EPA approves cleanup plan for Superfund site in Plymouth

PLYMOUTH – Over the objections of several nearby residents who are afraid of noise and the loss of their rural lifestyle, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has approved a cleanup plan for the Hows Corner Superfund site that involves installing a water-cleansing station.

The Hows Corner site, where George West Jr. of Wells operated a waste oil storage and treatment facility from 1965 to 1980, cannot be cleaned up, EPA officials told residents earlier this year.

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 removed from the site.

The cleanup details that concerned most residents who spoke out at this summer’s public hearings in Plymouth involved 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.

Residents were concerned about 24-hour lighting and noise generated by the pumping station. Terry Connelly, EPA project manager, was on vacation this week and could not comment on the residents’ objections.

At the summer hearing, however, Connelly said that the alternate method of treating the water was proposed after EPA officials discovered there was no other technical way possible to restore the groundwater.

Not only will this system cleanse the water, Connelly said, it will shut off the flow of contaminants through the bedrock.

“We expect that the plume will start moving backward towards the [Hows] site as the containment system operates,” Connelly said. The station, called a “containment system” by the EPA, could be in place by fall 2007.

There are 77 parcels of property 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.”

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.