Residents concerned about bottled water stoppage, chemical
reports
By Tony Burchyns
San Martin – Olin Corporation Vice President Curt Richards made a rare visit to Thursday’s Perchlorate Community Advisory Group meeting, fielding questions from a crowd of more than 70 local residents on the termination of the road flare manufacturer’s supply of free bottled water to some 600 households.
“There’s no one in this room whose drinking water is above six (parts per billion perchlorate),” Richards said to the largely skeptical gathering.
A number of residents at the meeting raised concerns over the possibility of clerical errors being made by MACTEC, the engineering firm hired by Olin Corp. to examine the extent of perchlorate contamination in South County’s groundwater stemming from the operation of a now defunct road flare plant in Morgan Hill.
MACTEC was charged with gathering data from more than 800 wells affected by the 9.5-mile plume of perchlorate-tainted groundwater stretching southeast through San Martin toward Gilroy.
In a deal between Olin Corp. and state water officials, the company agreed to supply bottled water to residents whose wells tested over 6 parts per billion (ppb) for perchlorate until four quarterly tests showed levels had dropped.
Gilroy resident Elaine Jelsema, who lives on Malo Court, claimed those tests had not been administered properly on the well she shares with four other households.
She brought to the meeting four letters from MACTEC indicating that tests had been performed on her well during a 23-week period between August 2005 and January 2006, rather than on a quarterly basis. Those tests indicated a slight rise in perchlorate readings from 3.5 ppb to 4.1 ppb.
“This all needs to be looked into,” Jelsema said afterward. “But they’re only giving us one week’s notice that our bottled water is being canceled.”
Others at the meeting shared similar concerns, suggesting that the test results on their wells had not been mailed out in an orderly fashion.
Richards, who works in Tennessee, defended himself by saying “one of the issues Olin has is the massive amounts of data” that must be processed in its mitigation of the South County water hazard.
“We are checking our database,” he ensured the crowd. “We want to make sure that no one falls through the cracks. But there is possibility for some errors.”
That “possibility” didn’t sit well with one irate resident, who accused Richards of hiding behind “a gold wall” of money, doing the least possible to mitigate the local environmental hazard.
Richards said “safe” levels of perchlorate in drinking water have never been pinned down definitively. Recent national studies, he said, suggest 24 ppb is acceptable. Until the 1990s, he later claimed, 400 ppb was an accepted national standard. But as a measure of good faith, Richards insisted, Olin decided to stick to California’s suggested health standard of 6 ppb.
Olin Corp. has spent more than $20 million in its investigation of the plume of perchlorate discovered in 2003 in the South County water table. More that $2 million has been spent on a program for free bottle water that is now being largely discontinued.
Andria Ventura, an environmental organizer with statewide non-profit Clean Water Action, said she thinks Olin Corp. has the resources to be doing more. She suggested to Richards the company include the dates and results of tests on wells in letters to residents whose bottled water is being canceled.
“That way people can feel comfortable with how the decision was made,” she said.
Richards said he would take that into consideration.
Sylvia Hamilton, chairwoman of the Perchlorate Community Advisory Group, a committee of water experts, real estate agents, farmers and residents that hosted Thursday’s meeting, asked the crowd to fill out comment cards specifying their well numbers and any concerns they had.
“We’ll begin addressing those tonight,” she announced.
Other talking points at the meeting included a MACTEC report released in March stating that the level of harmful perchlorate Olin unleashed on the South County water table is dissipating.
MACTEC representative Mike Taraszki said pumping “imported” water into groundwater supply has helped.
