Officials in Carroll County have promised to keep testing wells for gas additives in the Gamber area and are pushing for a timely resolution, even if no one responsible for the pollution is found.
Representatives of the Carroll County Health Department and the Maryland Department of the Environment went before the Carroll County Environmental Advisory Council on Wednesday to update them on contaminations around the county, and assured the council that residents in Gamber would soon see more testing and investigation.
Charles Zaleski, Assistant Director of Environmental Health, said they were working on a schedule to keep testing wells around the intersection of state routes 91 and 32, where gasoline additives such as methyl-tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) and benzene have been found in several sources of drinking water. The county will even continue to test the wells where MTBE concentrations are below the state’s action level of 20 parts per billion, just in case contaminations return, said Ed Singer, director of Environmental Health.
“We’ve had sites in Carroll where cases have been closed, and we’ve come back several years later to find problems again,” Singer said. To keep up, wells in the area will be tested at least once every six months until the case is closed, he said.
Part of the problem in Gamber has been identifying a responsible party in an area littered with old and new gasoline storage tanks ? each a possible source of leaks, said MDE Oil Control Program Administrator Herb Meade.
Environmental Advisory Council Member Sher Horosko pushed for a cutoff point to the investigations, where MDE would stop looking for the source and move directly to cleanup. “I don’t want to see ? citizens strung out for 10 years while we’re searching for the responsible parties,” Horosko said.
With the planned installation of six more monitoring wells in Gamber, the state should have a more complete picture of the pollution within six months, Meade said. Then, he said, the state should know if a single party can shoulder the blame and burden for further investigation and cleanup.
