Date: Sept. 12, 2003

Regional water board pays tribute
to Santa Clara Valley Water District

SALINAS - The Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board today presented a water quality award to the Santa Clara Valley Water District for its response to the discovery last January of perchlorate contamination in the southern portion of the county.

The award was presented to water district Director Rosemary Kamei during a Regional Water Quality Control Board meeting in Salinas.

The award notes the district's "exceptional efforts in responding to perchlorate contamination in Southern Santa Clara County" and for "development and implementation of a comprehensive stream maintenance program."

While assisting the regional board with an investigation into perchlorate contamination at a former flare-manufacturing site in Morgan Hill, water district sampling of nearby wells uncovered information led the district to suspect that the contamination had migrated off-site, threatening hundreds of private drinking water wells.

Over the past seven months, additional well-sampling has confirmed the presence of a nine-mile-long plume of contamination in the groundwater basin, stretching from south Morgan Hill to the northern city limits of Gilroy. Some 400 wells have shown detections of perchlorate at or above 4 parts per billion, an interim limit for perchlorate in drinking water until state and federal standards are adopted.

For the next seven months, the water district provided free testing of more than 1,000 private wells in South County and provided bottled water delivery to residents at no cost to them.

The district's stream maintenance program - also cited by the Regional Board in its award to the district -- is an innovative departure from traditional creek-maintenance programs.

Rather than solicit annual permits from several regulatory agencies, the district secured permits for 10 years in exchange for creating and preserving new habitat for fish, birds, amphibians and other riparian wildlife.

The stream maintenance program - believed to the first of its kind in the state, if not the nation - allows the district to remove, on average, 80,000 cubic yards of sediment, manage vegetation on about 4,000 acres and repair miles of eroding stream banks in the county each year.

In exchange, the district is preserving as much as 1,080 acres for stream and watershed protection, creating 30 acres of tidal wetlands and 14 acres of freshwater wetlands.

The Santa Clara Valley Water District manages Santa Clara County's wholesale drinking water resources, coordinates flood protection for its 1.7 million residents and provides stewardship for the county's 10 reservoirs and more than 700 miles of streams.