City and EPA team up to ensure water safety

ZANESVILLE – A new plan hopes to ensure the drinking water in Zanesville remains safe to drink.

The Zanesville Water Department has teamed up with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and will soon release a plan to secure the safety of the city’s wells, despite a high risk of contamination from nearby facilities.

Water Department Superintendent Paul Mills said the plan would give the city a thorough strategy for preventing water source contamination while also outlining response plans if contamination does occur.

“While we aren’t expecting any contamination in our water supply, having a proactive strategy to deal with any emergency situations is something the city had been lacking,” Mills said. “Where we had nothing before, this plan now gives us information on the most risky areas and a corresponding plan to deal with any and all possible issues that may arise.”

Wells near the Muskingum River are at an especially high risk of contamination, according to the assessment, because of the shallow depth of the wells and the close proximity of possible contaminant sources to the wells.

The plan specifically outlines all possible contaminant sources near the wells, such as companies, sewage lines and other facilities, with a corresponding risk rating, protective strategy and a response time table for each party.

Each of the 10 possible contaminant sources listed in the assessment is qualified as a one-year risk or a five-year risk, meaning that any contaminants released from said source would take either one year or five years to reach the city’s wells, depending upon their proximity to the river.

The plan also relieved the city of responsibility for testing wells for chemicals caused by a contamination nearly 30 years ago, saving the city about $5,000 annually.

Geologist Steven Saines, of the EPA, said manufacturing and other facilities near the river will always pose a possible risk to water purity in the future, but he added that local water sources have remained safe for the last 30 years.

In the early 1980s, a chlorine solvent contamination from United Technologies Automotive, now owned by Lear Corp., led to the closure of two wells near the Lear building on Linden Avenue. Because the contamination had most likely occurred two decades before its discovery, Saines said contaminants still flow from the building and into the river today, but he added that testing already underway from Lear Corp. was adequate to ensure the safety of the water.

epsmith@gannett.com

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