Hanover
“I want to apologize on behalf of Dartmouth,” Rick Mills, executive vice president at the college, told a crowd of about 60 neighbors, state officials and college employees on Tuesday night in the Hopkins Center.
Dartmouth’s medical school in the 1960s and ’70s dumped several tons of test animals on a wooded hill in rural Hanover known as the Rennie Farm, and after a 2011 excavation of that waste, a toxic chemical from the site found its way into a neighboring family’s well.
Since then, college contractors have found more bags of test animals in the ground, apparently left over from the initial dig. Dartmouth says it exhumed the remains in August.
State environmental regulators and school administrators called Tuesday’s meeting after a group of concerned neighbors, who favor a more aggressive cleanup, asked for a public informational session on Dartmouth’s remedial plans.
Mills, in his remarks on Tuesday, said the college had met the relevant legal and scientific standards in its management of the site, but had failed in another important way: being “a good neighbor.”
“I’m really sorry you’re here as neighbors because of what we did,” Mills said, “but we’re here to work on this.”
To Mills’ knowledge, he said afterward, it was the first time Dartmouth had offered a mea culpa for the contamination in a public setting.
The expressions of regret came from state officials, too, including from the water quality regulators overseeing the project.
“I just want to start out by acknowledging this is a situation that no one wanted,” New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services Commissioner Thomas Burack said near the beginning of the event.
For college and state employees, the goal of the meeting was to explain the next phase of the remediation, which will involve the installation of a pumping system to rid the groundwater of the contaminant, a substance called 1,4-dioxane, which is classified as a probable human carcinogen.
Dartmouth’s contractors are hoping to install the pumps by the end of the year, they say. In the meantime, a test last month found the contaminant in a nearby stream — its first recorded appearance in surface water.
This summer, a group of 36 neighbors petitioned Dartmouth to dramatically expand its cleanup. After Tuesday night’s presentation on the water treatment plan, many of those residents peppered the officials with questions — and criticism.
One of the petitioners, Peter Spiegel, who is the college’s former chairman of radiology, asked state officials on Tuesday why they had not required Dartmouth to directly treat the underground plume of dioxane — or expand its water monitoring system — sooner after the first discovery in spring 2012.
The 1,4-dioxane was found in a private well down the hill last fall, which was the first time Dartmouth tested that water source.
“I’m trying to understand … why nothing was done in this four-year interval,” Spiegel said. “Why would the state allow this contamination to exist, obviously moving, and not mandate that there need to be something incisive done about it?”
“Right or wrong, the decision that was made at that point was to continue monitoring and figure out what it was,” Paul Rydel, the NHDES official handling the case, said of the dioxane discovery: “Was it just a blip?”
“If it were hindsight, maybe we could have gone further or faster with the monitoring wells,” he added.
Spiegel pressed the question: “Why would you wait so long to do something incisive to try to get rid of this material? Is this typical of the way the state works?”
James Wieck, the college’s water remediation contractor, jumped in to explain that in 2012, data from the early monitoring wells had indicated the contaminant likely would “naturally attenuate.”
Duncan Syme, who lives near the path of the chemical plume, expressed concern for his and his neighbors’ property values, and asked what Dartmouth planned to do to make them whole.
“When I go to sell my house, my property is now worth less,” Syme said, emphasizing each syllable. “Everybody on Rennie Road’s house is now worth less … and I want to know: What is Dartmouth going to do about that?”
Mills said the college would address residents’ potential real estate issues, though he said he “didn’t have the answer” at the moment.
The Rennie Farm property once was home to an old farmhouse where Dartmouth put up employees and students, and residents on Tuesday questioned whether the college had attempted to contact them and gauge their health.
Maureen O’Leary, the school’s director of environmental health and safety, said a survey was underway to do just that.
Neighbors also criticized the setting of the meeting — in the Hopkins Center, which is college property — and its transparency.
A camera operator from local cable access channel CATV8 was turned away 30 minutes before the event began, and the residents wanted to know why.
After the meeting, college spokeswoman Diana Lawrence said she had told the cable employee to leave because she hadn’t received advance notice that someone would be filming, which college policy requires.
Event organizers later attempted to bring CATV back, but the station already had moved on to film another event, according to Dillon Walsh, CATV’s technology coordinator.
State officials promised to hold all future gatherings on non-college property.
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.
Correction
Hanover resident Duncan Syme said on Tuesday that his and his neighbors’ homes were “worth less” because of the contamination. An earlier version of this story misquoted him and was unclear about where he lives in relation to the plume.,