The Utilities Commission and Mayor and Council met Monday, May 19, 2014.
Part 1 Town Requests Hospital Oil Cleanup Plan Revisions
Chestertown Utilities Manager Bill Sipes reported that the Town requested changes to the underground oil contamination cleanup plan at the Chester River Medical Center site as it is currently proposed by UM Shore Health consulting group.
Changes would include:
• Makes sure bond or some type of financial assurance is in place.
• The cleaning program should be scaled back from 6 wells to 4 wells for Ivy-Sol injection.
• The current plan to inject the cleaning chemical Ivy-Sol into the ground is a “static plan” and the Town recommends that instead, recovery wells should continue running during the injection process. Currently Ivy-Sol is considered by the Utilities Manager as being an environmentally safe, biodegradable mixture of soap and alcohol products.
• Well-monitoring systems need to be reevaluated. Leaked oil may be at different depths than the well are monitoring so that oil may go undiscovered. “Monitoring wells do not cover the entire site and you could have contaminated water between testing sites,” Sipes says.
Sipes says that Shore Health will be submitting a revised cleanup plan to the Maryland Department of the Environment and that some of the changes have been accepted while others have not. One important reason to make sure that the cleanup is done properly is because of the contaminant’s proximity to the water treatment plant
“When we see the full-scale plan it’s going to be more intense,” Sipes said.
Tomorrow: Part 2—Calvert Street delegation seeks safety upgrades for the neighborhood,
David Foster says
Editor,
That was a really great presentation by Bob Sipes and it clearly shows that there are still a large number of important unanswered questions about this Corrective Action Plan and the proposed studies associated with it. I also was very concerned to hear once again that the Hospital had previously sought to conduct a study and halt the corrective action without ever informing the town or the locally impacted citizens.
This is precisely why it is so critical to recognize the importance of citizen participation in these cases and why MDE has previously said: “Public Participation in MDE programs is a paramount goal of the department and the agency is committed to providing extensive opportunities for public participation and involvement.”