The gasoline additive MTBE helped Phoenix reduce smog, but the rest of the state may pay the price.
The colorless, flammable liquid smells like turpentine, moves rapidly through soil and lasts a long time when it reaches water. It has been found in groundwater in at least 54 Arizona communities.
They range from big cities like Tucson, which closed an old drinking-water well after detecting traces of MTBE, to small towns like Arivaca that didn't need MTBE in the first place. Those rural areas got MTBE anyway because small communities and big cities shared the same fuel-distribution systems.
Arizona is moving to phase out MTBE, or methyl tertiary butyl ether, before pollution spreads from groundwater to drinking-water systems.
It's too soon to say whether the state has acted soon enough to avoid the problems of neighboring California, where cities including Santa Monica found their well fields polluted, said Paul C. John-son, an Arizona State University professor in environmental engineering. An ASU study last year noted MTBE beneath 54 Arizona communities.
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California may have had more problems because it sells more fuel. But it also typically tests water more aggressively than Arizona, said Bill Walker, a vice president of the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group.
By 1999, high levels of MTBE turned up in groundwater in Lake Havasu City, Mesa and Phoenix, which closed four wells.
The state found no MTBE when it sampled groundwater in the Tucson basin then. But in January 2000, Tucson Water found a low level of MTBE in a drinking-water well in Jacobs Park, on Fairview Avenue north of Miracle Mile. The tests showed a barely detectable 0.6 parts per billion parts of water.
Later tests came up clean until October 2001, when a trace of MTBE popped up again. The city closed the well, primarily because it was producing too much sand, said Tucson Water spokesman Mitch Basefsky.
The Flowing Wells Irrigation District found a barely detectable trace of MTBE in July 2002, the first year the EPA required utilities to test for it, but it hasn't shown up again, said assistant superintendent Jim Cavanaugh.
"We were relieved that we didn't find anything," Cavanaugh said. "That doesn't mean that we may not find some at a later date."
He said the state's water utilities generally oppose efforts in Congress to relieve the petroleum industry of liability from future claims of MTBE-related damage.
To search the Arizona Daily Star's online database of leaking tanks for documented cases in your area, go to www.azstarnet.com/sn/leakingtanks
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