Wednesday, August 3, 2005
Suburban Trends
BY CAROL FLETCHER
Staff Writer
For 13,000 residents, drinking water starts as rainwater running down surrounding hills, seeping into the ground and trickling down between rocks or sand to collect below them.
Two-thirds of the borough's residents get most of their drinking water from four public wells drawing from that underground water. The rest rely on private wells.
A new borough law passed on July 19 now protects those Wells by regulating what businesses can operate near them.
The law says no new businesses that use water-polluting chemicals, like gas stations, dry cleaners and car washes, can open near the wells. Businesses already there can stay.
Well contamination has been a reoccurring issue in town. Only last summer a suspected leak from a gas station contaminated several private wells in nearby homes.
"The intent is, we have a lot of problems and issues with our wells," said Councilman Tom Mac Allen, an engineer who sits on the local Planning Board that drafted the law. "The main thing here is to protect the public water supplies."
The law doesn't protect the wells from the businesses now operating nearby, but contains a map showing contamination sites in each well's three tiers of protected areas.
"The power of that (map) is that you can see your known contamination sites within those circles and those need to be under continued scrutiny," said Councilman and Deputy Mayor Bill O'Hearn.
O'Hearn was formerly employed by the Passaic River Coalition, a non-profit land acquisition
organization involved in water quality issues who wrote the model ordinance with state approval.
Now that those sensitive areas around the wells are mapped, the state might respond quicker with remediation assistance should a contamination incident occur within them, said O'Hearn.
Additionally, businesses like gas stations within those tiers might stand a better chance at getting state support for regular monitoring for leaks, he said.
Included in the law is a state-determined list of businesses that use major and minor possible water pollutants. None of them can be near the wells but some are allowed further away under certain restrictions.
The local health department will enforce the new law. Violators could be fined up to $1,250 per day and/or a maximum jail sentence of 90 days.
Well protection ordinances have recently been adopted elsewhere across the state. Locally, Wanaque and Pompton Lakes have adopted their own versions.
Most of Ringwood lies within the Wanaque River watershed and is part of the larger 935 square mile Passaic River basin, which extends into New York. Both areas act like catch basins to collect rainwater, which then drains back into the ground across porous surfaces like forest beds.