04/02/2019 - A Compliance Well in name only: MW-103s
At the 4/2/2019 CARD Meeting, the DEQ revealed that on March 1, 2019, the DEQ decided with the Asst AG that Gelman would not have to take action after all because a compliance well, MW-103s, had reached 85 ppb two months in a row as previously agreed to by the DEQ/AG but not Gelman.
The well was assigned as a compliance well to provide an "early warning" if dioxane is about to spread outside the well prohibition zone at 85 ppb. If the well sampling showed 85 ppb or above two months in a row, that would require the company to take additional action to prevent this if there were two consecutive monthly dioxane readings of 85 ppb. Gelman convinced the DEQ and AG not to enforce that requirement.
This news could have / should have been revealed at the March CARD meetings. And CARD stakeholders should have been involved all along in the decision making process leading up to the private meeting between the DEQ, AG & Gelman. The fact that CARD was not involved in the process and even kept in the dark for at least a month is troubling. Here's the point in the meeting video when the MW-103s issue was brought revealed.
The argument that Gelman used to convince the state to drop the need for additional action went something like this:
The 85 ppb is based on the state's old 85 ppb cleanup standard;
The state's new cleanup standard is 7.2 ppb and applying that to the Gelman site consent judgment is being negotiated privately by the parties to the court case.
Since that negotiation may result in a different number, the requirement based on 85 ppb should be ignored.
Somehow the AG and the DEQ accepted this bizarre reasoning.
Had DEQ's new 7.2 ppb cleanup standard been established in a more timely fashion instead of taking more than 7 years, and had it been applied to the compliance well in place of the 85 ppb, then the company would have been out of compliance several years earlier!
Documents shared at 4/2/2019 CARD Meeting:
We public stakeholders could see dropping the requirement if the state's cleanup standard had loosened, but certainly not if the standard has tightened as has happened. (The 7.2 ppb is still not applied to the Gelman site two years after it was made the cleanup standard.)