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Hauled-water tank is Green Twp. firm’s lead pollution solution
CANFIELD
A Green Township company official says the hauled-water storage tank the company recently installed is its solution to the lead contamination of its well water that put it on the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency’s drinking water contamination advisory list.
Linde Hydraulics Corp., 5089 W. Western Reserve Road, has been on that advisory list since September 2014, when lead levels more than two and three times the federal limit appeared in two of its five well-water samples, which are required to be taken every three years.
Readings from those samples, which are the most- recent collected, were 47.8 parts per billion, 33.4 ppb, 14.4 ppb, 12.6 ppb and less than two parts per billion.
The federal lead hazard action threshold is 15 ppb.
Thomas J. Pryor, Linde’s corporate controller, said he believes the well-water contamination is due to past coal mining in the area, which he believes disturbed the underground water table.
Ryan Tekac, environmental health director for the Mahoning County Board of Health, said he does not know why Linde’s well water became lead contaminated.
The county health board recently approved a permit for Linde to install a tank that contains water trucked in from an Ohio EPA-approved source, Tekac said.
“We’re totally off the well” as a water supply, Pryor said. “What we really want is to have city water out here.”
The nearest public water-supply lines, however, are those of the city of Canfield, which extend to the Canfield Fairgrounds, and those of Aqua Ohio, which extend to Tippecanoe Road.
Using Aqua water would require boring under state Route 11 and installing a pump station, which would be prohibitively costly, he said.
Extension of the Canfield supply line down state Route 46 would be the better option, but Canfield likely would seek annexation of Linde if that were to happen, Pryor said.
The lack of a public water-supply line makes it difficult to expand the plant, Pryor added.
With the drinking-water quality having been a perennial problem there, Linde was issuing bottled drinking water to its employees when he joined the company in 1994, Pryor said.
Even with the newly installed tank in service, the company continues to issue bottled drinking water to its 40 employees, provide a drinking-water cooler for them, and have signs posted in the restrooms warning that the water there isn’t potable because of concerns about potential contamination lingering in the plant’s plumbing.
Linde designs, manufactures and services pumps, motors and valves.
Besides its recently installed tank, the company has two other tanks to which water is hauled by truck for its manufacturing operation.
Before it ceased using its well, the company used a water-filtration system in its manufacturing operation, but it no longer uses the filtration system, Pryor said.
The OEPA advisory for Linde says children and pregnant women should use bottled water or water from a filtration system that has been certified by an independent testing organization to reduce or eliminate lead for drinking, cooking and baby-formula preparation.
In situations such as that of Linde, federal regulations provide 18 months after posting of the advisory for the company to submit to the Ohio EPA a lead-remediation plan, and they require the company to conduct quarterly employee education on lead risk reduction, said Heidi Griesmer, the OEPA’s deputy director of communications.
After a company submits a plan, it has two years to complete that lead-remediation plan, Griesmer said.
She added that her boss, OEPA Director Craig W. Butler, wants the U.S. EPA to accelerate that timetable.
Meanwhile, state Rep. John Boccieri said he has questions for OEPA officials regarding when they claim they first learned of test results that showed high lead levels in the village of Sebring’s water.
Boccieri, of Poland, D-59th, said in a news release Tuesday he recently received documentation from the state’s water-testing vendor, Ream & Haagar Environmental Lab of Dover, that confirms the vendor first notified the EPA in August of test results showing elevated lead levels in Sebring’s water.
“I remain concerned that the agency is still not identifying exactly when it received evidence of lead in Sebring’s water,” Boccieri wrote in a letter to Butler. “I am certain that if similar test results came to the OEPA identifying contaminated water in the governor’s mansion, the Statehouse or an affluent suburb of Columbus, OEPA’s notification procedures would have been far better executed. However, the small rural community of Sebring, Ohio, seems to have been forgotten between August 2015 and January 2016.”