Honeywell will pay for cleaning up groundwater in San Fernando Valley

A San Fernando Valley Superfund site will be cleaned up and help boost Los Angeles’ local water supply.

After more than a decade of negotiations, the Environmental Protection Agency announced Tuesday that industrial manufacturing conglomerate Honeywell International Inc. has agreed to pay to clean up contaminated underground aquifers and build water treatment plants in North Hollywood.

The effort is expected to cost Honeywell around $57 million, plus $8 million to $12 million per year to maintain and operate the water treatment facilities, according to Honeywell.

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The company expects to start delivering water from the treatment plants by late 2027. The EPA will oversee the cleanup.

The background

Starting in the 1940s, the EPA said Honeywell’s aerospace and chemical manufacturing predecessors leaked dangerous chemicals into San Fernando Valley groundwater. Those chemicals include cancer-causing trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene.

The agreement adds to ongoing efforts to clean up Cold War-era contamination of the city of L.A.’s largest groundwater basin, which sits under the San Fernando Valley.

A separate cleanup agreement was struck with Lockheed Martin in 2018 and the L.A. Department of Water and Power is close to finishing a $600-million project to clean the rest of the San Fernando Valley’s polluted groundwater so it’s safe enough to drink.

The orange outline shows the contaminated portion of the underground aquifer in the San Fernando Valley, which is LA city's largest groundwater basin.

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US Environmental Protection Agency

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LAist

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What’s next

The cleanups are part of L.A.’s goals to rely less on imported water and more on local supplies in the face of increasingly severe swings between dry and wet years. Those more extreme swings are primarily being driven by human society’s burning of fossil fuels.

All together, officials say cleaning up the groundwater basin will more than double L.A.'s local water supply during average wet years and help the city store more water for use during dry years.

Currently, only about 10% of L.A.’s drinking water is sourced from local underground basins. The vast majority is piped in from the eastern and northern Sierra Nevada and the overstretched Colorado River.

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