After more than 14 years of litigation, the City of Lindsay announced Monday that it won $9.5 million in damages to treat a water well contaminated with perchlorate, a fertilizer ingredient sold to citrus growers in the 1940s that trickled into the groundwater supply. … In 2010, the city filed a lawsuit against SQM North America, a subsidiary of large Chilean mining company Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile, which sold the fertilizer to American farmers starting in the 1920s. Perchlorate is a toxic chemical that interferes with the body’s uptake of iodine and is particularly harmful to children. It is banned from drinking water in California except at very low levels.