Plymouth Superfund site concerns raised

PLYMOUTH – Life on the Sawyer Road in Plymouth is quiet.

“You can hear the deer walking on the edge of the woods. You can hear the ducks and the frogs,” Juanita Spaulding said Wednesday night.

“There are no streetlights and more stars than you can see with a telescope. And the Northern Lights are spectacular,” she said.

But Spaulding, who was testifying before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency at a Superfund hearing on the proposed cleanup action at the Hows Corner waste oil site, said she is afraid her idyllic setting will change dramatically if new cleanup proposals are adopted.

Across the street from Spaulding’s home is the Hows Corner site, where George West Jr. of Wells operated a waste oil storage and treatment facility from 1965 to 1980. Thousands of gallons of used oil, degreasers and solvents were dumped on the ground, either accidentally or on purpose, and seeped through bedrock fractures and contaminated the groundwater.

Since the pollution was discovered in 1990, a municipal water system has been installed, town ordinances passed and soil has been removed from the site.

Part of the future cleanup proposal includes construction of a pumping station that will bring up the groundwater, treat it and recharge it into the bedrock. EPA proposes running the pumping station 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for possibly the next 60 to 100 years.

“How many decibels will the pumping station be? How many lights will be installed at the site? We want answers,” Spaulding said. “We want to be shown that we won’t even know that pumping station is there.”

Contamination at the Hows Corner Superfund site on Sawyer Road in Plymouth cannot be cleaned up, project manager Terry Connelly of the EPA told residents Wednesday night and at an earlier meeting in May.

“It is not technically possible to restore the groundwater,” Connelly said. He said the pumping station is one solution to halt the spread of the pollutants. The station, called a “containment system” by the EPA, could be in place by fall 2007.

Not only will this system cleanse the water, Connelly said, it will shut off the flow of the contaminants through the bedrock. “We expect that the plume will start moving backwards towards the [Hows] site as the containment system operates,” Connelly said.

There are 77 parcels affected and 53 homes have been connected to a municipal water system.

Connelly stressed that the contamination is not spreading nor is it affecting nearby Plymouth Pond.

“The level of contamination has remained essentially unchanged in the last 10 years,” he said. “That contamination has gone as far as it’s going to go.”

Other residents wanted assurances that the town of Plymouth and the Plymouth Water District would not bear any direct costs due to the cleanup.

Connelly explained that by the end of the project, it should cost more than $11 million, not including the pumping station expenditures. Those costs will be born by U.S. and Maine taxpayers and the parties that originally contracted with West to dump their waste oil at the site.

Mary Jane O’Donnell of the EPA told the residents that their comments would be evaluated, and if appropriate, changes would be made to the cleanup plan.