Search this Chehalis River Council site!Saturday, June 26, 2004
By Dian McClurg dmcclurg@chronline.com , The Chronicle
Centralia has made significant progress over the last year in its effort to clean contaminated groundwater in the Fords Prairie area, but it will be many years before the process is complete.
"The good news is, we're getting pretty close to being done," said Sandy Howard, a spokesperson for the state Department of Ecology. "Right now we're well underway with cleaning up the aquifer." But officials predict that the process of cleaning the water that was started last summer will still take 12 to 15 years to complete.
City leaders closed the Eshom well, a city-owned well on Eshom Road near the Port of Centralia, in 1988 after the state Department of Health found high levels of the contaminant perchloroethylene in the well and the surrounding groundwater. Ten years later, the city had a plan for how to extract and clean the contaminated water, and last year the city was able to begin the process.
The next project is to connect the approximately 130 homes with private wells in the contaminated area to the city's water supply. The Department of Health and Human Services has determined that perchloroethylene, or PCE, may be a cancer-causing agent.
Right now, most of the water with high levels of PCE is so deep that private wells not contaminated early on have stayed clean. But when the city begins pulling the contaminated water up through barrier wells to treat it, the contaminated water could rise and come into contact with these wells, said Centralia Utilities Director Dick Southworth.
"All of this is just unknown; unseen," Southworth said. "It's all underground." Part of the $4.5 million grant the city received years ago from the state, then, is going toward helping connect these homes to city water. Homeowners have until July 15 to sign onto the project, which equals a $4,000 savings for them.
The state and city will pay for the cost of installing water mains and decommissioning the wells, while homeowners will be asked to pay 50 percent of the cost to put in private service lines to their homes, Southworth said. For most people, this will cost between $600 and $800.
Homeowners can sign on only if they agree to decommission or disconnect their wells, Southworth said.
"This is a great opportunity," he said. "We rarely get a chance to offer a deal like this." How the Eshom well was contaminated is a question the city turned away from trying to answer five years ago, but a few clues suggest the contamination originated in Trailer Village, a trailer park on the corner of Harrison Avenue and Russell Road in Fords Prairie.
"The legend goes that there was once a cleaning establishment out there in Trailer Valley," said Southworth, the city's utilities director.
PCE is a solvent commonly used by dry cleaning establishments, and historically dry cleaners would dump the contaminants down the drain when they were done with them, according to the Department of Ecology.
"We're paying the price for that right now in hundreds and thousands of sites around the country," said Howard, a DOE spokesperson.
When Southworth joined Centralia's Utility Department in 1995, one of his first duties was to check up on how the water department was doing with the Eshom well. He learned then that the well, which would normally pump about 1,300 gallons of water per minute into the city's water supply, was not operating.
The first thing the city did, with DOE's help, was track the movement of the contaminated plume of groundwater by testing various wells in Fords Prairie. When they had a pretty good idea where the contaminated plume was located, they installed barrier wells.
This step was completed last summer. By January of this year, the city had installed pumps to suck the contaminated water up from the aquifer, run it through an air-stripping process to eliminate the PCE and then inject the drinking-quality water back into the city's water system.
Southworth said the process has worked thus far. PCE dissipates when it comes into contact with the air, he said.
"But this is still a very unstable situation," Southworth told city leaders earlier this month.
Dian McClurg covers city government for Centralia and Chehalis, and health issues for The Chronicle. She may be reached at 807-8239, or by e-mail at dmcclurg@chronline.com.
This page created and maintained by Chehalis River Council
Send comments or questions to the: Chehalis River Council