March 20, 2005|By Sheridan Lyons | Sheridan Lyons,SUN STAFF
The Finksburg Planning Area Council Inc. will focus on water contamination from MTBE at a meeting Thursday night with representatives of a gasoline station owner, his environmental consultant and a representative of the state Department of the Environment.
MTBE, a gasoline additive, was first detected in 2002 at the Tevis Oil Co. station at Suffolk Road and Route 140 and was found to have affected 23 wells in the area, according to state and county officials. Three locations had carbon-filtering systems installed, including Tevis' Shell Jiffy Mart that was identified by the county and state as the source.
John Lopez, the Finksburg community association president, said the meeting at 7 p.m. at the Sandy Mount United Methodist Church will focus on MTBE because "it seems like, at every meeting, it always gets brought up."
A February community meeting with Stanley H. "Jack" Tevis III, president of Tevis Oil, and consultant phA Environmental Restoration of Northern Virginia, was canceled because of snow.
Work has been under way at the station on a system of wells and trenching with the environmental contractor that Tevis said he hired in 2003.
Brian Flynn, water quality supervisor for the Carroll County Health Department, said officials have continued to monitor drinking water in the area.
Flynn said Tevis has provided bottled water and volunteered to pay for the installation of a filtration system at a day care center across Route 140 from the station. The Child's Nurturing Center Inc. on Old Westminster Pike had one reading of 24.1 parts per billion in an Oct. 25 sample, just above the level for taking action, Flynn said. The Department of the Environment has set an action level of 20 parts per billion.
"We did sampling across to Old Westminster Pike," he said, without detecting any more of the additive. "We'll keep an eye on it.
"We still get some calls from down there, but it's definitely toned down," he said.
Tevis has been praised by Flynn and Lopez, who said the station owner had "gone way beyond the call of duty to take whatever measures are necessary to straighten this thing out."
Methyl tertiary butyl ether makes gasoline burn more cleanly. It has been required since 1990 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in states such as Maryland that have ozone pollution in the summer. Studies on inhaling MTBE have shown that it causes cancer in laboratory animals at high doses, but its effects in drinking water are unknown.
While the additive did make the air cleaner, officials said, it has raised concerns about water in recent years.
"There are certain areas of the state that are, geologically speaking, more vulnerable to this kind of contamination from a well standpoint," Flynn said.
This has resulted in stricter requirements by the Department of the Environment for gasoline stations across the north-central areas of the state where underground water is drawn from fractured rock.
"The scary part about MTBE, discovered fairly recently," Flynn said, is that it may spread as a vapor as well as in liquid form.
"Our systems are not designed to be vapor-proof," Flynn said. "Now it is believed it can go from a vapor to a liquid and back again - and once it gets into the groundwater, it goes on its way."
Another part of Carroll affected by the gasoline additive is the Hampstead area. State and county testing found MTBE in 36 wells in the Hillcrest Avenue area just east of the town border, after a tenant complained of a gasoline smell in tap water in September 2003.
Hampstead town officials, who convened a meeting in January with MDE officials, have suggested that the homeowners in that area might want to be annexed into the town - enabling them to connect to its water supply and eliminating the need for their wells and the purification systems. The homeowners would be required to pay for the connection.
State and local officials are seeking a source of the MTBE in Hampstead, which has led to the installation of 10 carbon-filtration systems.
