neighbors across the street, Lorenzo Ortinez, said hearing about the issue doesn’t surprise him. It’s just another problem on a long list of things he feels incapable of affecting. He said these types of problems just tend to go unchecked here.

“I mean, look at this place,” Ortinez said, pointing to houses with flaking paint and rusted chain-link fences.

“I’m looking out for myself and my family,” he said. “If it isn’t bills, we’re not worried.”

Arizona pushes for feds to take over

The plume of toxic groundwater in the West Van Buren area borders two other contaminated sites: the state-administered West Osborn Complex site to the north and the federal Superfund site around the old Motorola 52nd Street factory property.

Last year, ADEQ’s Cabrera wrote to federal officials on the state’s behalf, asking the EPA to consider expanding the western boundary of the Motorola Superfund site to include parts of the West Van Buren site.

Cabrera said his request was based on data showing the plume of TCE and PCE had migrated from the Motorola site into the state's site. He asked the EPA to take over only the parts of the West Van Buren site where evidence points to contamination connected to the Motorola Superfund site.

Separately, Kimball of Gallagher & Kennedy wrote in March to Cabrera and Attorney General Mark Brnovich, asking for meetings to discuss the state’s responsibilities “to address the direct and ongoing public health and environmental risks.”

Kimball also wrote to the EPA, pressing for action and saying Roosevelt’s remediation plan “has not been fully implemented due to lack of funding and continued delay by the State of Arizona, EPA” and the failure of polluters to fund the plan.

Sixteen Democratic members of the Arizona Legislature weighed in on May 16 with a letter to the EPA, supporting the request to expand the western boundary of the federal Superfund site. They said the state agency presented “compelling data” showing that a significant part of the West Van Buren plume is an extension of the Superfund site’s plume.

They noted that the EPA has already twice expanded the boundaries of the Superfund site to take in portions of state-administered sites.

The legislators said expanding the site “simplifies the task of identifying potentially responsible parties” and developing a cleanup plan. Bringing parts of the West Van Buren site under the federal program, they said, “would also be more protective of human health and the environment.”

“A comparison of the histories of these two sites shows that the bisection of this contamination has been unproductive at best and potentially harmful at worst," the lawmakers wrote. "While decades of remedial action have occurred at the (Motorola) site, decades of work at the West Van Buren site has produced very few results and no site-wide remedy.”

Enrique Manzanilla, director of the Superfund division in the EPA’s San Francisco office, responded to the legislators in a July 1 letter. He said the agency is considering whether to expand the federal Superfund site to include the West Van Buren area, or whether to list it as its own Superfund site.

Manzanilla said the agency is studying the "extent of releases from the Motorola facility." He added that EPA officials have already heard from some of the "potentially responsible parties" and anticipate that expanding the Superfund site "would be vigorously opposed."

Manzanilla wrote in an earlier response to Kimball that if the EPA agrees to address the West Van Buren site under the Superfund program, it would “would seek input from the stakeholders to determine the appropriate remedy and who should implement it.”

Those other stakeholders would include the companies and agencies in the West Van Buren Working Group, Salt River Project, the city, and the public.

Margot Perez-Sullivan, a spokesperson at EPA’s San Francisco office, said in an email that the most contaminated areas of the federal Superfund site “are being contained, captured, and treated” by the two treatment systems in the central and eastern portions of the plume. She said the contamination levels are lower in the western portion of the Superfund site, and have been the focus of cleanup efforts. She said the agency plans to determine whether contaminated water from that western portion of the federal site has crossed into the West Van Buren area.

In his letter, Manzanilla said despite Kimball’s claims that immediate action is necessary to protect people’s health at the West Van Buren site, EPA officials have examined the data and don't see a need "to address immediate risks to human health and the environment.”

He said assessments including the 2015 state health report have found “that the contamination is not currently impacting anyone at levels that would warrant" such a response.

If the EPA agrees to take on the site under the Superfund program, Manzanilla said, the agency would then consider how to address the release of chemicals into the air.

Help us investigate: If you have a tip, please contact Ian James at ian.james@arizonarepublic.com or Andrew Nicla at andrew.nicla@azcentral.com.

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Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and at OurGrandAZ on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.