EPA hosts open house

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hosted an open house last month to meet with citizens concerning the progress of the remedial investigation into the Franklin Street Groundwater Contamination in Spencer.

The site was added to the national priorities list in May of 2018, but work on the site, which starts with the remedial investigation, did not start until the fall of 2023.

The contaminant tetrachloroethene (PCE) was first detected by the BBP Water Corp. in 2011 and has been completely removed from the treated water since 2017. Even at the initial detection the contaminant's levels were 1.2 parts per billion (ppb), which is under the maximum contaminant level set by the EPA at 5 ppb.

PCE is also sometimes referred to as PERC.

According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), PCE "is a manufactured chemical that is widely used for dry cleaning of fabrics and for metal-degreasing," and "it appears as a clear colorless volatile liquid."

PCE is both a known and probable carcinogen, and it can harm the nervous system.

PCE is also a volatile organic compound, meaning that it easily can go from water to vapor. It is also more dense than water, meaning it sinks.

PCE can contaminate drinking water, indoor air quality through soil vapor intrusion, and groundwater.

"We're the ones that found the problem in the first place because we do annual water testing," BBP CEO Todd Gardner previously told The Owen News.

"Even though the finished water was under the guidelines set for the chemical [PCE] the BBP Water Corporation Board of Directors decided to be proactive and in 2014 designs for treating and removal of all PERC from the finished water was being engineered," BBP's 2022 annual water quality report explains.

In addition to a new well being added, BBP added air strippers and reverse osmosis filtering units.

PCE has not been found in BBP's finished water since the air strippers were turned on at the water treatment plant in May of 2017, completely removing it from the finished water.

Dion Novak, Remedial Project Manager for the Franklin Street Groundwater site, shared information about the site's progress.

"Over the past couple of years, the bulk of the field work sampling has been done," he said. "Because of the (federal government) shutdown, I'm still waiting on a lot of the results because our labs shut down, obviously as well."

The shutdown also impacted plans to have a fall open house.

"We were supposed to be here in October, and we couldn't because of the shutdown," he said.

There is still some additional work to be done in 2026, as they continue to monitor 25 to 30 wells in town to test the groundwater. They take samples quarterly and must have eight samples.

"We may do some additional source characterization, which is sampling where sources of contamination might be. We've already done some of that, like at the Pride Center and around McDonald's," Novak said. This testing has been done because they are known locations of former dry cleaning businesses, which the chemical is commonly used in.

He also said they plan to do another meeting, presenting what they know so far in March.

"We may do some additional source characterization to help us put the puzzle together," he said.

He added that there will be a report of the indoor air sampling as well, though the EPA cannot share who had their property sampled and what the individual results were for each property.

They have tested approximately 100 properties.

They will release a summary of the information without the personal information, in addition to the soil and groundwater information, which is releasable.

"I will be putting that out just to kind of give people a picture of what we're finding here in town, and then my contractor will start working on the overall investigation report, which is a huge report that summarizes everything that's been done," he said. "A big component of that is what we call a risk assessment. We take the sampling information and then we run it through and determine if there's excess cancer risk based off of exposure to the contamination that we're finding in soil or groundwater or whatever."

Novak reiterated that nobody is directly drinking the groundwater (untreated) in town, which limits a lot of the exposure.

"This risk assessment will be done on all of that sampling data that we've collected including the indoor air sampling that we've done, and then we'll determine if there's what we call unacceptable excess future cancer risk," he said. "We're overly conservative. We assume you're eating dirt from a contaminated area every day for 25 years. What is your excess chance of getting cancer over and above your normal chance, which unfortunately is pretty high these days."

He stressed the extra caution taken as to the need for remediation taken by the EPA.

"That is the reason we have to collect all that information so we can make a statistically, conservative based decision. We want to be overly protective. We want to overly design something to provide more protection just to be on the safe side. That's how we run the Superfund program," he said.

Novak anticipates that the final investigation report will be complete in 2027 because of the need for additional groundwater sampling.

"The good thing is we're not finding as much contamination in this town as I originally thought we would, based on the type of site that we have here, which is old dry cleaners. I think the good thing is that the dry cleaners are old enough that if there was contamination coming from them, it's long gone," he said. "So 40 or 50 years ago, I mean, there would probably be more contamination there than there is now."

Novak also addressed how the Franklin Street Groundwater site compares to other similar sites.

"For an old dry cleaner site like this, and there's a lot of these across the state. There's a lot of these across the country," he said. "You will typically have what we call a plume, an area that's contaminated within this whole area. That's normally what we find. We're not finding that. We're finding blobs of contamination here and there, but we don't have that big area."

He added that the State had originally assumed the entire town was the Superfund site, based on the information that was available at the time, before the remedial investigation began.

"I can tell you that it's not the whole town," he said.

Novak continued.

"You're in a river valley, so there's a lot of sand under the town and groundwater flows through the sand pretty quickly. So the fact that there's not as much contamination as I thought means that Mother Nature has kind of done her thing. It's not surprising that we're finding what we're finding based on the age," he said.

It has been roughly 40 to 45 years since there was a dry cleaner in Spencer. Novak also noted that older systems required taking the clothing, wet with the solution, and placing it in a dryer, leading to the chemicals dripping onto the floor and seeping into floor drains and cracks in the flooring itself. Now, newer technology has the entire process done in one system.

After the report is released, an interim decision will be made on how to remediate the contamination and there will be a public meeting with a proposed solution. That meeting will allow for public comments, questions and input. Those comments are then used to determine a final course of action, and Novak said the EPA has to show how it considered the public comments when making a final remediation decision.

Options for remediation vary based on what is contaminated. With soil vapor intrusion, the health risk is when that vapor is inside buildings. Systems similar to those used to remove radon to move the vapor intrusion outside to be disbursed into the atmosphere can be installed.

For contaminated groundwater, the water can be treated using air strippers or bioremediation techniques such as using bacteria and other chemicals to eliminate the PCE from the water.

For contaminated soil, it can be removed and taken somewhere else. It can also be treated in place or a cover or cap can be placed over the contaminated soil to prevent it from recontaminating the ground water.

"There's a number of different ways that we can treat the contamination in the soil or in the water," Novak said.

The report will include a feasibility study to look at alternatives and what is most effective.

Once a final decision has been made, the site has to wait in line for EPA to provide funding for the remediation efforts.

That is, unless responsible parties can and will provide funding for remediation.

"Our objective is to get the companies responsible for the pollution to pay for the cleanup," Novak said.

However, when it is not possible because the party will not take responsibility or the business is no longer open, the funding does come from the EPA budget, eventually.

Novak said he may break the remediation into two parts, one for soil vapor intrusion and one for the soil and groundwater contamination. The advantage to this is that the site can get in line for part of the funding earlier.

More information about the Franklin Street Groundwater Superfund Site can be found on the EPA's website, www.epa.gov.