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The city of Glendale, hard by the weary old Los Angeles River, is suddenly at the fore in crusading for safer water standards. As a major suburb just a handful of miles northeast of the nation’s no. 2 metropolis, Los Angeles, Glendale is making activists sit up and take notice, following an announcement that it will radically reduce the amount of chromium 6 in water that gets pumped into city homes.

Chromium 6, of course, has a certain "Hollywood" status, being the subject of the dirty little secret that led to a $333 million damage settlement against Pacific Gas and Electric as glorified in the film Erin Brockovich.

What’s happening today is, the city is going ahead with plans to pump water with low levels of chromium 6 to homes under an engineering design that will redirect more contaminated supplies for non-potable use. On May 29 the city council approved a $91,000 contract with Stetson Engineers Inc. to accomplish the design.

According top Don Froelich, city water services administrator, the city will blend water from five wells with low chromium 6 levels with imported water from the Sacramento Delta. The upshot will reduce the local contamination level to a remarkable 1 part per billion (ppb).

Assigning values to chromium ppb is a problematical numbers game. Essentially, chromium takes on two separate structures in water, c-3, found naturally in food, and c-6, which scientists believe is carcinogenic when inhaled. The federal standard for chromium, including 3 and 6, is 100 ppb. That level won’t due for California, however, which has set it at 50 ppb—and is considering slashing that to 2.5 ppb.

Back to the "Brockovich" case stemming from Hinkley in the San Joaquin Valley, state officials jumped in to cut through some of the confusion. "Conventional wisdom was that there was more chromium 3 and very little chromium 6 in the groundwater," said David Spath of the state Department of Health Services. "We found the opposite, which heightened the issue."

Glendale, aware of the high c-6 found in local water sources, has been discharging treated groundwater from its Flower Street treatment plant into the LA River, while water from two high-chromium c-6 wells will now be piped to the Grayson Power Plant to cooling towers and on to the municipality’s recycled waters system to irrigate parks.

Thus, said Froelich, the city is minimizing the amount of water that has to be discharged into the Los Angeles River. That, he said, makes the Environmental Protection Agency "happy."

The blending-water scheme should work well, said City Councilman Dave Weaver, "as long as we measure the level of chromium 6 when it reaches the home tap. Water is becoming scarcer and scarcer. We can’t just afford to dump it into the ocean."

The new treatment facilities are expected to be built by the end of the year and cost between $600,000 and $800,000.