The Kansas Department of Health and Environment held a meeting last night in Wichita after several domestic wells near Central and Tyler were found to be contaminated by underground petroleum storage tanks leaking a chemical component of gasoline called MtBE.
The meetings also addressed groundwater in the area that is contaminated by a chemical called PCE, a solvent used in dry cleaning and a known carcinogen. The impacted area in that case is near the intersection of Maple and Maize.
Officials from the KDHE said the MtBE contamination was discovered while they were sampling wells in an effort to find the source of the PCE contamination. Scott O'Neal with KDHE said there are several monitoring wells set up around the underground storage tanks where the leak was discovered, but the chemical somehow spread without being detected.
O'Neal said private wells at two homes in the area were impacted by the contamination; those residents have since been hooked up to the city water system.
"We're getting ready to proceed with an investigation into how [the MtBE] spread and why it wasn't detected by the monitoring wells," O'Neal said.
Residents at the meeting expressed concern about health risks related to the chemical as well as future action by the city and state to remediate the problem and notify homeowners of changes. Farah Ahmed, public health officer for KDHE, said the effects of MtBE vary from person to person, but it is not a known carcinogen.
"In some studies in animals where they're given very, very high doses it has been shown to cause some liver and kidney damage," Ahmed said. "But those are concentrations that are much, much higher than what humans are exposed to if they're drinking contaminated groundwater."
Diana Ratliff attended the meeting out of concern for the health of her two young children. She said her home isn't in the area of concern defined by KDHE, but it's close to it.
"We're not in any contamination zone, but when they show it on the map, north, south, east and west of my house is all contaminated," she said. "So I think that at this point until they come out and test our water, I'm probably going to be buying drinking water."
Bob Jurgens with KDHE said the agency plans to do a three-dimensional investigation of both areas.
"We're going to do cross sections and work our way down so we'll know spatially, horizontally, side to side and vertically where it's at when it's all said and done, " he explained.
According to Jurgens, the KDHE identified both contaminants last month. The agency said it will pay for all of the homes in the affected area to be hooked up to the city water system. Jurgens is hopeful that will happen by the end of October. In the meantime, residents have been given bottled drinking water.
The KDHE is continuing to test wells in the area to determine a boundary for the pollutants and work to clean up the source of the problem. The agency said neither area is related to a separate case of PCE contamination that affected private wells in west Wichita in 2014.
Concerned citizens who are unable to attend the meeting can find a copy of the presentations below:
MtBE:http://www.kdheks.gov/tanks/download/MtBECont_PubAvail.pdf
PCE:http://www.kdheks.gov/dryclean/download/Millers_PublicAvail.pdf
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