Orange County Water District works to clean polluted groundwater from decades of manufacturing
Russell Detwiler, UC Irvine associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, said many sites of similar magnitude on the Superfund list still end up taking decades. “That’s the cost of these things, it is easy to contaminate an aquifer, it’s very difficult to get it back to its pristine state,” Detwiler said. Detwiler was brought in to provide expert testimony by a law firm of a defendant in the South Basin lawsuit. He said he didn’t end up being deposed or providing any on-the-record testimony.