2/23/2024
WT Staff
SDWA Profiles
East Palestine Village Public Water Supply
One year after mass incident
Friday, February 23, 2024
A year after the train derailment in the center of East Palestine released hundreds of thousands of gallons of vinyl chloride gas and other hazardous materials, some residents of the town report continued physical symptoms including skin rashes and respiratory changes. The airborne contaminants spread out from the crash site to impact surface water including the Ohio River at downstream East Liverpool, Portsmouth, Cincinnati and Louisville, Kentucky. Drinking water intakes were closed while the debris plume passed by, raw water was tested for spilled contaminants every two hours during the critical time following the event.
Some residents of East Palestine are still reluctant to drink East Palestine tap water, in spite of the fact that the supply is located more than a year upstream, in terms of the movement of groundwater through the aquifer.
Raw drinking water for the village comes from wells located 58 to 90 feet underground with good clay overburden, no less than 1.4 miles northwest of where the mass incident occurred Feb 3, 2023. Following the hazardous materials release, the raw drinking water was tested weekly for 140 contaminants based on the materials released. These test results were reported to the public and re-posted here on this media.
WTOH accessed drilling permits taken with Ohio Department of Natural Resources in 1977. Movement of groundwater through this aquifer over a mile is estimated to take a year or more. If groundwater flowed in from the spill site in the direction of the wells, we would only be detecting the contamination now.
Cardinal Labs LLC, Alloway Marion Laboratory, Summit Environmental Technologies Inc contribute to regular analysis of the East Palestine drinking water supply, the results of which are posted publicly. The most recent lab test values can be found on Ohio Drinking Water Watch under Chem/Rad Samples by Analyte. We pulled up the reports, summarizing what we found below.
Drinking Water Facility:
EAST PALESTINE VILLAGE PWS
Owner: local government
Location: East Palestine, OH
County: Columbiana
Watershed: Upper Ohio River minor tributaries - Little Beaver Creek watershed
Active Permit: OH1500912
System Type: community water system, established June 1, 1977
Population Served: 4761 residents, 2100 combined metered connections
Source: groundwater wells 001, 004, 006, 007, 008
2024 Feb Chemistry sampling and testing found analytes below the minimum reportable level, including:
- vinyl chloride
- benzene
- styrene
- toluene
- ethylbenzene
*Note that drinking water information provided on this site is aggregated from the federal EPA database, state resources and local government sources where available.
EPA publishes violation and enforcement data quarterly, based on the inspection reports of the previous quarter. Water systems, states and EPA take up to three months to verify this data is accurate and complete.
Specific questions about your local water supply should be directed to the facility.
The EPA safe drinking water facilities data available to the public presents what is known to the government based upon the most recently available information for more than one million regulated facilities. EPA and states inspect a percentage of facilities each year, but many facilities, particularly smaller ones, may not have received a recent inspection. It is possible that facilities do have violations that have not yet been discovered, thus are shown as compliant in the system.
EPA cannot positively state that facilities without violations shown in ECHO are necessarily fully compliant with environmental laws. Additionally, some violations at smaller facilities do not need to be reported from the states to EPA. If ECHO shows a recent inspection and the facility is shown with no violations identified, users of the ECHO site can be more confident that the facility is in compliance with federal programs.
The compliance status of smaller facilities that have not had recent inspections or review by EPA or the states may be unknown or only available via state data systems.
Drinking Water matters
Ohio EPA publishes current drinking water advisories with the following notation "Public water systems are required to monitor their water regularly for contaminants. Currently, more than 95 percent of community water systems meet all health-based standards. When a system doesn't meet a standard, consumers are notified. Notifications may be in the form of signs or multimedia announcements."
WTOH.us checks in on the OEPA issued list regularly for new DW advisories and for the resolution of long term advisories. These drinking water advisories result from the standard monitioring and measurements in violation of quality parameters. Boil water advisories posted to the map as a result of water main breaks, service disruptions, loss of water pressure come up intermittently with advice provided by the drinking water facility to their impacted customers.
See yellow tags on the map for more information.
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