Stamford, Conn.–Somehow the plan for the city to subsidize well water testing in North Stamford is considered controversial. To us it’s a no-brainer.

The city has a public health problem on its hands. It’s been two years since contaminated water was discovered in North Stamford, and still no answers.

Back then it first seemed the contamination was coming from the dump beneath Scofieldtown Park. But the problem appears to be much more complicated than that.

Many private wells in North Stamford have been found to contain harmful chemicals, spread out over a wide area, which indicates that if the park is a source of contamination (a city study said it wasn’t) it’s likely not the only one.

Locating possible sources of contamination is a very difficult job, and has to be approached from many angles.

One is testing wells. The more wells that are tested, the more that can be mapped. Clusters of contamination can help point to potential sources.

The problem is, two years on, and relatively few wells have been tested. There are approximately 5,000 Stamford homes that use private wells. About 300 have submitted testing results to the city Health Department.

One of the reasons so few people are testing could be the high cost — an average of $350 per test.

Then there are the people who do test, but who don’t share their results with the city, largely out of concerns for their property values.

To tackle both problems, the Board of Representatives North Stamford Water Supply Committee has approved an ordinance to spend about $100,000 a year to subsidize testing. Homeowners who take advantage would have to pay only $100 to have their well tested, but they would be required to share test results with the city. The relatively minor expenditure could pay for roughly 750 tests a year, according to health officials.

It’s not likely that many well owners would participate, but if even half that number did to start, the city would more than double its data. So where is the problem?

City Rep. Harry Day, R-13, a Water Supply Committee member, voted against the subsidy. “We don’t do this for radon,” he said. “Indeed, we don’t really do it for anything else. So why are we doing it here?”

Although he’s not the only one to have asked that question, we think the answer is obvious. If groundwater is being contaminated at a source or sources and is spreading, that’s exactly the type of situation that a city needs to confront and not leave to individual homeowners.

Then there is the North Stamford Association, which argues that subsidize testing would unduly burden people connected to water lines.

“It would be unfair to ask homeowners without private wells to subsidize the testing of private wells,” the NSA wrote in a letter to the Board of Representatives.

Well, if that’s the kind of community we have become, or want to be, Stamford is a drastically different place than it once was. Hard to believe as it may be, there really was a time when communities like this rallied together in times of crisis. Everyone didn’t say “Not my problem” and pull down their shades.

The city has before it a sensible ordinance by which it would spend a modest amount of money and amass valuable information — and, not incidentally, potentially alert residents who have contaminated wells.

There was a tremendous sense of urgency in Stamford when this problem was publicized in 2009. That urgency has since dissipated until the issue has become what Board of Representatives President Randy Skigen, D-19, accurately called “a quiet health crisis.”

It’s time to turn up the volume again.

Mr. Skigen proposed subsidized testing about a year ago — yet another example of how progress on water contamination has been too slow. Much too slow.

Perhaps the only conclusion to be drawn at this point is that the city must come together to solve this particular problem.

Stamford Advocate

By JOSH KOVNER, jkovner@courant.com

August 21, 2010

HAMDEN —The largest residential environmental cleanup in state history has begun in the town’s Newhall section, a venerable neighborhood of closely clustered former factory housing built on what amounts to a massive landfill.

The project, a decade in the planning, has been received all along the way with skepticism and uncertainty by this community of largely African American homeowners. They are tired of living with sinkholes and digging up car batteries and shell casings from the old Winchester Repeating Arms factory in their back yards, but do they don’t have a great deal of faith in the cleanup either.

State officials are confident. They say removing up to four feet of contaminated soil from the yards of 232 homes should lift a stigma that has clung to these close-knit blocks like a fog for 100 years.

The area, including a former middle school, ball fields and a park, was polluted by arsenic, lead, heavy metals and partially burned waste from decades of dumping in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to fill the mosquito-infested swamplands of south Hamden. The unfettered dumping solved one problem, but spawned another.

The officials say it will take three to five years and $50 million to $70 million, half paid by state taxpayers, to truck away the dirt and replace it with hundreds of thousands of tons of clean material. The houses will remain, but decks, porches, shrubbery and anything else in the way will be yanked out and replaced.

Some trees have already been removed; the big dig starts in earnest this week on the first wave, 22 homes.

Tough Decision

The contamination goes down 18 feet or more on some of the properties, and residents are questioning whether the 4-foot dig goes deep enough. The state Department of Environmental Protection says four feet of fill is enough to bury any potential threat, but the uncertainty lingers even as the backhoes get to roll Monday morning.

First stop for the heavy equipment: the yard around Charlie Patterson’s tidy brick home on Morse Street. Late last week, the 80-year-old former New Haven police officer, paper-supply salesman and small-business owner was wrestling with what to do. His face was creased with consternation.

On Wednesday afternoon, he said he shared the concerns that the cleanup didn’t go far enough but was ready to accept the work. Wednesday night, he spoke with the indomitable Elizabeth Hayes, the neighborhood resident leading the opposition, and after that conversation, Patterson decided to sign a statement rescinding the permission he gave to contractors for Olin Corp., the company that is shouldering the other half of the cleanup cost, to come on his property.

Thursday afternoon, Patterson got a visit from the DEP’s Raymond Frigon, the project manager, who said Patterson and the rest of the homeowners had the right to reject the service, but if they did, they’d “own” the contaminated soil and would be responsible for paying for it to be removed. On Thursday evening, Patterson went to visit attorney Howard Lawrence of New Haven, who is advising the coalition that opposes the DEP plan.

Thursday night, Patterson reported on his session with Lawrence.

“His advice was to go ahead and let them do the work,” Patterson said, adding that he’ll heed that guidance. “If they don’t do the work properly, then there would be some sort of a course of action in the courts.”

On Friday, Lawrence said: “I’ve reviewed the science and the promises made by the DEP. My best advice to the homeowners in phase 1 is to accept the service. If the state does it right, then we’ve done the right thing. If they do it wrong, we can pursue an action. In the spring, when the next phase is about to start, we can see how it went.”

The properties in the first wave have the least amount of contamination, and the DEP has promised that for this group, 100 percent of the tainted soil will be removed, Lawrence said.

Hayes, who lives in the neighborhood but does not have contamination on her property, said she is trying to get the DEP to go down eight feet and needs the whole neighborhood pushing together for that effort to have a chance.

She asked why, if the four-foot cap is sufficient, homeowners are required to disclose the presence of any remaining contaminated soil to prospective buyers when selling their homes?

“If four feet is enough, why not call it clean?” asked Hayes, who is convinced property values will remain depressed in the neighborhood even after the cleanup.

Frigon, of the DEP, said the disclosure is intended to protect owners of properties with deep contamination in the event that they want to dig down below four feet to build an addition. He said properly owners can dip into a fund being set up to pay for the removal of the deep contamination.

Other than that, Frigon said four feet of clean fill, layered on top of a barrier, is more than sufficient to bury any remaining contamination and neutralize any potential health threat.

‘Complex Project’

Richard Pearce, a popular local businessman, has been hired by the town as a liaison between the neighborhood and officials.

He said he understands the angst.

“It’s a complex project. A wrong was done many years ago; now we have to right that wrong. I’m here to facilitate clear communication and answer concerns. I have found that when I sit down with a resident one-on-one and explain the details, they have felt comfortable with the project,” Pearce said.

State health officials have concluded that there has no elevation in the number of cancer cases, blood poisonings or any other illness in the neighborhood.

A separate fund, containing $5 million in proceeds from the sale of state bonds, will be used to correct any structural damage caused to the homes by uneven settling of the fill material under and around the foundations.

Dale Kroop, Hamden’s director of economic development, said he has so far identified 51 houses with structural damage. He said about 20 of those probably will have to be bought through the fund and demolished. Others can be repaired, he said.

Kroop sees the cleanup, coupled with the repair and replacement of some of the houses in Newhall, as an opportunity to permanently improve the neighborhood. He is considering employing a deconstructionist, rather than a demolition company, so that flooring and other material from the houses can be saved and reused. He said he would like to see some jobs created for Newhall residents during the razing and reconstruction.

Some of the homes with cracked foundations, tilted walls and sinking garages date from the late 19th century.

The South Central Regional Water Authority and the town of Hamden are responsible for cleaning up of the old middle-school campus and the park, respectively. That will be done later in the project.

‘A Few More Years’

The least contaminated soil — that is, dirt that can be reused for an industrial purpose but not a residential one — will be trucked across Hamden to the town’s other iconic environmental problem: the country’s largest tire pond. A lagoon with millions of discarded tires is being covered over by a small mountain of fill.

Shannon Pociu of the DEP said most of the soil from Newhall has been cleared to be used to cap the tire pond, an operation that is in its final stages.

Tainted soil from Newhall that can’t be used again will be trucked to a hazardous-waste landfill.

Removing and replacing the soil from the 22 Newhall homes in the first wave will require 400 truckloads. The clean soil is coming from a housing construction project in Orange.

Specific truck routes from Newhall to the tire pond off State Street have been approved by Hamden police.

“You can expect a tremendous amount of activity in Newhall for the next few years,” said Kroop.

“Been living in this neighborhood since 1948,” said Patterson, who was born in North Carolina. “Guess I can wait a few more years to see how it all turns out.”

Copyright © 2010, The Hartford Courant
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Connecticut Post

Milford site cleanup being mapped out

FRANK JULIANO

Article Last Updated: 04/26/2008 11:34:01 PM EDT

MILFORD — Nearly five years after a toxic chemical was reported in the groundwater and soil of an industrial site here, state officials and representatives of four affected companies discussed cleanup plans last week.

But that is little comfort to Debbie Smith, of Ansonia, who believes that her husband, Ed, was at least the second construction worker at the Milford Power Co. site to die of cancer linked to exposure to the chemical.

The conference call Tuesday that included state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal; Graham Stevens, the brownfields coordinator for the state Department of Environmental Protection, and the property owners did not set any timetable for removing the trichloroethylene, or TCE.

Stevens said the four companies: Bic Corp., Milford Power Co., Jordan Realty and Gas Equipment Engineering, are working on their Phase III environmental studies, which detail exactly where on their property the once-commonly used solvent is, and suggest methods to remove it.

A fifth company, Northeast Electronics Corp., is not part of the partial consent order that Blumenthal won in court in 2005, but is engaged in a separate TCE cleanup overseen by federal officials.

“Northeast Electronics has completed much of its Phase III, and this department has already accepted Bic’s study,” Stevens said.

A “hot spot” of known soil contamination on Shelland Street leading into the Milford Power Co. facility has already been remediated, the DEP official said, as has the soil under four buildings at the nearby Caswell Cove Condominiums.

“There were 8,400 tons of impacted soil removed from the area of concern on Shelland Street that were taken to an approved landfill, most likely out of state,” he said.

Debbie Smith said that her husband got very sick working on the power plant construction, developing a large tumor in his neck that turned out to be a very aggressive cancer.

Neil Clifford, the blasting contractor on the power plant construction, died in 2005 of a rare form of cancer that he believed was caused by exposure to TCE. He had undergone a bone marrow transplant in an effort to battle the disease.

Joe Ambrosini, the business manager of Laborers Local 665, said union members suspect that Ed Smith’s cancer was also caused by work-related exposure to TCE. “We’ve always kind of speculated among ourselves; Ed had throat cancer, which isn’t usual.”

In fact, his widow said, Ed Smith didn’t smoke and had no family history of cancer. Smith died last May 9 at age 55.

“He was the first one on the Milford Power job and the last to leave it. My husband really suffered,” Debbie Smith said. “He had two operations and after the second one he lost the ability to speak. He had to be fed through a tube in his stomach. But he wanted to live and he was willing to try whatever treatments they had.”

But Ed Smith was denied workers’ compensation benefits, his widow said, because he had worked at so many construction sites over the years.

“We had a hearing in New Haven and they denied us 3-2 because Ed had also worked on the Raymark site in Stratford, which was contaminated,” she said. “They told us they couldn’t determine whether, if he got it from the job, which job it was.”

Clifford, Smith and other workers would get soaked by the contaminated water, which collected in ponds and sprayed up after blasting, the men’s families said.

Although the DEP doesn’t certify any job site as safe, Stevens said that Bic Corp. officials paid for their facilities to be checked and determined that they were safe for workers. The company has since moved much of its manufacturing to Shelton.

“Bic filed its Phase III report in January,” spokeswoman Linda Kwong said. “Bic will continue to work with the DEP until this investigation is completed and is committed to doing all that is necessary and reasonable as a long-standing, responsible neighbor to provide assurances about the safety of Bic’s manufacturing operations.”

State and city health department officials checked the Milford Power Co. plant itself when construction was completed.

The point of origin seems to be the Jordan Realty Co. property on Bic Drive, where “hot spots” of up to 60,000 parts per billion of the industrial solvent, a suspected carcinogen, were measured, officials say.

The TCE was discovered in 1999 by an environmental analyst hired by the Milford Power Co., which had purchased a portion of the Jordan Realty site to build the 544-megawatt generating plant. But DEP officials at the time failed to follow up on the report, and it wasn’t discovered until 2003 when workers contacted the Connecticut Post.

House Speaker James A. Amann, D-Milford, who lives at Caswell Cove, and then-Sen. Winthrop S. Smith Jr. later pushed through a notification bill that requires that workers be told of any job site contamination.

Debbie Smith said she knows that much has been done to address the problem, but that she still worries about worker safety, especially as her son, Jeremy Smith, 21, begins his career as a laborer with Local 665. “I’m worried about him, sure, but they are being a lot more careful than they were years ago,” she said.