West Cornwall residents ‘starting to freak’ about well water in pipeline area

“I told my land guy for years I smelled petroleum and he’d say, ‘ah, you must be imagining things,’” Rick Gibble said. Then his well tested positive.

Rick Gibble always suspected there was something funny about the West Cornwall Township well he used for drinking water.

“I told my land guy for years I smelled petroleum and he’d say, ‘ah, you must be imagining things,’” Gibble said.

But Gibble likely wasn’t imagining things. In 1991 – four years before he moved to 22 Spangler Road – a spill at the nearby Cornwall pump station let potentially cancer-causing chemicals into the water. A remediation contractor monitored the area immediately surrounding the spill, but nearby land owners say they were never told that the spill happened.

Last September, after a construction blast went awry, crews working on the natural gas liquids Mariner East 2 pipeline noticed a sheen on surface water. The Gibbles had their well tested, and tests found levels of contaminants far above recommended drinking standards.

“I’d like to see anybody drink that (crap) for 22 years the way we did,” Gibble said.

Sunoco subcontractors are now developing a plan to fix the problems that remain – but, since their previous efforts didn’t catch all of the contamination, area residents like organic farmer Phil Stober are skeptical the pollution hasn’t spread more widely than they want to admit.

The issue only adds to worries about environmental problems during Mariner East 2 pipeline construction and the concern of future mishaps from pipeline operations.

“You begin to wholistically add all of those pieces together, and that’s why people are starting to freak,” Stober said.

Wells of information

Aside from the village of Quentin, West Cornwall Township is quiet farmland where many homes aren’t connected to a public water system and residents use well water to quench their thirst.

The township’s one reminder of industrial life, the Mariner East 1 pipeline, is unobtrusive save for the pump station along Route 322 near Butler Road that pumps “product” – petroleum in 1991, now naturals gas – from the pipeline into trucks. In 1991, a pump station spill leaked into the ground, releasing contaminants.

Sunoco assigned the task of fixing the problem to West Chester-based Aquaterra Technologies and to Evergreen Resources Management, a Sunoco subsidiary that manages legacy remediation projects. They set up monitoring wells in an area surrounding the pump station, as shown on the map included with this story.

Time yielded good news, according to Aquaterra Senior Project Manager Michael Sarcinello: graphs based on data from the monitoring wells show the “plume” of benzene and other pollutants gradually shrink to almost nothing by the mid-2010s.

But a farmer operating to the north of the plume decided caution was in order last summer when he dug a new well for some of his chickens. That Weaver farm well tested positive for unsafe levels of MTBE in August 2017, so Sunoco’s contractor installed a water treatment system.

The next month, a blasting subcontractor working on construction of the Mariner East 2 pipeline across Spangler Road from the Gibble property had complications during a detonation and workers discovered a sheen of an unknown product, prompting the testing of the Gibble well.

Experts and neighborhood residents are divided over whether the blast caused the well to become contaminated or if the pollutants were only discovered after the blast but had long existed in the water there, as Gibble believes.

Regardless, Sarcinello explained that Aquaterra and Evergreen now plan to cast a wider net, placing seven new monitoring wells in an area outside of newly discovered contamination. After a half-year of observation, they will use the new data to determine if any further remediation steps need to be taken.

“A certain bit of skepticism”

That solution didn’t appease many of the about 35 area residents who attended a June 12 presentation on the Aquaterra and Evergreen remediation plans at the Quentin Fire Hall on South Lebanon Street, mainly because the previous monitoring effort did not detect for decades the contamination found last year.

“How can we take any of this as having any accuracy whatsoever?” one neighborhood resident demanded.

Stober more diplomatically stated that the consultants are “dealing with a certain bit of skepticism.”

The idea of placing monitoring wells outside of a known area of contamination to determine its outer limits is called delineation – and it is a proper practice in this situation, according to Gary Brown of RT Environmental Services, an engineer and environmental remediation expert. Brown worked for the Gibbles, under an agreement with Sunoco, to create a treatment system on the Gibble property so they can obtain clean water.

According to Sarcinello, it’s possible the original monitoring well did delineate the main plume and the newly discovered well contamination is from isolated “detached plumes.”

Township resident Doug Lorenzen had another theory: that the monitoring wells didn’t go deep enough and the contamination is deeper in the water table, discovered only when people create wells for personal use and have to dig deep to find a reliable source of water.

According to Brown, the consequences of not finding all of the contaminated water go beyond the risk to existing wells. The area may continue to attract new real estate development and houses may be built on the understanding that there is a clean source of water nearby.

“It would not be cool if somebody 10 years later found another contaminated aquifer that was missed,” he said.

Brown believes Aquaterra and Evergreen should conduct testing to rule out other possible sources of contamination besides the pump station, including the pipeline itself and the nearby defunct Quentin Terminal, where petroleum products were once housed.

Two carcinogens

The Weaver-farm and Gibble-property wells tested positive for unsafe levels of gasoline additives that environmental regulators warn can be harmful in drinking water.

Unsafe levels of Benzene – found at the Gibble property – can increase risks of cancer and cause anemia with long-term exposure, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) – found at both the Gibble and Weaver properties – is considered a “potential human carcinogen in high doses” and can also impact the odor and taste of water, according to the EPA.

If someone living near pipeline construction or operations fears contamination to their well, they should obtain a baseline water quality test, Bryan Swistock, a water resources specialist and senior extension associate with Penn State Extension, told the Lebanon Daily News last year. That creates a body of evidence so that future contamination can be more easily traced back to pipeline activities.

The landowner should use a state-accredited lab that maintains a “chain of custody” ensuring the property owner did not tamper with the results, Swistock said.

What happens next

Aquaterra and Evergreen held the June 12 meeting as part of a remediation process known as Act 2, which provides some liability relief to Sunoco in exchange for remediation of contaminated properties.

The West Cornwall Township supervisors insisted that mandatory public involvement during the process include a community involvement committee to keep an eye on remediation efforts, supervisor David Lloyd said.

“We want transparency. We want this to be known,” Lloyd said. “The supervisors are more or less going to put it in the citizens’ hands to administer it.”

Residents signed up at the June 12 meeting if they were interested in participating in the committee, he said. Members of the committee will ultimately be appointed by the supervisors.

Lloyd expects the remediation process to take years. As data is collected, the citizen committee will help ensure it is relayed to the public.

The first step was June 12’s presentation on what Aquaterra and Evergreen intend to do to fix that problem. A copy of the PowerPoint used in that presentation will be made available at the West Cornwall Township office and the Lebanon Community Library, officials said.

People who wish to provide written comments on the presentation may do so by writing a letter addressed to the West Cornwall Township Supervisors, 73 S. Zinns Mill Road, Lebanon, PA, 17042, Attention: Cornwall Pump Station Site. The deadline for comments is July 12.

This story comes to us through a partnership between WITF and The Lebanon Daily News.