Wash on list for perchlorate study

Friday, March 31, 2000 | 10:37 a.m.

The Department of Defense will spend $50,000 on a study to track how the rocket fuel booster perchlorate is traveling through ground water and into the Las Vegas Wash.

The wash is the first of five national sites chosen for a perchlorate survey, biologist Ronald Porter said Thursday at a meeting of the Lake Mead Water Quality Forum, a group of federal, state and local water experts who meet regularly to assess environmental issues associated with the lake.

The Defense Department received $250,000 -- or $50,000 per site -- this year to examine the surface water, soils, sediments, plants, trees and fish for perchlorate, said Porter of Brooks Air Force Base.

Since 1998, when water officials announced finding ammonium perchlorate -- which was manufactured by two companies in Henderson -- in Las Vegas Wash and Lake Mead, scientists have been trying to discover whether the chemical ends up in living things, said Cornell Long, serving as an interagency leader on the perchlorate issue.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Defense Department do not have enough information on how perchlorate moves from water into the soils, sediments, plants and animals in places such as the wash, Long said. The EPA and the Defense Department are working with state environmental departments to do the research.

Scientists are concerned that if perchlorate moves through the food chain, people could be exposed to more of the chemical.

Doctors prescribed perchlorate in trace amounts during the 1950s to help people control overactive thyroid glands.

The Las Vegas Wash is a 15-mile-long stretch of channel carved by floodwaters, 150 million gallons a day of treated sewage and Las Vegas Valley ground water that streams into Lake Mead, the valley's major drinking water source.

The rocket fuel booster was used in NASA shuttles and weapons and has turned up in wells across the nation.

There is no federal or state limits for how much perchlorate is too much in drinking sources, but California has placed a limit of 18 parts per billion on perchlorate in drinking water.

Lake Mead's water registered 14 parts per billion for perchlorate in January and 11 parts per billion in March, Southern Nevada Water Authority scientist Kay Brothers said.

Although perchlorate manufacturer Kerr-McGee Chemical Co. of Henderson is removing 80 percent of the salt from a stream entering the wash, researchers believe the chemical settled into sediments and surrounding soils and is still washed into the lake, Brothers said.

Scientists do not expect a dramatic drop in the perchlorate until the end of the year.

Cooperating to clean up the wash are the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection, the Southern Nevada Water Authority, Kerr-McGee and American Pacific, owner of the former Pacific Engineering & Production Co. (PEPCON), which, after a 1988 explosion and fire destroyed its plant in Henderson, moved to Cedar City, Utah.