PIERMONT — The town began offering residents discounted arsenic tests last week after a resident reported unsafe arsenic levels in their private well last month.
The town recommends that residents, especially those in the area between Four Corners and the Haverhill town line along Route 10, arrange with the Selectboard office to pick up kits to test their water for the carcinogen, which is colorless, odorless and tasteless and has been linked to skin and bladder cancers.
“We thought this would be a good opportunity to try to put out a little bit of public awareness and to attempt to facilitate people getting their water tested, so they know whether they need to take action or not,” Selectboard Chairman Rick Daley said.
If tests come back with high arsenic levels, well owners can install reverse osmosis filtration systems, Daley said. These systems can range from a few hundred dollars to multiple thousands.
“Any town resident that wants to have their water tested can reach out to the town administrator and arrange for a pickup of one of these water testing kits,” Daley said.
Arsenic naturally occurs in soil and bedrock and can get into wells as they’re drilled, said Celia Chen, a professor of aquatic ecology at Dartmouth College.
“When you drill a well down into the water table and that geology has arsenic in the rocks, then it ends up in the water,” Chen said.
It can also seep into wells through arsenic-based pesticides that were widely used in the first half of the century, according to the National Cancer Institute.
The concentration of arsenic can change over time due to factors such as differences in groundwater flow. Drought duration has also been associated with increased arsenic exposure in domestic wells, according to a 2021 national study published in Environmental Science & Technology.
The elevated bladder cancer rates in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine have been linked to the region’s high arsenic in private wells, according to a 2016 National Cancer Institute study.
Within Northern New England, rates of arsenic in water vary widely. New Hampshire’s geology has more arsenic than Vermont’s, Chen said. Due to the Granite State’s “highly fractured bedrock, even wells within short distances can present very different water quality,” according to the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services.
The department found that 25% of New Hampshire wells have arsenic levels higher than 5 parts per billion, according to a 2021 study. While there is no “safe” level of arsenic, the Environmental Protection Agency requires public water systems to be 10 parts per billion or lower, and New Hampshire requires 5 parts per billion.
NHDES recommends that private well owners test their water for arsenic and most other contaminants every three to five years. Bacteria and nitrates are recommended yearly.
As Piermont has no municipal water supply, its 769 residents generally rely on private wells that aren’t managed or tested by the town.
Tad Nunez, a five-year resident of Piermont, picked up one of the test kits on Wednesday, the day the town began offering them.
Nunez, who had been using Lebanon’s municipal water for 35 years before moving to Piermont, said that he appreciated the town providing a discount on the test kits sent by the Williston, Vt.,-based environmental testing company Endyne.
At no cost to the town, Endyne is selling Arsenic tests to Piermont residents for $22.50, which would otherwise be $25. A more general test is also available for $185 that looks for total coliform/E.Coli, arsenic, nitrate, nitrite, fluoride, first-draw lead, uranium and gross alpha.
Residents can arrange the pickup through the Selectboard office at 603-272-9181 to ensure there are enough kits available.
Nunez’s tank was “clean as a whistle” when he got it tested after it was drilled five years ago, with just traces of sulfur, but he had been meaning to get it retested, he said on a Thursday phone interview.
He has sent his water to the lab, but was “a bit taken aback” that it might be two to three weeks before the results come back from the Endyne lab in Lebanon, he said.
If arsenic test results come back positive, Chen recommends a call to the Drinking Water and Groundwater Bureau in the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services.
“They have lots of information on what you should do, what kinds of filtration, what kinds of remediation,” she said.
If a pattern of high arsenic begins to appear in the town, Piermont officials “would start researching to see if maybe there’s grant money available,” Daley said. “But right now we’re just, you know, helping facilitate testing.”