Published in the Asbury Park Press
By JEAN MIKLE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
TOMS RIVER -- Ocean County's public health coordinator asked that a carbon filtration system be installed on a well in United Water Toms River's parkway well field 25 years ago, the chairwoman of the Citizens Action Committee on Childhood Cancer said last night.
"This is very upsetting information," citizens committee Chairwoman Linda L. Gillick said.
Gerald P. Nicholls, director of the state Department of Environmental Protection's Division of Environmental Safety, Health and Analytical Programs, said documents recently received by his agency indicate now-retired county Public Health Coordinator Charles I. Kauffman requested that filtration systems be placed on Well 26 at the parkway well field in the summer and early fall of 1974.
Kauffman made the request because volatile organic contaminants had been found in private wells in the area, Nicholls said. Nicholls said DEP did a study of the well field in response to Kauffman's request, but found no evidence of volatile organic contaminants above state drinking water standards.
Carbon filtration was never installed on the well, which was then part of the Toms River Water Co. system. United Water later purchased the company.
Nicholls said monitoring wells were installed in the area of the parkway well field and tested for a period of time in 1974 until sometime in 1975. The testing of monitoring wells was then discontinued, he said.
It was in the summer of 1974 that volatile organic contaminants, including trichloroethylene, a suspected carcinogen, began to show up in private wells in Dover's Pleasant Plains section, near the parkway well field.
The contaminants were traced to drums of Union Carbide Corp.'s chemical waste an independent trucker had deposited on Reich Farm, off Route 9. Eventually the farm site was placed on the federal Superfund list of contaminated waste sites.
The state condemned 148 private wells and ordered public water lines installed in the Pleasant Plains area.
By the late 1980s, a plume of ground water contamination from Reich Farm had migrated one mile south -- into United Water's parkway well field. Well 26 and nearby Well 28 were found to be contaminated with volatile organic contaminants and an air stripping system was installed to remove them.
In November 1996, small amounts of styrene acrylonitrile trimer, a chemical compound related to plastics production, were found in the two wells. A carbon filtration system was installed to remove the trimer, but water from the two wells has been pumped to waste for the majority of time since then, and is rarely used in the drinking water system.
Carbon filters are being installed on two other shallow wells in the parkway field, nos. 29 and 22.
Nicholls said officials do not think contaminants from Reich Farm could have reached the well field by 1974.
But the revelation that a filtration system was requested more than 20 years ago is likely to increase the skepticism of some parents, who have stated publicly that they do not think state and federal health and environmental agencies did enough to protect Dover residents from ingesting tainted water in the past.
The citizens committee has asked that filtration systems be installed on two other shallow parkway wells, and that air strippers be placed on the four shallow wells that do not have them.
Health officials have said two of the wells -- nos. 24 and 44 -- have shown no history of contamination, but this does not reassure some residents.
"I have very little confidence in the EPA, DEP and all these guys," said Dover resident John Cardini, whose daughter Jessica, 10, is in remission after battling leukemia.
Source: Asbury Park Press
Published: May 11, 1999
|
