WELLS RIVER — Seven months after hundreds of gallons of oil spilled out of two fuel tanks 75 feet from the well that supplies drinking water in Wells River, the village has started hauling in drinking water and is still working through a complicated cleanup process.
The village trustees had been working on how to bring in water since the January spill, but it was “very, very difficult” to find a company or companies willing to do the job, village Clerk Mary Schilke said Monday.
The trustees finally found three companies willing to do it in early July and as of last week, they are trucking in water on a rotating schedule from nearby Woodsville up the steep and narrow Royston Ridge Road to the Wells River reservoir on weekdays. From there, the water is being pumped down to the Wells River Water System’s 120 customers.
The village well was turned off last Monday to avoid pulling any oil into the water supply. Some cleanup is ongoing, but environmental consultants, the village and the state of Vermont are still working out the best long-term solution.
The temporary fix now in place aims to address the Jan. 7 spill of about 600 gallons of fuel oil when a valve in an above-ground storage system at 31 Main St. North failed, according to a report from environmental consultants Wilcox & Barton. The oil traveled through a wooden floor, into a crawl space and into the ground.
The building, owned by Wells River Historic Housing Limited Partnership and managed by Evernorth, a Burlington-based nonprofit that develops affordable housing across New England, houses seven apartments, the Wells River Post Office and a retail space.
Shap Smith, an attorney for Evernorth, declined to comment Wednesday morning.
The cleanup is being managed by Wilcox & Barton and overseen by multiple agencies in the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation. The department’s Drinking and Groundwater Protection Division has been involved since the very beginning.
After initial tests in early January found that there was no contamination in the drinking well, roughly 75 feet from the spill location, Wells River was allowed to continue pumping water.
However, oil has been detected in nearby monitoring wells. The water supply and groundwater are being regularly tested to track the levels and spread of contamination.
The department has “strongly recommended since January that the system stop using the well” because of the “risk that at any time contamination could reach the well,” Matt Hunt, who has been overseeing the cleanup for the Drinking Water Division, said in an email.
If contamination entered the water system, the division would have issued an immediate “Do Not Drink” order that would continue until the well is clean because of an immediate risk to public health.
Trucking in water is expected to cost $100,000 a month and will continue until a longer-term solution is in place hopefully this fall, Schilke said.
“It does not affect the water bill,” Schilke said.
The cost of water hauling and remediation efforts are expected to be covered by Evernorth’s insurance, Village Trustees Chairwoman Jean Welch said. It has, however, been difficult to secure the payments so far and the costs keep adding up.
“The only way it affects the consumers is we’re asking them to try to cut back and save water,” Schilke said.
While water is being trucked into the village, the Wells River Village Trustees are asking residents to avoid “activities which may use large amounts of water like filling swimming pools, watering lawns and gardens, and washing vehicles and paved surfaces” in order to cut down on costs, according to a legal notice.
Schilke went a step further, asking residents to consider doing laundry or washing dishes less frequently, for example once a week instead of every day. But, she said so far there has been no reduction in water use.
In the first week, the three companies hired by the village hauled about 123,000 gallons of water, which is in line with typical water use, Village Water Operator Jeff Morin said.
A1 Water Delivery of St. Albans, Vt., Henshaw Farms of Chesterfield, Mass. and M.E. Matthews Inc. from Westmoreland, N.H., are each managing a few days a week. When they are in the village, the water haulers and water operator run a constant circuit driving to Woodsville, testing the water, hauling their trucks up Royston Ridge, pumping out the water and testing it again for chlorine content and heading back to Woodsville.
On Tuesday, Morin and John Matthews of M.E. Matthews Inc. expected to make seven trips between Wells River and Woodsville to transport and test the drinking water.
Even in the fair summer conditions, Matthews said, the route to the reservoir is problematic. Though his truck can haul up to 6,400 gallons of water, he said he is only filling it half full for fear that a full vehicle wouldn’t make it up the hill.
In addition to temporarily switching water sources for the village, there are also temporary treatment systems in place above ground and underground that are cleaning up the oil.
The above-ground system is redirecting groundwater, which would typically flow from the contaminated area down to the Wells River, into a holding tank that then pushes the water through a large filtration system “like a water filter in a home or a water bottle on a much larger scale,” Max Saylor, Vermont DEC Site Management Division project manager said.
Underground, a similar system is extracting and treating soil vapor.
The only way to return to using the well is to ensure that any trace of oil is completely removed, Morin said.
The village, state and environmental consultants are working under a tight deadline to get a longer-term solution in place before the winter, when weather conditions would make hauling water even more difficult.
In winter conditions, Royston Ridge Road will become difficult for trucks to navigate, and the water pumping system will be susceptible to freezing during and between trips to fill the tank, Morin said at the reservoir Tuesday.
“As far as I know there is no plan in place” if a long-term solution is not complete by winter, Welch said Wednesday.
The current frontrunner for a long-term cleanup solution is excavating all of the soil beneath the building at 31 Main Street North and all the way over to the supply well to remove any potential oil that is still in the ground, Saylor said. The Site Management Division deals with hazardous site cleanup and also is overseeing the project.
The department is still evaluating how feasible this option is, especially before the ground freezes.
If the timeline doesn’t seem realistic, Saylor said there are “several other remedial options that we’ve considered and are possible” and the team will “immediately” move on the “next most effective route” to avoid wasting any time.”
The environmental consultants proposed eight potential options to clean up the site. Saylor said there are three that could be used alone or in combination, including continued underground vapor extraction, multi-phase extraction which would use a vacuum to remove oil, groundwater and soil vapor at the same time and air sparging, which would pump air into wells that force the contaminants out of the soil and water and into an extraction system.
With these options, unlike with excavating, it “can be kind of hard to get the very last drops and bits” of contamination cleaned up, he said.
There have been discussions of using a heated pump to transport the hauled water, which could help resolve some of the winter worries, Saylor said.
