If you have a private well that supplies water to your home in the town of Cheshire, CT – a town with:
- a population of approximately 30,000 people,
- public water supply serving 80% of the town,
- private water supply serving the others,
- a confirmed history of ongoing TCE contamination throughout it’s entire public water supply for 2-3 decades…at times, at levels north of 200 ppb (40 times the national safety standard),
- TCE (and other VOC) contamination found in the town’s private water supply in multiple wells over past 20 yrs,
- 1 official Superfund site,
- 16 other EPA ID’d contamination sites (many of which have been waiting for an NPL decision for 20 years),
- a 35+ year contamination history,
- and elevated cancer rates over time, some with increasing trends, of (at least) the following types: breast cancer, brain cancer, non-hodgkins lymphoma, pediatric cancers, and “all female invasive cancers”
- there is no formal program of recommendation, reminder or advice to help private-well users protect their water supply, even though cancer-causing, industrial contaminants have been discovered nearly all across the town.
We wish we could report this was a new problem. Or that it was isolated to Cheshire. But this appears to be a Connecticut problem. Remember CT? The state that leads the country in hazardous waste sites discovered by the EPA before 1985 but still haven’t been cleaned up? The one that leads the country in breast cancer rates and ranks 3rd nationwide for non-hodgkins lymphoma and bladder cancers? Yep. That’s the one. Well, it appears CT has been living with a deficiency in its public health protection policy for quite some time.
From a 1980 New York Times article:
June 15, 1980, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
SECTION: Section 11; Connecticut; Page 1, Column 4; Connecticut Weekly Desk
LENGTH: 1552 words
HEADLINE: TESTS OF PRIVATE WELLS: EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF
BYLINE: By ANDREE BROOKS
[...]
Today about 500,000 people, representing 20 percent of the households around the state, are served by private on-site wells, according to Richard Woodhull, chief of the water-supply section of the State Health Department. Though water pollution has been much in the news lately, officials agree that little has been done to protect or educate the thousands of householders dependent on their wells.
”Except for the initial test when the house is built, it’s every man for himself,” said Alan Smith, director of environmental services for the Aspetuck Valley Health District.
While all the wells and reservoirs serving the municipal water supplies are now regularly checked by state and local officials for industrial pollutants – which include such suspected carcinogens as trichloroethylene (known commonly as TCE) and benzene, in addition to more traditional contaminants – there is still no regulation governing even the basic monitoring of private systems.
There is no formal program of recommendation, reminder or advice to help private-well users protect their supply. The 1979 study conducted by the Connecticut Water Quality Managing Board, with headquarters in Middletown, identifying approximately 100 major water supplies, focused only on the protection of public sources, according to Peter Alagna, assistant director of the board.
Jack Graham, a retired geologist who lives in Weston, said: ”Most people don’t even know they have a problem until they become ill or the water starts to look or smell different.”
Mr. Graham is in the forefront of a movement seeking a regular program in Weston to monitor wells for the traditional pollutants as well as the more recently recognized industrial wastes suspected of causing cancer
25 years and multiple superfund/hazardous waste sites later, and nothing has changed in CT. In a recent email, a representative of the CT Department of Public Health confirmed emphatically, “the private well is the responsibility of the home owner.”
And all the while, unknowing residents remain at risk.
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