New Jersey

Tests Show 8% of Private Wells Contaminated

ALEXANDER LANE / Star-Ledger (New Jersey) 5mar04

Dangerously high levels of toxins turned up in 417 of the 5,179 private wells tested under a new state law in the past year, a failure rate of about 8 percent, state officials reported yesterday.

Much of the contamination was centered in North Jersey, with clusters of arsenic-laced well water found in Hunterdon and Somerset counties, and high fecal coliform levels found in spots across the northern part of the state.

The results hardly indicate a public health crisis, experts said. The water was tested before it reached any in-home treatment system that may have been in place. Moreover, public water systems, from which the vast majority of New Jerseyans get their water, are much more tightly regulated and treated.

But the results are worrisome in some respects, and certainly show that the 18-month-old law requiring private well owners to test their water when they sell their houses was much needed, officials and environmentalists said.

"We're working directly with county officials to find out what the basis for those failures was," Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Bradley Campbell said. "The most encouraging thing is that the information is now on the table and families are now armed with that information."

Campbell said he had not heard of tainted wells scuttling any home sales, and assumed that where contaminants were found, the $200 to $4,000 cost of a treatment system was factored into the sale price.

The most common problem was excess nitrate, which is generally a result of fertilizer use and can cause blue-baby syndrome, an oxygen-depleting disorder. In all, 189 wells had high nitrate levels, including four out of seven tested in the Middlesex County farming communities of Plainsboro and Cranbury.

Fecal coliform contamination, which often comes from leaky septic tanks, appeared in 92 wells, mostly in North Jersey. They included 19 out of 574 wells tested in Hunterdon County, 10 of 458 tested in Morris, 21 of 313 tested in Somerset, 20 of 601 tested in Sussex and five of 264 tested in Warren.

Environmentalists cited the findings as yet another argument against the rapid, poorly planned development that they say has characterized growth in North Jersey in recent decades.

"You can still put a gas station in on top of an aquifer recharge area," said Jeff Tittel, director of the state Sierra Club chapter. "We have a system that's going to keep making groundwater more polluted."

Arsenic, which is linked to several types of cancer, was found in dangerous levels in 72 wells, including 12 of 108 tested in Raritan, seven of 34 in East Amwell and four of 33 in Delaware -- all of which are in southeastern Hunterdon County. It also turned up in seven of 39 wells tested in Montgomery, Somerset County.

Only homeowners north of Monmouth County were required to test for arsenic, since it has historically been found to occur naturally in the rocks of the Piedmont Region, a geologic zone that sweeps from the Delaware River at the Hunterdon-Mercer border through the Bergen-Passaic border.

Officials said 71 wells failed for high levels of volatile organic compounds, a family of toxins that tend to come from hazardous waste sites and underground storage tanks. The most common were trichloroethylene, a degreasing solvent, and tetracloroethylene, a chemical used in dry cleaning.

Brian Buckley, executive director of laboratories at the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute in Piscataway, said that isolated contamination could prove dangerous to individual families, but the bigger worry was clusters of tainted wells.

"Private wells potentially are sentinels for a bigger overall problem," Buckley said.

Barker Hamill, chief of the Bureau of Safe Drinking Water at the DEP, said that where more than five wells in one area are found to contain dangerous levels of man-made toxins such as volatile organics, the state seeks the source of the contamination.

Methyl tertiary-butyl ether, known as MTBE, was more common than any other volatile compound, but rarely appeared in levels above its relatively high legal limit, DEP spokesman Fred Mumford said.

Tests for mercury were conducted only in South Jersey counties, where it has turned up in the past, and 14 wells were found to be contaminated.

source: http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey/index.ssf?/base/news-5/107847114873000.xml 5mar04