They're Freaking Out In Ohio

      There was a nasty chemical spill in a recent tank car derailment and the railroad decided to burn it in order to get the track cleared as quickly as possible.  It made a nasty mess including a thick plume of ill-smelling smoke.  People were evacuated and it's been all over the news.

      Politicians have been pointing fingers at one another, blaming the previous administration's policy changes or the present administration's people (and sometimes the other way around, presumably for variety).  The folks who live there are understandably upset -- and they want their wells tested, right now!

      While that's probably a good idea, well water is old water.  How old depends on how deep the well is and what your subsurface geology looks like.  A good rule of thumb is that ground water percolates along at about ten feet per year.  Contaminant plumes move at that rate or a little slower, depending on the contaminating substance.  So it could be a long, long time before someone only a quarter of a mile away from the burn site gets a nice hit of vinyl chloride in their tap water.

      Sure, test your well now -- but don't assume you're in the clear if it comes up clean.  The way to monitor a mess like this is to sink test wells (or take test cores) around the source, figure out where the plume is heading and how fast it is moving, and then keep on monitoring.  That won't be cheap.

      When I was young, many streams and some rivers in the part of Indiana where I lived were very interesting colors and degrees of opacity.  Some got that way naturally -- Indiana limestone will give you milky water, some (most) of the rivers are yellow-green and the newer reservoirs where we went swimming tended to murky brown or worse.  But there were no few rainbow-surfaced creeks, places where the runoff or streams picked up all manner of things from agriculture and industry that don't naturally show up in most water.  Over time, we cleaned 'em up.  People got their wells checked -- and if they had any reason for concern, they kept on sending in samples to be tested, at regular intervals.  (Layers of clay and limestone gave us different aquifers at different depths; there were a number of old flowing artesian wells within a few miles of the house where I grew up, but our well was shallow and gave rusty, hard water, safe but ugly even after the water softener.)

      Wells aren't especially mysterious but how water gets into them, from where and how quickly is not quite as straightforward as some people seem to think.  That hasn't had a lot of clear-headed coverage in the aftermath of the mess in Ohio.