Published in the Asbury Park Press
By JEAN MIKLE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
TOMS RIVER -- United Water Toms River's parkway well field should not be shut down unless scientists can find a safer alternative source of drinking water for the community, a cancer activist said yesterday.
"Unless I know where that water is coming from, unless I know that it will be tested to the same lengths that this water has, I'm not about to say, 'Close down the parkway well field,' " said Linda L. Gillick, who chairs the Citizens Action Committee on Childhood Cancer Cluster.
Gillick, who is also executive director of Ocean of Love, a support group for families of children with cancer, was responding to statements made earlier this week by Dover Township Committeemen John F. Russo Jr. and John M. Furey, who called for the well field to be shut down.
The two committeemen said residents do not trust the quality of water from the well field, located off Dugan Lane near the Garden State Parkway, because of a long history of groundwater contamination at the site.
A spokesman for Sen. Andrew R. Ciesla, R-Ocean, said this week that Ciesla has been meeting with United Water officials to discuss alternative sources of supply that would allow the company to shut down the well field.
Gillick said any decision about the parkway well field will have to be made by hydrogeologists, water modelers and other scientific health specialists.
"It's going to be a decision based on scientifically safe standards beyond what the state and federal government mandate," Gillick said.
There are eight wells in the parkway field, and they supply about 30 percent of the drinking water produced by United. The water company serves about 95,000 people in Dover and Berkeley townships and South Toms River.
Some shallow wells in the parkway field have been contaminated by a plume of groundwater pollution from the Reich Farm Superfund site, located one mile north of the well field.
An independent trucker dumped thousands of drums of chemical waste from Union Carbide's Bound Brook plant at Reich Farm, a former chicken farm, in the early '70s.
Wells 26 and 28 capture and treat the pollution plume, and water from those wells is pumped back onto the ground after being run through air stripping and carbon filtration systems to remove contaminants.
The cleaned water from the two wells meets all state and federal drinking water standards, but many residents have continued to raise concerns about its safety.
Water from wells 26 and 28 has not been used in the drinking water system since the summer of 1997, but hot, dry weather during the first week in May led United's general manager to warn that the two wells might have to be turned on if customers' water usage did not drop.
The arrival of cooler weather dropped water usage and water from the two wells was not placed in the drinking water system.
Wells 22 and 29, also located in the parkway field, were outfitted with carbon filtration systems in 1999, after small amounts of pollutants were discovered in well 29.
Published on May 12, 2001
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