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Military Pollution Threatens Omaha’s Water

State Senator Don Preister
District 5

The following “Midlands Voices” guest editorial was originally published in the June 10, 2008 Omaha World-Herald under the title, “It’s too risky to start using new well field.”

Omaha cannot afford a risk to its water supply. Safe water is critical to the health, recreation and economic well-being of our state’s largest population center. But with the Metropolitan Utilities District’s new well field located adjacent to a Superfund site, the future safety of Omaha’s water is not guaranteed.

Military chemicals contaminate groundwater and surface water at the former Nebraska Ordnance Plant near Mead in Saunders County — just two miles southwest of MUD’s new well field.

The site has been on the EPA Superfund list since 1990 and remains contaminated with volatile organic compounds, including trichloroethylene (TCE), and explosives, including RDX.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also has primary responsibility for cleanup at the sites of the Cornhusker Army Ammunition Plant in Hall County and the Hastings Naval Ammunition Depot. Although both were designated Superfund sites in the mid-1980s, they remain contaminated.

RDX is a possible human carcinogen. TCE can cause impaired heart function, liver damage and cancer through inhalation, skin contact and drinking. In 2001, a draft EPA risk assessment found that TCE is up to 40 times more carcinogenic than previously thought. The National Research Council found in 2006 that “the evidence on carcinogenic risk and other health hazards from exposure to trichloroethylene has strengthened since 2001.”

The NRC urged federal agencies to finalize their risk assessment to enable expeditious risk management decisions, such as tightening regulatory standards. The dangers are real.

It is not clear why these chemicals are still in the groundwater. Nebraska state policy calls for accomplishing cleanup in 20 years or less. However, the Corps of Engineers, which has primary cleanup responsibility at the Mead site, has selected cleanup strategies that will take at least 130 years to complete. The corps did not consider a 20-year strategy at Mead, and its current cleanup plans for the Grand Island and Hastings sites estimate that cleanup there will not be completed for another 40 to 50 years.

Scientific evidence of the water problems at the Mead site has been mounting since contamination was uncovered in a private well in 1989. Although TCE above the regulatory action level appeared in other local groundwater samples, initial groundwater remediation did not begin until 2001 — 12 years later. Six residences in Saunders County currently use alternate water supplies; four use carbon treatment systems.

Despite the Mead site’s 17-year-old Superfund status, we do not fully know the nature and extent of toxins contaminating it. In August 2007, the Corps of Engineers said it was surprised to learn that the contamination was not contained in three areas and that its cleanup strategies were not as effective as previously believed.

In October 2007, the corps admitted that it was caught off guard by the discovery of TCE in groundwater contamination plumes previously thought to contain only explosives.

All of this poses serious health risks to Nebraskans. And the slow, frequently ineffective cleanup and the ongoing discoveries of spreading contamination make risky any imminent startup of MUD’s new Platte West well field.

Neither MUD nor the corps has established definitively that site contaminants will not pollute Omaha’s water supply. Indeed, MUD’s 404 permit, issued by the corps, acknowledges thatMUD’snewpumping may cause contamination to move, interfere with the corps’ cleanup and contaminate drinking water.

Long before the corps acknowledged its faulty containment system, it expected that MUD’s pumping would cause movement of the plume farther east. Now that it is clear that the contamination is not contained near MUD’s new well field, we need to ask additional questions:

• How far east and south from the Mead site does the contamination go?

• Are the corps’ and MUD’s monitoring wells properly placed and numerous enough to detect movement of contamination from MUD’s new pumping when it occurs?

• Is the corps’ response plan adequate to tell us as soon as elevated toxins are detected?

• What is MUD’s contingency plan if toxins are pumped into Omaha’s water system?

Local public officials should ask these critical questions and demand responses before it is too late. Our state’s water supply and Nebraska’s residents deserve protection.