Published in the Asbury Park Press
BY JEAN MIKLE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
Expert discusses Dover Twp. site
TOMS RIVER — A network of groundwater monitoring wells intended to keep track of contaminants from the Reich Farm Superfund site would pick up any future discharge of pollutants from the property, a groundwater modeling expert said Monday night.
"The monitoring wells would pick up contaminants no matter which part of Reich Farm it came from," said Jon F. Sykes, a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
Sykes, who has extensive experience modeling groundwater flow and pollution movement, helped design the monitoring system that was installed on and around the Reich Farm site in the 1990s.
Steve Spayd of the state Department of Environmental Protection said he is still concerned that any future pollution release from Reich Farm might go undetected if the contaminants were at a greater depth than the 20-foot-deep monitoring wells.
"The aquifer is 100 feet thick, and the monitoring wells are 20 feet," Spayd said. The DEP will review the data provided by Sykes to see if the department agrees with Sykes' conclusions.
Responding to a question asked at a January citizens committee meeting, Sykes created a computer model that illustrated what would happen if pollutants were to leach from the farm site. The model showed that one of a series of 26 monitoring wells on the Reich Farm property, located between the farm and United Water Toms River's Parkway well field, would pick up a future pollutant release from the farm before it reached the parkway wells.
Reich Farm off Route 9 in Dover Township's Pleasant Plains section is the source of a plume of groundwater pollution that migrated off the farm property. Researchers have estimated the plume reached the Parkway well field by 1982, but the pollutants were not discovered until 1987.
The well field is about a mile south of the farm, off Dugan Lane. It provides about 20 percent of United's drinking water supply.
Independent trucker Nicholas Fernicola has admitted that in 1971, he dumped more than 4,000 drums of chemical waste from Union Carbide's Bound Brook plant in the rear of the farm property.
Carbide, now merged with Dow Chemical, has paid for monitoring of the well field and the cleanup at Reich Farm, which was completed in the late 1990s. Soil at the farm site was excavated and treated with an on-site thermal desorption unit, in which the dirt was heated to high temperatures to vaporize any contaminants.
There is no known contamination in the property's eastern section.
Carbide also paid for carbon filtration systems to be placed on several wells in the parkway field after Wells 26 and 28 were found to contain small amounts of a trimer in 1996.
The trimer, a previously unknown chemical compound, was discovered in 1996 during extensive water testing as part of the investigation into elevated levels of some types of childhood cancer in Dover Township. When cleanup work was done at the farm in the mid-1990s, no one knew the trimer existed.
The review of the cleanup at Reich was initiated because the Reichs, who still own the former poultry farm, had asked if the property could be removed from the Superfund list so they could regain some use of the land.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency found trimer levels of up to 1.4 parts per million in the upper 7 1/2 feet of soil, and levels of up to 14 ppm in soil from 7 1/2 to 29 feet down, during testing completed in 2004.
Carbide also did sampling at the site, and found higher levels of the trimer, a semivolatile compound that tends to adhere to soil. Carbide found levels up to 4.4 ppm in the upper 7 1/2 feet of soil, and up to 29 ppm in the lower depths.
The discovery of some trimer in the soil means the property will remain on the Superfund list until an ongoing toxicity study of the trimer is completed. Results of the study are not expected for four to five more years.
Carbide officials said Monday they will continue to monitor the groundwater in and around Reich Farm on a regular basis, even though the EPA would permit the company to reduce monitoring. Some of the monitoring wells are tested only once a year, while others are tested more frequently.
Published in the Asbury Park Press 03/8/06
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