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Vienna residents frustrated waiting for results of radium testing at leak site
By Ed Runyan
VIENNA
The communications director for the Ohio Department of Health says the results of radium testing the department did early last month near Sodom-Hutchings Road are not yet complete.
The testing was done in areas that were contaminated by oil that leaked in late March into the streams and wetlands on the east side of Sodom-Hutchings Road from the Kleese Development Associates brine-injection facility on Sodom- Hutchings.
Russ Kennedy said the Ohio Department of Natural Resources asked the Ohio Department of Health to conduct radium testing “of an area of the spill that has been cleaned up. Oil-based materials such as those in the spill contain naturally occurring radium, so radium testing provides an indication of whether additional cleanup is needed.”
Trumbull County Commissioner Frank Fuda said last week that residents living near the site have expressed frustration to him that they have waited so long for results of the testing.
“Initially, [state officials] said it takes 30 days to test,” Fuda said. The testing was done April 8, and residents still are waiting, he said.
The property owners in the area also expressed anxiety waiting for test results from the state around April 8, after water samples were taken from several residential water wells and sent to Columbus for analysis.
The results indicated the well water had not been contaminated by the spill of about 2,000 gallons of “light waste oil” from the Kleese site, which has been closed since early April.
The ODNR, which has jurisdiction over the Kleese site, has declined to comment on the reason why the oil spilled, but other state officials have identified the storage tanks and a liner underneath them as the reason.
Vienna Township Trustee Phil Pegg said the storage tanks and a concrete pad under them have all been removed and not yet replaced.
At last week’s county commissioners meeting, all three commissioners expressed support for an effort by the Trumbull and Ashtabula county trustees associations to lobby the Ohio Legislature for changes to rules that govern Ohio injection wells.
“Some of these [injection wells] are being permitted, and we don’t even know about it,” said Trumbull Commissioner Dan Polivka. “Literally, you could be a landowner next door [to a brine-injection well], and if you don’t see [a legal ad] in the newspaper, you could have an injection well” without knowing it was coming.
One change the township association wants is notification of property owners and local government agencies when a company applies for a permit for an injection well. Currently, notifications go out only to other well owners in the area, township association officials said.
Fuda said the spill has left him suspicious of state officials and the injection-well owners and makes him believe changes in the law are needed to better monitor what injection companies are doing.
“We don’t know what is going on at 4 a.m. when nobody’s around,” he said. “We don’t know what’s going into the rivers and streams. They [the state] don’t care about us.”
A public meeting for people from seven counties with most of the state’s brine-injection wells will take place at 1 p.m. Wednesday in the Trumbull commissioners meeting room, 160 High Street NE.