Why Wasn't E Plume Caught Earlier?

Why Wasn't E Plume Caught Earlier?

From 1994 to 2000, the company did not sample monitoring well MW-30d, even though it was the only E unit monitoring well between the core and Evergreen.

Sampling of this well was halted in spite of the contamination in the well having an upward trend and a reading of 9 ppb when they last sampled it on August 8, 1993.

Sampling resumed starting February 16, 2001, four years after PLS purchased Gelman Sciences and only after the E unit contamination showed up in newly installed wells in other parts of the site.

When sampling resumed, the dioxane levels were already above 60 ppb.

The latest reading in 2002 was over 100 ppb.

Had PLS/GSI been acting in good faith, MW-30d would have been sampled all along, the investigation of the E unit contamination could have begun up to seven years earlier, and maybe the contamination of the City’s Northwest supply well could have been prevented.

To this day, PLS’s submittals of sampling data for MW-30d fail to include the samples from 1993 and before -- even though that data was in GSI’s 1995 database.

UPDATE: MW-30d's dioxane levels rose to 1626 ppb by 2011.