Coalition for the Future of Greater Chino Valley

There is nothing magic about water and gravity. Whether the airport area is in an officially designated 100 year flood plain or not, water will flow downhill  carrying whatever pollutants it picks up.  The only surface water destination in the whole Chino area is the low point, which is the Verde headwaters. 
 
If there are areas of ponding that do not surface drain, the water will either evaporate, or soak into the alluvium or cracks in the underlying volcanics.  All ground water in the Chino area drains downhill to the Verde headwaters also. There could be some who will say it takes a long   time for water that soaks into the ground to exit at the Verde springs, and that could be right or wrong depending on the transmissivity of the alluvium or volcanics, but there should be no doubt that it all will eventually exit at the springs until/unless the level in the aquifer water table drops below the Verde springs. If the mining of the Big and Little Chino aquifers drops the water   table that low, it means the Verde headwaters will stop flowing, except for some very small flow that originates from the undisturbed Big Black Mesa.
 
Pollutants like jet fuel or the glycols used for deicing in the winter, probably are poorly adsorbed on the surfaces of alluvial particles, so the pollutants will create a “plume” of contamination in the aquifer that will travel with the groundwater flow and eventually exit at the springs.  The concentration of the pollutants will be diluted throughout the path the groundwater flows and will  be much less at the exit point than the original concentration when it entered the groundwater, but it will continue for a very very long time.  It could take a hundred years or more before the concentration dropped below detectable levels.
 
The EPA has mountains of data on all kinds of hazardous liquids plumes at thousands of toxic waste sites and even mundane gas station storage tank leaks. It is incredibly expensive and complicated to try to clean up  such plumes. Once you pollute an aquifer it is 1000 times more expensive to try to contain the plume than it would have been to prevent the leak in the first place. Cleaning up the groundwater and alluvium contamination at the Hanford, Washington nuclear plant and arsenal will cost upwards of $100 billion and take more than 20 years. 

– Ken Janacek