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.”