Water Wells

A new, cleaner gasoline will be cleaning a little more money out of your pockets. Starting this month, motorists in the Philadelphia area and elsewhere across the country will have to start using a new reformulated, or "green" gasoline, designed to cut down on air pollution. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has ordered conversion to the new air-friendly gasoline at a time when consumers are already choking at the gas pump - not from the fumes, but from the prices.

The bad news for the Warminster residents who live near the Naval Air Development Center is that its seven waste sites pose enough of a threat that the center was put on the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund list in October. But the good news, according to Jim Kingston, the public affairs officer at the base, is that extensive tests and monitoring have shown that none of the waste buried on the center's 839 acres has seeped into the groundwater. "We know that the sites are there, we recognize the problem, and we are taking the steps to deal with it," Kingston said.

Medford Township officials and local businessmen met yesterday to discuss how to bring municipal water to the Stokes Road commercial district, the site of a fire that destroyed several stores nearly three weeks ago. About half the township uses municipal water. The other half, including the Stokes Road commercial district, uses private well water. Township Administrator Richard Deaney said preliminary plans call for constructing a complex loop system of water mains around the commercial zone to tie in with an existing municipal water well.

The Coatesville Water Authority (CWA) has offered to supply water for neighboring Valley Township's burgeoning housing developments, but Valley officials are not sure they want to accept the offer. The township is willing to discuss the issue, but, in the words of supervisors Chairman William Lambert, "This board will not be dictated to. " Talks between Valley officials and members of the CWA about supplying water to Valley Springs, a development of 137 houses under construction, broke down during the summer.

The call to remove the additive MTBE from gasoline is good news in combatting water pollution, but not so good news in battling air pollution. That is the dilemma state environmental officials are facing after a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency task force yesterday recommended that MTBE be taken out of gasoline. It is a recommendation that the EPA appears ready to impose. "We must begin to significantly reduce the use of MTBE in gasoline as quickly as possible," EPA Administrator Carol Browner said.

For one of the county's veterans in municipal government, it was not a hard equation to balance. The combination of a single issue and just two meetings a month won out, said Donald J. Greenleaf, former Downingtown borough manager and now the first executive director of the Downingtown Municipal Water Authority. The move means a cut in pay from $52,000 to $46,000 for Greenleaf, 59. "I was feeling slightly burned out," said Greenleaf, who worked for the borough for 38 years.

Two residents are asking a Superior Court judge to hurry action on a lawsuit filed last year that seeks to halt an ordinance making it mandatory for 179 residents to hook up to a public water system. George Geist, attorney for residents Delores Toussaint and Anthony Melevin, is contending the ordinance is unconstitutional and in violation of state law. He filed for a summary judgment this month. "We just want this over," said Toussaint. "This thing has been looming over our heads, and we just want to get this out of the way and move on. " The wells of 179 residents throughout the township were found to be contaminated by township engineers after the engineers did periodic checkups.

TRY TO IMAGINE that you live in a nice suburban residential neighborhood and someone wants to open up an industrial chicken farm nearby — or maybe a fireworks factory or a steel mill. Surely, local zoning laws would not permit it, just as they would prohibit other commercial and industrial uses of residential areas. But Act 13, Pennsylvania's giveaway to the fracking industry, would allow natural-gas drilling in nearly any neighborhood where drillers want to drill, including towns whose zoning does not allow it. And there would be nothing you — or the local leaders you elected to protect your quality of life — could do about it. As part of a law that created impact fees for hydraulic fracturing, Act 13 allows natural-gas drilling in every zoning district, with some buffers: drilling has to be 300 feet from springs, rivers and wetlands; 500 feet from buildings and water wells, and 1,000 feet of drinking-water sources.

Children are dying here, prey to a silent killer that could be lurking in the ground, attacking young victims in infancy, or suddenly in their teen years. Some parents believe this killer seeps into their homes in every drop of water their children bring to their lips, every vapor they inhale while they bathe. There is no method to its madness. But in nine years, it has targeted dozens of youth in the Ocean County communities of Toms River and Dover Township, where there has been a cluster of bone and brain cancer.

The threat of natural gas drilling has made the Upper Delaware River the most endangered waterway in the nation, according to a national advocacy group. The nonprofit American Rivers plans to announce that dubious distinction - its 25th in as many years - Wednesday at noon at a City Hall news conference. The Upper Delaware - the stretch from Upstate New York along the Pennsylvania border and south to the New Jersey line - is believed to be an exceptionally rich area for drilling, and drilling companies have already scrambled to snap up thousands of leases from homeowners.