meetings

I went to a Committee meeting on Wednesday night to support the continued testing of pesticides in well water in Stamford.
I learned a few things:
While the meeting was strictly about extending the time of the ordinance, there were questions raised concerning what is going to be done with the data.
I found that interesting.
I guess if you want to blame someone, then you look for a single source.
And in the past i have found multiple source of something affecting wells, it was published.  Some of that information was used when the CT public health code was being reviewed.  It showed that softeners which discharge the salt brine into a septic system (commonly done) added chloride to wells near the system and to the south.
The information was made public and presented every time some one came with a question concerning treating their well water.  It changed things because the homeowner was aware.
This is public health.
You find something dangerous - in this case, pesticides.
You test and tell the homeowner yes or no.  There is treatment.  It gets fixed.
This is public health!
And for the question, there is a slight pattern, in relationship to the south side of farms that have been broken up and become residential, but the pesticides were used by homeowners in there own right and so there are places that it is found that can not be "predicted".
The message?
Test!
There are other things that concern me though.
The Board seems , in private statements to be limiting the testing to the concern in regards to pesticides.
Maybe this is correct because i believe the Health Department should be on the forefront in saying things need to be tested for the sake of public health.

My list mostly involves the following metals:
lead
copper
arsenic
manganese
uranium
and the nonmetal is Radon.
Most of these are natural, but lead, copper and arsenic have man used sources.
Expect me to continue speaking.

Swan Song

In 7 days, i will no longer be the "chemist" at the Stamford Health Department.
There may be even fewer posts in this area after that.
I have allowed my RS in Connecticut to lapse as of November 30th, which shows you just how commited i am to leaving this feild.
I have kept my ACS (American Chemical Society) membership because chemistry is a very diverse feild and is involved in every part of our lives, whether it be using man-made items or natural products.

The lab at the Health Department will no longer be offering any metals testing - no iron or manganese, copper, arsenic, calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, zinc or lead.
At least until they hire someone new who is interested in these things (read what this says about the current person, who is strictly clinical).

This bathers me, but there are other labs that offer such testing, the lab has that list.

This bothers me because lead and copper still top my list of the most prevelant metals and the reasons are fairly clear - old pipes, old well pumps or pumps that failed and could not be extracted from the well, there is not natural lead and copper in this area.
Arsenic worries me because even though only 3 wells have been found at the action limit,  Arsenic was used extensively in many products and it remains a significant hazard.
Although a person has said they found mercury in their well, thay have not shared any results and that makes it hearsay and i personally think it is just some one wanting to make trouble.  No mercury has shown up in any tests submitted to me.
Uranium, one of those "natural" products has shown up in a number of wells and this does concern me.  We never could test for this, but other labs can.
Manganese is one of those discoloration metals that has the potential to be dangerous to your health at high levels.  It exists in many wells.
VOCs (Volitale Organic Compounds, think solvents) have been found in insignificant quantities (mostly due to chlorine use) throughout Stamford.
Pesticides, the big concern, have shown to be all over and very persistant in the environment.  Political and executive descions will prety much keep this as a Stamford problem, even though it is very clear to me that it is found anywhere that had some sort of usuage when the pesticide, particularly dieldren and chlordane) where legal to use.
People continue to use pesticides on lawns with great abandon, so more problems will show in the future.
This of course seems to only be a concern as far as wells are concerned.  Everything is treatable and i will continue to say there is more risk in all the other exposures that we have in eveeryday life, than form the well water.

a question of Integrety

I have been fielding a lot of issues lately and i watch how others deal with the same things and i see why people become confused or suspicious or skeptical.

In my 33 year, i have been an investigator.
My investigations have include environmental issues, forensic cases, illness investigations and insect problems.
The same method is used - you take your best guess - do as many tests as are needed to say yea or nay , refine your guess, do more tests and come up with a conclusion.
The conclusion may be nowhere near what the first guess was or it maybe exactly.
You do not worry that what you said at first contradicts what you come out with at the end.
You completely understand that first guesses can be wrong for anyone and do not worry about it.
It seems most people are afraid of this approach, they are afraid of my conclusions, but my conclusions are based on facts and it just does not matter.
So a good example is my thoughts that arsenic should be a problem in wells - it has a number of sources, but i really have not found any in well water.  A few traces, because my limit to see Arsenic is down to 1 ug/L and the EPA set limit is 10 ug/L, the CT public health has not set a lower action limit.
So i was wrong.
I did not think lead would be an issue in run well water, but instead, i find that it is and i understand that old pumps with brass fittings (which contains lead) and old solder are down in the wells.
I found that even the older water fountains might not have lead in the water until the cooling mechanism comes on.
I learn something new daily.
A sample comes in and it is suppose to be sewage - it smells like sewage, it has all the correct look and "feel" of sewage, but there is not fecal bacteria (or minimally so).  It is not sewage.  I make that conclusion and others get frightened of that statement.
What is it?  I do not know because i was looking for sewage.  More samples and even though time has passed, it is showing something odd...not sewage, but maybe fertilizer?  The evidence points to that and everyone runs from that statement because the initial assessment was that it was sewage.

finally something worth while...

I keep hearing from different places “why don’t you publish that?”
Now publishing anything has its place, for me it is to disseminate information that might not be obvious to everyone.
Lately, the things that other people have wanted me to publish are on the well water issues I see in Stamford .
The reason is because what I have seen so far does not warrant the current sole emphasis on pesticides.
“They” don’t want to deal with the pesticide issue.
You get that information here because I want discussion on it.

I get that.

I also do not slight the issue of pesticides because I think we have horribly misused them in the past and I think still in the present.

I think other issues might have even more importance to our health, but I do not know for sure and want more information.

That is what my well water update has been, until now.

Now I have found some thing that I think is important to publish.

Here it is for discussion!

The information first
                                        

Coliform bacteria (all wells)	average value 6.4 CFU	high value 3,900 CFU	total tests 6,904	Not potable	With only 1 CFU
				12.72%	1.69%
	Total addresses tested		3,236	18.48%	3.21%
Wells without pits Total addresses	5.4 CFU	500 CFU	353	27.48%	3.40%

a CFU is a colony forming unit, the way bacteria are reported by a laboratory which uses a membrane filtration method.Why is this important?
For a significant while, pitless adapters and having wells finish above ground has been considered the "gold standard" for well construction.
While wells with pits have been considered something that was a real source of contamination.
Now i have good information from well people that many of the "pitless" adapters have been poorly installed, giving a home owner a sense of security that they really were not entitled to.
What this means is that a home owner still must be vigilant, test the well for bacteria during a rainy, wet period periodically.  The fixes still are all about the seals and are usually simple.
The coliform issue is a strange one - i kind of stand in a place of saying it is not that big a deal while everyone gets all excited over it.
Coliform usually do NOT come from septic, but the soil that is everywhere...
There are places where it is an issue and i get excited about that, but a coliform is not e coli is not a major concern in my view.

Well Caps

Since they were available, pitless adapters have been strongly recommended for all wells which had "pits"  - dug 2 to 3 foot in diameter pit that a well was sunk into as much as 20 feet.  They are usually lined with stome, to prevent colapse and almost alwats had water in them, cover the actually well head.  The pits were considered a major way that surface water could get into the well.
The truth be told, in 5,000 some tests, a surprising few alctually had problems, even in the worst of conditions. 
Now pitless adapters are a good thing, they raise the well head above the ground so that water can not (or should not) penetrate, allowing normal soil to do its thing and clean the water that is taken from a well.
Today, I had two examples were the work done to setup a pitless adapter was so poor, that it made the situation worse.
One a unevenly cut casing had a loosely fitting cap place on top of it.  bacteria was found in the well.
The other, the pitless adapter was loosely attaches to the main casing, so that the seal rotted away, allowing soil bacteria to get into the well.
How do you prevent such things?  The only way I can think of is to test the water for bacteria in a heavy rain situation to see if the work holds up.

Stamford Well water -metals

Some of the issues with metals are not health related, they simply stain, everything.
Yellow, brown, black, blue.
They add pleasant and unpleasant tastes in the water.
Lead is sweet - you do not want sweet water.
Iron and manganese give a bitter flavor.
Copper is really metallic.
Lead is really bad for children under the age of six.
Copper is an essential nutrient, but too much can cause severe gastrointestinal problems.
Very high levels of manganese can cause mercury-like brain damage, small doses are good for muscle growth.
Iron is not used by the body and does nothing against it either.
Copper and lead are products of corrosion, either by water quality or by electrical problems.

Test	Average value	High			Okay	% Okay
METALS in mg/L
		above 0.3	0.2 to 0.3
iron	0.58	657	173		2234	72.91%
		above 5.0	0.5 to 5	0.05 to 0.499
manganese	0.14	8	186	745	1528	61.94%
		above 5.0
zinc	0.23	1			175	99.43%
		above 1.3	.5 to 1.3
copper	0.38	168	336		2473	83.07%
		above 0.015	0.005 to 0.015
lead	0.01	24	37		115	65.34%

Stamford Well Water - discussion on minerals and Salt

In the mineral post at first glance it might seem hardness is an issue, however if you look at what the US EPA's guidance on hardness is the problem resolves into a slight problem with about 16% of the wells having significant hardness in the water. When you look at the type of hardness, calcium hardness is much more benign than magnesium hardness, the wells with difficult water drops to less than 5%. So what is the issue here. Hard water (or water that is presented as being hard) sells softeners, which a lucrative business. The true issue, acidic water, is not as lucrative and not addressed unless a softener can be sold as well.


This next presentation is of Salts in well water, the major source of which is softener backwash. Most backwash is pumped into septic systems, which will destroy the cement of the septic and is against public health code for a very good reason. The water pumped into the septic system goes back into the water a well draws from.

Test	Average value	High			Okay	% Okay
SALTS in mg/L
		above 250	100 to 250
chlorides	105.69	441	1337		3632	67.13%
chlorides with softener	138.84	147	358		583	53.58%
chlorides without softener	69.04	0	923		2789	75.13%
		above 100	28 to 100
sodium	49.84	547	1481		2417	54.38%
sodium treated	85.74	263	371		217	25.50%
sodium untreated	51.14	577	1423		2209	52.48%
		more than 2500	500 to 2500	Above Average
potassium	25.27	0	2	281	371	56.73%
potassium treated	95.47	0	2	109	23	17.16%
potassium not treated	4.75	0	0	23	71	75.53%

The wells with problem salts that do not have softeners are linked to their neighbors softener backwash except in only 4 cases where the wells have road salt drain over them.

Well Water

I am in the process of compiling asurvey of all well water in Stamford. I have on record about 4,000 of the 5,100 wells that are in North Stamford.
I have a basic fact sheet almost completed and will post. I will also GIS the info to see any patterns.
The basic info so far shows things I have already published, softeners will pollute your own water supply and are the main reason for excess chloride in the water.
There is not much info (14 tests) on Radon, but at this point that looks pretty grim.
Discoloration from Iron and Manganese and acid water are the main issues.
Most wells are very healthy.
That is the summary.

So Your Going To buy a House? Treatment Units Neutralizers

What do you need? Why?
When approaching the issue of treatment, I find the second question the most important. So many people have an interesting response when I ask why they have the treatment unit they do. It usually goes along the lines of, "someone told me I needed it." or "it was there." or "just in case." The number of educated consumers of treatment units is minimal. A number of years ago there was a company (no longer operating in Connecticut because Consumer protection chased them out) who would scare a home owner because of all the potential problems they might have and sell them a unit that this company made that had no chance of fixing the problems that were true to that well. The reality, most well water is very good and healthy.
Okay so lets deal with the most prevalent issue, aggressive water. You might get a hint that you have this problem if you see blue-green staining in the white porcelain fixtures. If you do not notice that, you will notice when your water pipes develop small pinhole leaks and plumbers have to be called. Treatment depends on the water quality and if the water is the cause. The pH is one issue and levels below 6.4 (7 is neutral) might be an issue. I say might because if your water hardness is about 150 mg/L, the calcium will coat the pipes and prevent the acid from hurting them. So figuring out the aggressive index of the water is important. The simplest treatment is a calcium carbonate bed (marble chips) and it will raise the pH modestly and add hardness to the water, all very good. Sometimes this does not do the trick or is not applicable because either the pH is below 6 and/or there is a significant amount of hardness in the water already. In this case a feeder pump must be installed to sodium or potassium hydroxide. Those substances are dangerous and so the water should be monitored.
If the water is not the problem for the blue staining, you will need to call an electrician who knows what electrolysis is. This can be an expensive proposition, but the fix is usually fairly simple, ground the copper pipes.
Again, the first step is have your water tested by a state certified lab, then go on with it.

So you want to buy a house?...part 6-metals

Metals and the discoloration they cause! Discoloration problems are the next most prevalent problem in the well water in this area, mostly caused by deposits of iron and manganese that exist in the ground. Now iron in the water gives the water a bitter taste, but will not hurt you and unfortunately is not in a form the body can readily use either,. So irons big issue is that it can cause an orange-brown discoloration that most people will see in a 'clean' toilet bowl. There is also a bacteria which helps the iron look particularly ugly called appropriately enough an iron bacteria. This bacteria does not like humans and will never hurt us, but if it grows without oxygen present (called anaerobic and a condition not uncommon in wells), it will produce a nasty odor (Hydrogen Sulfide) that will make your water very unpleasant. Unfortunately, very few labs will test for this bacteria (The Stamford Health Department Lab does, it was my first introduction to the bacteria world in 1974) and its presence will create havoc on many treatment devices. Most of the time though, this bacteria will thrive in the back of a toilet bowl and will turn the bowl inside rust colored. The good news is that a cup of bleach every week will kill the bacteria and keep the discoloration out of the system. Most worrisome levels of iron are easily seen when you turn on the faucet, but a few have not been oxidized and will not be so apparent.
You notice that I did not talk about manganese with iron even though a low levels it is exactly the same as iron except it stains black-brown. Iron bacteria love it, it imparts a bitter taste to the water, is a stainer, at low levels is not dangerous and even healthful, but at high levels there is a real problem.
This issue was first found in a well water supply in a Japanese village that had been tainted by an industrial source of manganese and document first in 1965 (I believe). The neurological problems have been likened to mercury poisoning and are significant. The original document that I read (not the one I found and sited from the web and talked of levels of 30 mg/L in the water), talked of adults being affected primarily because manganese is essential in growing muscle and that is what growing children do best. Still, Connecticut has a maximum contaminant level of 0.5 mg/L in well water and levels above that should be treated.
Copper is still a different issue because there is very little native copper in the soil and that means any copper in the water is coming from the household plumbing. Copper will stain fixtures at very low, non-toxic levels a bright blue, blue-green or yellow-orange depending on the form it is found. It is considered toxic at levels over 1.3 mg/L.
Arsenic is a significant issue that we are just now coming to grips with. There is an EPA standard (0.01 mg/L) and it is considered a carcinogen. This was actually based on a tragedy that occurred in Bangladesh where wells were drilled to helped residents escape the terror of bacterial polluted water. The ground had significant natural levels of arsenic. It was used as a pesticide for apple orchards, as a wood preservative in pressure treated wood in the United States and there have been wells tested with levels over the USEPA action limit.
The Greenwich Health Department Lab is able to test for arsenic.
Lead is an issue only for older home (before 1977) with either lead solder (most common) or lead pipes (rare). It is a significant toxin for children under the age of 6 and will make the water taste 'sweet'. It is not common to find elevated levels in water in this area in wells, but can occur. It is also not common in water company water, but some homes in the late 1960's and 1970's have been found with elevated levels.
On the whole, serious problems from metals in well water are rare, but do exist. The more common issue is simple discoloration.
If a lab is certified to do metals, there are no testing issues.
I hope my next installment will deal with treatment issues.

So you want to buy a house?...part 5-acidity

Last installment I talked about well water and a non-issue issue (water hardness), so what is the major issue facing home owners with well water? Acidity of the water, pH primarily, but there is a lot more to it and that is why I write.
First, the prevalence of acid water is close to 50% in this area, but the main issue with acid water is its aggressiveness to the water pipes in the home and that runs only about 33%. A neutral pH is 7.0 and the average in the area tends to 6.6 (the lower the number, the more acid).
So acid water in of itself is not a health concern, we drink coffee and soda and many other things which are significantly more acid, but because it flows through copper piping, it can corrode the piping, creating pinhole leaks over time and increasing the level of copper to above levels that affect health.
The good news is most acid water conditions do not bring copper to that level and amounts of copper below 1.3 mg/L (milligrams per liter, which is about a quart) are not bad for you (you are suppose to get 1.0 mg per day).
Next, testing for pH is both easy (you stick a calibrated pH probe and measure) and problematic.
Why problematic? One of the main components of acidity in well water is carbon dioxide, a gas and it comes out of the water easily, even in a closed container. The recommended testing time is within 15 minutes. Now that presents a serious problem for most home inspectors who have contracts with labs in Danbury or even Norwalk, there is no way they can get the sample to the lab in that time period and many batch their inspections and bring the samples late, putting them in a holding refridgerator at the lab so they can be tested in the morning. The value of the pH goes to neutral over time. So many pH values are not reported correctly.
The actual problems an acid pH will cause is a combination of many factors, alkalinity (measure of Carbonate), Calcium, chloride and other disolved solids. Some labs will do a TDS (total dissolved solids) with the pH to calculate the corrossivity of the water, others will do an alkalinity and calcium hardness with pH to do the same. The corrossivity calculation will show if the water has the potential to cause problems for your water piping and that is the most important issue, otherwise the number for pH is meaningless.
There are other factors which will cause pipes to corrode that are not related to the water quality at all and that has to do wqith electrolysis due to poor or improper grounding of the home electrical system. This will almost always bring the copper measurements in the water to unhealthy levels, but correction can only be found using an electrician who understands the word (many do not).
My next installment will be on other metals which may cause various problems.

So you want to buy a house? Part 4- hardness

Well Water quality and what it contains. First there are a number of people who will not like what I will be saying because I am going to deal with the benign issues first and that is how most of the money is made in water treatment systems, treating what will not hurt you and may even be good for you.
Water hardness is the first issue and this area of New England is classified as moderate when it comes to water hardness. What is hardness? Basically, calcium and magnesium in your water. Calcium is actually something that you will actually get into your body drinking water and it is a good thing. Magnesium also has no health negative issues, so why treat it? If we were in the mid West, that would not be a question because levels out there are so high, they will clog pipes, but in Connecticut, that level of hardness is rare. I believe maybe 1% of the wells in Stamford face that problem. There is also a fight over even what is hard water, the USEPA says 200 mg/L is hard, Treatment people will say anywhere from 80 to 150 is hard. They also use the term grains, because that is how they sell softeners.
So hardness will not cause you harm and generally does not cause trouble for pipes in this area, why treat? Ascetics! The drops of water drying on shinny new fixtures dry white and when you boil water you will get a white residue in the pan and that means you have to spend time whipping them off or cleaning them out.
That is it, the entire reason.
The solution is you buy a softener which takes out most of the calcium and magnesium and replaces it with sodium of potassium. You also buy salt so that the stuff in the softener can be reused. You get slick, poor tasting water (I forgot to mention that calcium hardness makes the water taste good) that still leaves some residue in the pot and on those fixtures, but it is greatly reduced. Go Figure!

So you want to buy a house? ... Part 3-well water

Well Water. Yes I promised and it is time. Did you know there are over 5,000 homes in Stamford that use a private well for their water source? There are a significant number of wells in Darien, more in Greenwich, still more in New Canaan and Pound Ridge.
The best news here is that the water from a well is basically very good and many times more desirable than even water company water. Having said that there are issues and some non-issues that a home with a well may have.
1) Quantity of water. Although most wells will not run dry and produce copious amounts of water, there are enough that may not support both an irrigation system and home use, may not produce enough for large households and may run dry in severe drought. There is a section in Northwest Stamford where wells 1,500 feet deep produced only a quart of water a minute. That is not sufficient for general use. On the other hand, three wells that produced only about 2 gallons a minute ran the Crystal Rock water company for years.
During the last water emergency, wells were mostly unaffected and there were reports of only 2 wells going dry.
So perhaps an explanation on how a well gets its water is in order. Basically it comes from water which is within a defined distance, maybe as much as 200 yards from the well. The distance varies based on the wells depth, yield (gallons per minute) and the make-up of the subsurface in the area, but 200 yards is a good average distance in lower Fairfield, eastern Westchester counties.
The draw is conical, meaning that the strongest pull is closest to the well. For most wells this obviously includes all the rain, any streams, ponds or lakes and yes, the septic system.
There is also a general movement in this area of the water from North to South, so you would expect a general migration of any contaminants in a well to come from a northerly position.
The cost of having a well, besides the initial drilling, is the electricity to run the pump and certain repairs that may need to be done. The pump should last for about 20 years and the repairs usually come only with floods, earthquakes (yes we have earthquakes in the area), heavy construction (using dynamite) and things directly associated with disturbing the rock and soil around the well. In general a well is cheaper to have than city water.
My next post will be on water quality and may be in several parts.