Hanover
The land — known as the Rennie Farm — formerly played host to several thousand pounds of animal carcasses from 1960s-era medical school experiments involving radioactive isotopes.
After contractors working for Dartmouth in June found waste that wasn’t uncovered during a 2011 exhumation of the site, the school submitted plans to dig up the remaining detritus and treat a chemical plume that entered a neighboring family’s well.
The water treatment plan, as college contractor Jim Wieck described it on Thursday, involves the installation of several pumps to siphon away the contaminant, a substance known as 1,4-dioxane that the Environmental Protection Agency classifies as a probable carcinogen.
“It’s like wrapping our arms around the whole thing and containing it — putting it in a box,” Wieck told the crowd of roughly 30 who gathered on Thursday afternoon around a tent where administrators had set up a screen and projector.
As the cleanup goes forward, Dartmouth remains at odds with a group of at least 36 neighbors who in July circulated a petition demanding a more aggressive plan at the more than 200-acre site off rural Hanover Center Road.
State water and nuclear regulators this month signed off on the excavation plan, which college contractors said would begin next week and last only a few days.
One extra piece of water monitoring that Wieck revealed on Thursday appeared to be in response to a demand in the neighbors’ petition — namely, that the college test for 1,4-dioxane on all sides of the burial site, not just in the direction officials believed the plume to be traveling.
The plume is headed northeast, but a slide in Wieck’s presentation showed four new wells that he planned to place to the south and west. Those monitoring stations were not based on scientific data, Wieck said.
Rather, he said, the wells were going in because “concerns have been expressed that we are not confident we have it all enclosed.”
The reaction from residents in attendance was mixed.
Peter Spiegel, a signatory to the petition who is also Dartmouth’s former chair of radiology, praised Wieck’s work but said he still had doubts.
“Your monitoring seems to be very comprehensive and very thorough, and I compliment you on that —” Spiegel began.
“Thank you,” Wieck said.
“But my real concern is the treatment,” Spiegel said.
Spiegel said he was concerned, given that some of the highest levels of 1,4-dioxane were measured in the burial site this spring, that a contamination source remained in the ground.
“My sense is you have something in there — maybe it’s a drum that leaked,” Spiegel said. “I am somewhat perplexed why you don’t take an aggressive stance on that.”
Wieck countered that something as large as a drum likely would have been removed in 2011 — or, he added, picked up by a recent ground penetrating radar survey of the site.
Ellen Waitzkin, a doctor who is one of the co-authors of the petition, asked why Dartmouth planned to dig up only a 30-by-30-foot area around the area where new waste was found.
For comparison, the neighbors’ petition asks that the college re-excavate the entire acre where animals originally were buried.
“Is the obstacle cost,” Waitzkin asked, “or is it a scientific reason?”
Last month, a college spokesperson estimated that the last five years of work had cost about $5 million.
Wieck replied that the obstacle was not cost — rather, he said, hollowing out the full acre runs the risk of disturbing whatever chemicals may remain in the ground there.
“We could potentially make the matter worse” by digging too much before completing the pumping program, Wieck said at another point in the meeting.
He estimated that water from the system would be drinkable in less than five years.
In the interim, Waitzkin asked, “What would you say to the neighbors who are in the path of the plume now?”
“We would not remove the risk by removing it all,” Wieck told her, referring to the soil on the site. Furthermore, he said, he will keep track of the chemical plume so that neighbors don’t drink contaminated water.
Later, Spiegel said he had been trying to sell his property, which lies to the south on Ferson Road, but was worried that concerns about the dump site would hamper the effort.
“I’ve been told by a realtor that the presence of this issue won’t help it to sell,” he said. “It is becoming a tangible issue for neighbors who are thinking of retiring or selling.”
Spiegel asked Dartmouth and its contractors to be as transparent as possible, so that the possibility of contamination would not deter buyers
Dartmouth officials present on Thursday assured neighbors that they were working to the same end: cleaning up the site quickly and thoroughly, while keeping those nearby safe.
“Our goal is the same as yours,” Ellen Arnold, associate general counsel for campus services, told the residents.
Also in attendance on Thursday was Charles Watts, president of Clym Environmental Services and supervisor both of the 2011 dig and next week’s follow-up.
In a short presentation, Watts described how his workers had missed the bags of animal carcasses that they now are returning to remove.
At the time, college records did not indicate how deep the waste was buried or how much there was, he said, so the only way to know that it was gone was to inspect each of the 43 burial plots visually.
That required digging up the entire acre, which, he said later, meant he “had to push the college” to proceed.
In one plot, No. 28, workers dug about 6 feet before they encountered groundwater, which obscured their view of the waste. Nevertheless, a contractor working a mechanical excavator reported that he hit bedrock, Watts said.
“We assumed it was bottom,” Watts said in an interview after the event, but “it appears we were incorrect in that assumption.”
Afterward, Spiegel approached Michael Cimis, the college’s senior associate director of environmental health and safety.
Spiegel told Cimis that he was “not quite reassured” but that the presentation — and the research from Wieck, the water expert — had been thorough. Wieck, he said, was a “man of integrity.”
“We’ll just have to wait and see,” he told a reporter later.
The public meeting with college administrators and state officials will take place on the Dartmouth campus. The gathering is scheduled for Sept. 13 at 6 p.m. in Alumni Hall, which is upstairs in the Hopkins Center for the Arts.
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or at 603-727-3242.