ORRINGTON – A gasoline additive has been found in the well water of one house on Emerald Drive, but fresh water is expected to be turned on this week, officials said Wednesday.

To protect the homeowners and their children, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection has decided to connect the house to public water that is available on Arctic Station Road, located approximately 250 feet from the home.

Bangor Water District has completed the work and was conducting biological tests on Wednesday before turning on the water, Wes Haskell, assistant general manager, said.

“They may turn those on today,” he said. “It’s a pretty big thing to have contaminants in their wells.”

There are three homes at the end of Emerald, which is shaped like a “T,” but only one has tested positive for the gasoline additive, Jean Flannery, project manager for the DEP’s regional office.

“There is nothing at all” in the other two wells, she said.

The DEP had the water district run a water line to the end of the road and connect the house with the contaminated well.

“We put it in so the other two can hook up if they want to,” Flannery said, adding those hookup costs would by paid by the homeowners.

Town officials said MTBE, or methyl tertiary-butyl ether, was discovered in some water monitoring tests done along Arctic Station Road.

“Some holes had it and some didn’t,” Richard Harriman, Orrington code enforcement officer, said Wednesday.

Flannery, who was not at work on Wednesday and did not have the file in front of her, could not verify the exact contaminate.

MTBE is a colorless and potentially cancer-causing gasoline additive that has been used in gasoline to improve air emissions since the 1970s, but now also is known to pollute water. MTBE was banned in Maine in January.

The cause of the contamination is not known, even though several tests have been conducted, Flannery said.

“We don’t know enough about what’s underneath the ground to know what is the culprit,” she said. “It was cheaper to connect the public water.”

In the last decade, the DEP has gained considerable experience investigating more than 1,000 MTBE-contaminated wells, sometimes resolving the problem by providing filtration systems, digging new wells or doing both, and if public water is accessible, providing a new water line, all at public expense.

After the state Bureau of Health found MTBE in a number of private and public wells in 1997, the Legislature expanded an oil cleanup fund designed to handle tanker spills on the coast to include gasoline and heating oil spills on land. Between 60 and 80 cases are reported yearly.