UPDATE: Doddridge County Spill Raises Questions About Reporting An unknown substance was dumped upstream of West Union's water intake point this past summer.

The State Journal
9 November 2009
By Pam Kasey

WEST UNION -- West Union officials recently learned about a summertime spill of a not-yet-identified substance upstream from the community's drinking water intake.

The event has raised questions about the system the state uses to notify local drinking water providers about possible contamination.

“We were denied knowledge of the spill and therefore unable to test on our own,” wrote West Union Mayor Robert Fetty in an Oct. 28 letter to Barbara Taylor, director of the Office of Environmental Health Services at the state Bureau for Public Health. “We experienced operational difficulties we believe may be tied, at least in part, to this spill. Unfortunately, we cannot prove nor disprove this as we were not notified.”

West Union’s drinking water treatment plant started showing high levels of manganese in the incoming water in mid-July, according to Chief Operator Duane Reynolds.

Manganese, Reynolds explained, is a secondary contaminant that does not affect human health but does affect drinking water taste and odor. It turns the water dark, “like tea.”

The level of manganese was not just a little higher than usual, but far higher: at around 1.6 milligrams per liter, it was four times higher than the worst days he’s seen at the plant since 2001, he said.

He spoke about the matter with the regional office of the BPH in Wheeling and the state office in Charleston.

And he added unusually high levels of potassium permanganate to settle the manganese out.

“We were able to keep the manganese under control, but it was just really odd,” Reynolds said.

The elevated manganese levels continued through August, September and into October, he said.

Then, on Oct. 23, a West Union City Council member called the treatment plant to ask about a spill that he had just read about in the Clarksburg Exponent-Telegram.

The spill was at least two months old.

It had been reported to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection’s Spill Hotline on the morning of Aug. 25, according to the hotline’s call log.

The location of the spill, on Buckeye Creek in Doddridge County, lies upstream of West Union’s drinking water intake on Middle Island Creek — five miles or so upstream as the crow flies, or approximately seven or eight crooked stream miles.

Reynolds and Fetty want to know why they were never informed.

According to the inspector’s Sept. 16 report to DEP Office of Oil and Gas Chief James Martin, clean-up was coordinated by a gas well operator’s designated agent; that operator is unnamed, but a separate notice of violation cites TAPO Energy of West Union.

The inspectors concluded on Aug. 25 that the spill had not reached Middle Island Creek based on a visual inspection. The operator placed booms on the creek to contain the spill.

Reynolds doesn’t think booms or a visual inspection were enough.

“Containment booms will keep things behind them that are floating,” he said. “But things that become a constituent of the water, that dissolve in the water, they’ll go right underneath those booms.”

The DEP inspectors took their first water quality samples on Aug. 27, according to the report.

Again, Reynolds said he feels it was too little, too late.

“My guess is it would have taken a couple days for the spill to get down here,” Reynolds said. “In a couple days, they didn’t even take a sample. If this had been, God forbid, arsenic or something like that, we wouldn’t have known about it until we started filling body bags, and that’s totally unacceptable”.

Several agencies contacted by The State Journal about the protocol for notifying public drinking water systems of possible contamination from spills did not provide clear answers.

If the BPH’s Office of Environmental Health Services hears about a spill, they’ll contact drinking water systems, according to Readiness Coordinator Jeff Smith.

But OEHS hasn’t received a report from the Spill Hotline for as long as he’s been in the job, since the beginning of 2008.

“There’s been a breakdown, and I’m trying to figure out what’s going on right now, because I never got notified about (the spill in Doddridge County),” Smith said.

“I’ve contacted DEP and Division of Homeland Security trying to figure out where the breakdown was,” he added. “From what I understand, they don’t notify people unless it’s something that they think has gotten out of hand.”

Mike Dorsey, chief of homeland security and emergency response for the state DEP, confirmed that.

“There has to be a risk that it’s going to hit a system,” Dorsey said. “Usually it’s pretty obvious. If we have something that’s 15 miles from the nearest drinking water source and it’s contained, it’s not (reported to the drinking water system).”

Although he conceded that it’s not always obvious whether there’s a risk or not, he said, “the Oil and Gas guys didn’t do anything wrong here. I’d have called the Bureau for Public Health or the plant itself, but these guys, if everything’s as they say, the oil was all contained to Buckeye Creek — it wasn’t creating a problem for West Union.”

Dorsey thinks this was an unusual case where a spill that was handled by the Office of Oil and Gas happened a lot closer to a drinking water intake than usual.

“They’re used to dealing with spills way out in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “There’ll be a little bit of oil in a tributary. They’re not really used to dealing with these kind of spills where they’re near civilization.”

He said he has since recommended to that office that they notify any drinking water systems that might be affected.

DEP has not yet determined the exact nature and cause of the spill in Doddridge County and, although the timing is suggestive, it is unclear whether that spill was related to the high levels of manganese in West Union or not. An accidental spill of oil would not put manganese in the water, Dorsey pointed out, but gas well drilling brine might.

The larger question remaining is about whether, how and how quickly drinking water system operators are notified about possible contaminants.

Reynolds said, in his thinking, it is better safe than sorry.

“This just can’t be tolerated. There’s too many people that could get harmed by this not being in place,” he said. “Our goal is to get either the system reinstated or instated. We want to make sure that in the future things like this don’t recur.”