What would have happened had Ernie Wetzel, Delpha Very, or Margaret Wholean, as the CEOs of the town, removed the salt from the decrepit salt shed at the highway facility? Would 6 years be enough time to find a new place for the road salt?
The CT Dept. of Environmental Protection knew about our problems at the Highway Facility over a decade ago when Neumann was First Selectman and warned Woodstock repeatedly. The DEP knows about the toxic waste pile on the north slope of the facility. This is why all 4 of the last First Selectmen knew about this problem. We are now ineligible for grants to clean up the Highway Facility because of inaction. The next step is for the State to start issuing fines to Woodstock because of this inaction. Then the lawsuits will follow. This will cost Woodstock’s taxpayers millions of dollars before its over because the development rights to the Bennett farm and surrounding properties are worth millions. In the early January BOS minutes, Ms. Wholean mentioned that she had still not heard back from the Bennetts’ lawyer (so nothing could be done)…and there was a barn full of wet, seeping salt to boot. This is just stupid because no effective effort was made toward correcting the problem of the Highway Facility to begin with (I guess it’s true…You Can’t Fix Stupid!).
Ernie Wetzel has stated in a comment below that he had the Bennetts’ water tested when he was First Selectman and there was no elevated salt. If this is true, then I believe that the salt contamination of the Bennett’s drinking water could have been reversed simply by removing the salt from the Highway Facility and carrying out some remediation proceedures. The decline in salinity could have been monitored monthly from tap water with an inexpensive hand-held sodium sensor. JL
What would have happened to the saline concentrations in the Highway Facility wells and the Bennett wells had the salt been removed 6 years ago, 4 years ago, or 3 years ago, or 2 years ago, or even 1 year ago? Common sense suggests to me that the salt concentration would have diminished with time. Why didn’t these First Selectmen first remove the salt? Why didn’t they purchase an inexpensive hand-held sodium sensor to monitor the decline in the salt from the tap water with time and predict the amount of time necessary to naturally solve the problem? Why didn’t they dig a rectangular trench, a few feet deep, in front of the open end of the salt shed and fill it with water once a week to irrigate the down-flow of water and the polluting salt down to the aquifer and out? Wouldn’t this have helped to speed the remediation of the salt pollution underneath the Highway Facility and reduce the saline heading toward the Bennett Farm via the aquifer? Read the rest of this entry »
