According to this report by WLTX-TV News 19 (SC):

As of Monday night's Restoration Advisory Board meeting, Shaw officials say Sumter residents no longer have to worry about their drinking water because all known contaminated wells have been treated.

You may remember a similar meeting was held back in February. For many Sumter residents, that was the first time they learned about a potentially harmful chemical - known as TCE - contaminating their water.

Since then all known contaminations have been eliminated. But for at least one resident, that's not enough.

"I've lived here probably around eight years," says Ralph Oxendine.

Up until February he got his drinking water from a well he had installed on his property when he moved in. But he says he stopped using it when Shaw tests found unsafe levels of TCE - an industrial-strength degreaser - in his well water.

"The EPA limit is 5 parts per billion and he was just above that - around 8 parts per billion," says Capt. Travis Guidt, a spokesman for Shaw.

[...]

Base officials told [Oxendine] to get checked out by a doctor and then to file a claim with Shaw.

Base officials say that believe they've contacted everyone who could be affected by TCE contamination, but if you have a well adjacent to Shaw and Highway 441 that has not been tested, contact the base at (803) 895-2019.

We wonder if base officials told Oxendine that diseases linked to TCE and similar VOC's reportedly take years, sometimes decades, to present themselves in the body. This is what is commonly known as a latency period - the period of time between toxic exposure and the onset of illness/disease.

A clean bill of health today - especially after at least eight years of drinking and bathing in dangerous levels of TCE - is guarantee of precious little. While the recommendation to see a medical expert about the possible impacts of the exposure is a good one, the possibility of TCE-induced disease is not something that can be ruled out with a single visit.

Separately, it is hard to tell from the limited reports if Shaw has ruled out the prospect of vapor intrusion into homes sitting above the TCE contaminated soil/groundwater for all those years. As Walter Mugdan, from EPA Region 2, reminds us:

Indoor air problems may occur even when levels of groundwater contamination are quite low. Moreover, the model most commonly used to make predictions about vapor intrusion, the “Johnson-Ettinger” Model, has been found to significantly under-predict indoor air vapor levels in a variety of situations.

If vapor intrusion into buildings near Shaw AFB has not been ruled out with any certainty, officials should ensure that this happens.