Water Wells

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.

The Clinton administration said yesterday that it will ban the gasoline additive MTBE because it poses a risk to public health and the environment. Carol Browner, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said the administration was initiating the ban - using existing toxic-chemical laws - because Congress had failed to act. "The time has come to take action," Browner said. "Americans deserve both clean air and clean water and never one at the expense of the other.

Some of the residents of Teal Lane in Mount Laurel Township waited years for the day when they would be rid of ailing septic tanks and contaminated water wells. During that time, the residents said, many of them petitioned, bargained and pleaded with township officials for new water and sewer lines that would hook them into the township's water and sewer system. Today, two years after the $144,000 water and sewer lines were completed on the quiet, tree-lined street, nobody wants to pay for them and, so far, nobody has. Dorothea Simpson, 64, and other Teal Lane residents said that they have low incomes or are on fixed incomes and cannot pay. One repayment proposal has been rejected by residents of the street and the matter is now before a specially formed Board of Assessors, which officials expect to formulate a second repayment proposal by the end of the year.

This is the war on terrorism that most Americans don't know about: A few days after Christmas, U.S. Army Sgt. First Class Adam Reed rode into the parched, hungry village of Sankabar with a present: a new water pump. This month, Reed returned to the village, where elders gleefully showed the soldier from Sidon, Miss., what the simple irrigation system had brought: budding green fields of corn, bananas and oranges, the most promising crops in years. A small U.S. military task force in East Africa is installing water pumps, rebuilding schools and health clinics, making medical house calls, and training national armies - all part of a mission to stabilize a region that is seen as a potential breeding ground for terrorist groups.

It is called a "ring of crisis. " This ring's darkened boundaries mark a huge and populous area within which South Jersey residents are drinking and flushing and lawn-watering and car- washing and bathing themselves to death. They are sucking their water wells dry. And they know it. What they don't know - or, at least, don't agree on - is what to do about it. Potential solutions abound. But each one is costly. State officials first tried forcing cuts in water usage.

Forgive the thousand or so residents of this gravel-topped town if they sometimes think everything is coming apart at the seams. Much of it is. The waste-water treatment system doesn't treat waste water adequately. The cost of building a system required by next July 1 under the federal Clean Water Act will top $210,000, or six times the town's annual operating budget of $35,000. The solid-waste dump site that Grant City shares with three other towns is about to spill over.

Malvern Borough is in search of new water wells to bolster its sagging water system. Discussions of water problems surfaced Tuesday at a Borough Council work session and at the last regular meeting of the Council Sept. 18. About 10 years ago, the borough entered into an agreement with Malvern Preparatory School on Warren Avenue and dug three wells on school property, Council President Stephen DiOrio said in an interview Wednesday. Since that time, however, the borough and the school have not been able to reach an agreeement that would allow the wells to be placed in service with the water system in the borough, DiOrio said.

Test results released yesterday by the Department of Environmental Protection confirmed that a newly constructed municipal well in Washington Township, Gloucester County, contains unsafe levels of radium. The state agency first discovered the presence of radium, which can cause cancer, during routine tests in January. Township officials said the latest results meant that the well, constructed last year for $600,000, would remain closed indefinitely. Intended to supply drinking water to the fast-developing township, the well at Route 555 and the Black Horse Pike was completed in December, but was not put into operation because of the radium contamination.

Welsh Mountain residents with contaminated wells may be forced to seal those wells once public water starts flowing through their taps. It makes no sense to leave the wells open, according to members of the Honey Brook Borough Authority, the probable supplier of the public water under terms of a connection agreement being worked out between the authority and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Even using well water to wash cars or water lawns would pose an unacceptable risk, authority members agreed Wednesday.

More than one-quarter of the 60 Hulmeville residents surveyed recently by the borough said they experience constant shortages in the water supply from their backyard wells. "Between the tests that we did and the survey and just generally talking to people, the situation's worse than I thought it was," said Ferd Reetz, Sewer and Water Authority chairman. The authority and the Borough Council cooperated on the survey to determine the quantity and quality of the water that residents get from their wells, and also the cost of treating it. Almost all of Hulmeville's approximately 900 residents use well water; there is no public water system.