Cost to remove perchlorate from town water supply rises to $740,000

The cost of removing the contaminant perchlorate from water drawn by the Riverhead Water District’s newest Well, estimated at $522,000 in January, is now approaching three-quarters of a million dollars — more than a third of the cost of the well itself.

The budget for a water supply treatment system for Well 16 in Calverton has risen to $740,000. The money is being paid out of existing water district funds.

“Bids came in a little higher than anticipated,” John Collins of the water district’s engineering consulting firm H2M told the board during an April 7 public hearing on a proposal to increase the project budget.

The board unanimously voted to increase the project budget by $217,616 and award a $413,100 building and mechanical piping bid to Bensin Contracting of Holtsville.

In January, it awarded a $279,516 bid to construct the treatment vessel to Calgon Carbonate of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania firm. Bensin Contracting will construct the building to house the treatment vessel and complete the piping.

H2M will be paid engineering fees of up to $47,500 for the remediation project, bringing the new estimated total project cost to $740,116. The town board in January had set the project cost at $522,000.

The treatment system will remove completely remove perchlorate from the water supply tapped by Well 16, Collins said.

Perchlorate is both a naturally occurring and man-made chemical used in the production of rocket fuel, missiles, fireworks, flares and explosives. It is also present in some fertilizers. According to researchers at the Suffolk County Water Authority, “ammonia perchlorate was a principal ingredient in a fertilizer that was sold in the 50s and 60s” and used by farmers as an inexpensive crop fertilizer, former SCWA chairman Michael LoGrande told the Pine Barrens Research Forum in 1999.

The EPA in 2011 announced it would regulate perchlorate in drinking water because it is known to impede thyroid function in humans. Perchlorate has been linked to cancer in laboratory mice, but no studies have been done that indicate a causal connection between perchlorate and cancer in humans.

The water district drilled Well 16 in 2010 — at a cost of $1.58 million — despite initial tests indicating perchlorate in the water of about 9 or 9.5 µg/l, Collins said. In 2011, the district then increased the well’s pumping capacity in 2011 from 1,380 gallons per minute to 2,000 gallons per minute — an extra 500,000 gallons per day — bringing the total cost of the well to $2.2 million.

At a March 2011 public hearing on the proposal to expand the well’s capacity, H2M engineer Dennis Kelleher told the board the quality of the water being drawn from the well was “excellent” — despite the known perchlorate contamination, which town board members say they were not told about.

Well 16 is considered a critical water source for the Riverhead Water District — without it, the district “would have run out of water” during peak demand times in summer of 2010, Kellerher said at the March 15, 2011 public hearing on the plan to increase the new well’s capacity.

But perchlorate levels at Well 16 have been increasing since the well was constructed in 2010 and reached a maximum of 14 micrograms per liter, Collins wrote in a Sept. 11, 2014 letter to the water district.

“In accordance with the requirements of the New York State Department of Health, if perchlorate levels in a Well exceed 18 µg/l, then the well must be removed from service,” Collins wrote.

The water district took the well offline in the fall and needs to get it back online before the peak demands of summer.

Supervisor Sean Walter told RiverheadLOCAL in January he was “very unhappy” the town board was not made aware of the perchlorate contamination until recently — even though the district engineers and former superintendent knew perchlorate had been detected there since the well first came online.

Last month, Walter said he became intrigued by the idea that the contamination might be the result of jet fuel spilled nearby when a Boeing 707 on a test flight crashed in August 1959, very near the spot where Well 16 would be drilled more than 50 years later. The jet, being tested at Grumman in Calverton, crashed nose first into the Pelis farm, killing all five crew members aboard.

Eddie Pelis Jr. of Baiting Hollow vividly remembers the crash, which was just south of Sound Avenue and east of Edwards, slightly northeast of where Well 16 is today. He remembers the grisly scene of the crash site, fire trucks “tearing up” the farm field and crowds of onlookers trampling the family’s field crops.

His father was not allowed to farm the acreage around the crash for five years because of spilled fuel, Pelis said in an interview last week.

Calverton resident Janis Rottkamp came to the supervisor last month with copies of newspaper articles documenting the deadly crash, asking if the jet fuel might have something to do with the contamination.

Walter said today Water District Superintendent Mark Conklin asked H2M if the contamination might be connected to the crash.

“They told him perchlorate is found in rocket fuel, not aviation jet fuel,” Walter said. He had hoped the cash-strapped town might be able to get some financial assistance with the cleanup from Boeing or the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

“So it seems like the source, as originally suspected, is fertilizers,” Walter said.