No Groundwater PCE Near Kirtland

The reported discovery of a possible Superfund groundwater site beneath southeast Albuquerque appears to have been a false alarm, according to the New Mexico Environment Department.

The Environment Department announced last month that the potentially cancer-causing chemical perchloroethylene, or PCE, had been discovered in test wells being drilled to monitor nearby contamination from an old Kirtland Air Force Base aviation fuel spill.

The PCE appeared to be unrelated to the Kirtland spill, and set officials off on a search for an old dry cleaner or similar site that might have caused a leak.

But follow-up testing, done over the past three weeks, found no signs of PCE contamination, according to Jim Davis, head of the New Mexico Environment’s Resource Protection Division.

The most likely explanation is that the contamination came not from groundwater, but from equipment being used to collect the initial samples, Davis told members of the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority on Wednesday evening.

The wells, in an area around the intersection of Southern and Louisiana SE, are part of an effort to determine how far the jet fuel has spread from the original spill site at Kirtland’s fuel loading facility.

Also Wednesday, the U.S. Air Force and the water utility signed a deal under which the Air Force agreed to pay the cost of “what if” planning to prepare for the possibility of fuel from the spill reaching drinking water wells.

The planning effort is the result of months of talks between the utility and the Air Force about how to approach the problem of preparing for the worst case scenario – contaminants from a decades-old fuel spill forcing the water utility to shut down key municipal drinking water wells.

Air Force officials discovered in 1999 that an underground fuel pipe had been leaking for decades. The fuel, possibly as much as 24 million gallons according to an analysis by an Environment Department scientist, reached groundwater and is now moving toward Albuquerque’s municipal drinking water wells.

Uncertainty over how close it has come has led to an extensive network of monitoring wells in a southeast Albuquerque neighborhood to try to determine the extent and severity of the contamination. None of the jet fuel contamination has been found in drinking water wells.

The contingency plan will evaluate alternative water supply sources if the water utility is forced to shut down the wells closest to Kirtland because of contamination. Options to be evaluated could include drilling new water wells elsewhere, or treating the water to remove contamination before delivering it to water utility customers, said John Stomp, the utility’s chief operations officer.

But the Air Force would not agree to pay for a $120,000 cluster of monitoring wells that the utility thinks are important for early detection of contamination approaching the drinking water wells. So the utility’s board agreed to pay for the wells out of ratepayer money already in the budget.
— This article appeared on page C1 of the Albuquerque Journal