The path to TCE: Well water
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| Morris Stokes, 81, gestures while talking about his garden behind his Bynum home. Stokes uses well water to irrigate his crops. The Army tests his water annually to make sure it's free of a toxic chemical that workers dumped at the Anniston Army Depot for years. Photo: Jeremy Cox/Special to The Star |
In the tensest moment so far in the Anniston Army Depot's TCE drama, more than 100 angry residents faced down the Anniston Army Depot's environmental staff in the summer of 2002, demanding an answer to one question: Is our well water safe?
Six years later, that question remains unanswered.
For years, test wells just beyond the depot's southeast boundary showed, at most, only a trace amount of TCE in the groundwater below. Then, as if out of nowhere, three wells in March 2002 spiked to 150 parts per billion.
The federal drinking water limit is 5 parts per billion.
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What was most alarming was that one of the wells was halfway between the depot and Coldwater Spring, a bulwark of purity and the main provider of the region's drinking water.
Sparked by The Star's coverage of the newly discovered contamination, fear spread. One of Anniston's leading environmental groups, Community Against Pollution, complained that the Army hadn't fully informed residents about the problem. Talk of a class-action lawsuit against the Army easily found traction, particularly since many residents already were locked in a legal battle against another polluter, Monsanto.
How the government defines "risk" and how residents define it are often two different things. Risk, from the federal government's point of view, depends on dosage in the drinking water, said Dr. David Ozonoff, a TCE expert with Boston University.
"The cancer risk for any individual is probably small," he said. "Even if you doubled or tripled your risk by exposure to TCE, a small risk is still small. So from the individual point of view, I don't think there's a cause for panic."
Speaking about national implications, Ozonoff added, "On the other hand, when you expose giant numbers of people (to TCE-laced water) like we do across the country, the risk piles up."
The Army and the Environmental Protection Agency responded to the public outcry at the depot swiftly by retesting the 18 wells that were routinely monitored for TCE at the time. To their relief, the contaminant had returned to normal levels.
With that, the TCE controversy receded again from the public spotlight, leaving a small contingent of Army engineers, federal regulators and concerned residents to grapple with the mystery. Their best guess is that drilling that spring at a new 600-foot Army test well just south of Alabama 202 agitated TCE in the groundwater, making it more detectable up to several miles away.
"All we can figure is we changed the dynamics" of the groundwater, said Pat Smith, the depot's environmental engineer. "The plume is stabilized and whenever you stir it up, you're going to see changes."
In a 1999 study — before the 150 parts-per-billion sample — the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry pronounced the water from private wells near the depot safe to drink. But because of the area's complex geology and the unpredictability of TCE's movements underground, the report hedged on that statement.
"Private wells may … exist in areas with elevated TCE concentrations, even if adjacent areas do not," the agency wrote.
No other high concentrations of TCE have popped up outside the post, except at a catfish-stocked pond along the depot's southern boundary. Samples showed contaminant levels routinely ranging between 80 and 110 parts per billion in the water, prompting the Army last September to buy the property from its owner, T.A. Cooper, for $185,000.
And annual tests of dozens of homes served by well water in Bynum and Eastaboga have never turned up a violation of the federal drinking water standard.
Regulators, however, can't be certain that they've identified every well that should be tested. The state of Alabama doesn't track who is tapping into its aquifers. That means there's nothing to stop someone from sinking a well outside the southeast corner of the depot, where officials are most concerned about TCE contamination.
Nearly half of the original 80 homes tested under the program, which began in 2000, have switched to municipal water sources, which have much lower risk of TCE contamination, Smith said. About 4,300 people live within a mile of the depot's boundaries, the federal government estimated in the mid-1990s.
Some residents say they can't afford to make the switch.
The Army, however, says it will pay to install a water-treatment system if a private well shows high levels of TCE. In some instances, it will even pay to connect the homes to municipal lines.
A few years ago, Tina Dale paid to have an Anniston Water Works line extended from the street to within a few paces of her doorstep. But the 81-year-old Bynum woman is sticking with her well water all the same.
"They said it was safe, so …" she said.
Morris Stokes, an 81-year-old former depot employee, spends his retirement tending a small plot of sweet corn, okra and other vegetables on his spread off Beck Road, about a mile south of the installation.
Once a year, an Army contractor dons latex gloves and opens the spigot attached to Stokes' well house. A few months later, a clump of spreadsheets arrives in his mailbox, telling him his water is safe. Stokes saves the papers in a beige folder, but he isn't sure why he bothers.
"They really don't mean that much to me," he said, laughing.
Jeremy Cox was a 2008 Knight Fellow in Community Journalism at The Anniston Star and the University of Alabama.
