Hanover
The man standing next to it looked worried, they remember.
“Don’t panic,” he told them.
That day, Ivan and Olga Gorlov, researchers at the Geisel School of Medicine who live in a shady, quiet clearing off Hanover Center Road, became the second family to learn that their drinking water contained a toxic substance believed to have leaked from a Dartmouth College laboratory waste dump site.
This newest contamination was a shock both to the Gorlovs and to college officials, leaving them to wonder who is safe from the spreading chemical.
For the past year, Dartmouth has been mapping the northwesterly advance of an underground plume of chemicals from the Rennie Farm, the school’s 1960s-era burial site for laboratory animals. Not only is the Gorlov home located to the northeast, it stands on a hill and nearly a mile away, on the border with Lyme.
Like other nearby residents, the Gorlovs in past months had received at least one letter from the college warning of the plume.
At first, Ivan Gorlov said, “We disregarded it — we thought it could never happen.”
It was a neighbor who persuaded the family to commission a test. The idea, Gorlov said, was to secure “peace of mind”: If one day they needed to sell their house, they could show the negative results to buyers.
“We could offer them proof we were clean,” he said.
Instead, college contractors found the chemical in question, a substance called 1,4-dioxane that appears in laboratory solvents and some household products, at a concentration of 0.28 parts per billion — about a tenth of New Hampshire’s standard for ambient water quality.
The Environmental Protection Agency classifies 1,4-dioxane as a probable human carcinogen, and says long-term exposure to the substance could cause kidney and liver damage.
The finding was something no one, including Dartmouth officials and the state regulators who oversee them, had expected.
“This is a serious surprise,” Jim Wieck, the college’s environmental contractor, said last week during a meeting at the dump site. “Based on the data we had, it really didn’t look like it was going that way.”
“Given the well’s distance from the site, this detection is indeed surprising and was not expected,” Paul Rydel, the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services official handling the case, said in an email.
After ordering a confirmatory sample — it came back within a few days with a slightly higher level of 1,4-dioxane, 0.30 ppb — Dartmouth last week alerted neighbors to the contamination.
Although Wieck and his team are working to determine how the dioxane traveled almost a mile off its projected course and through a hill, their operating theory is that the Gorlovs’ 300-foot-deep well siphoned the contaminated water from a fracture in the underlying bedrock.
The only way to track the movements of 1,4-dioxane along the fractures, Wieck said last week, is to monitor residents’ wells. Keeping tabs on every crack in the bedrock is “just not possible,” he said.
Since these were the first tests of the Gorlovs’ well, they don’t know how long they may have been drinking water tainted with 1,4-dioxane.
Yet in some ways, the Gorlovs acknowledge, they are better off than the Higginses, the first neighbors known to have encountered the contamination.
The Higgins family, who live a short distance downhill from the dump site on Rennie Road, learned more than a year ago that their well had twice the state-sanctioned limit for dioxane.
Before that, they experienced dizzy spells, skin peeling in their mouths and sores on their bodies, all of which they said subsided when they stopped using their water.
They have held talks with Dartmouth about possible compensation, but according to their attorney, Norwich’s Geoffrey Vitt, those have stalled.
The Gorlovs, by contrast, said they hadn’t noticed changes to their physical health.
“I don’t feel anything unusual, except anxiety and bad sleep,” Ivan Gorlov said. “We’re trying to keep life as normal as possible, but it’s always in the back of your mind.”
Although the Gorlovs are facing their situation with a sense of humor — chuckling, for instance, over the Dartmouth contractor’s choice of words when he told them not to “panic” in their driveway — the contamination weighs on them in many ways, some of them unexpected.
Washing dishes was a calming exercise for Gorlov; now, it reminds him of the well. And as the couple sat at their kitchen table on Friday evening, they referenced their young daughter, who was playing in the next room.
The Gorlovs pointed out that, although the EPA’s statistics indicate the average human can take years to develop cancer from ingesting small quantities of 1,4-dioxane, every person is different, and any concentration of the chemical carries some risk.
“No one knows what the susceptibility is for the little ones,” Gorlov said, gesturing to the child.
Originally from Russia, the Gorlovs came to Hanover from Houston in 2013 — more than a year after the college first discovered 1,4-dioxane on the Rennie Farm.
Had they known, Gorlov said, “We would have never bought this house.”
Olga Gorlova — in the Russian language, her surname reflects her gender — questioned why Dartmouth had not warned the entire neighborhood as soon as they found the contaminant in the dump site in 2012.
“They should be more open with the public,” she said.
At the time, Dartmouth has said, its hydrological data indicated that the chemical was not migrating from the Rennie Farm.
“They should be more aggressive in telling people about possible risk, now that our well has tested positive,” Gorlov added.
The college, for its part, has opened up in recent months, as a group of concerned residents circulated a petition and lobbied a wide range of authorities — Dartmouth administrators, town officials, state regulators and legislators — to intervene and expand the scope of the cleanup.
Dartmouth has been sending semi-regular letters to neighbors, and has launched a website where it posts those communications and other information. The page can be accessed at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~ehs/rennie.html.
Things are still sinking in for the family. Gorlova said on Friday that she hadn’t yet had the chance to tell her mother, who lives with them but is visiting family in Australia, what had happened.
Contractors are scheduled to arrive on Monday to install a water filter in their well, the Gorlovs said. For now, the family is drinking bottled water provided by the college.
Asked whether he would use his water again once the system was in place, Gorlov nearly instantly replied, “Yes, yes.”
Gorlova looked at him. “Really? You’ll use it?”
He looked back. A pause.
“Probably not.”
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.