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Shelby County water regulators on Tuesday questioned a proposal to inject treated water from a Collierville Superfund site back into Memphis’ source of drinking water. The site’s updated cleanup plan also worries some environmentalists.
For about 30 years, the Carrier Corporation has been extracting polluted groundwater from under its air conditioning manufacturing site in Collierville. The water containstrichloroethylene, or TCE, a carcinogen linked to kidney cancer. Under current procedures, the company filters the TCE from the groundwater, and then pipes it to a sewage treatment plant for disposal.
But Carrier recently applied for a change in disposal--to pump the treated water into the Memphis Sand Aquifer, adding it to the county's drinking water. There's a current county-wide ban on the injection well practice, but the company argues that the sewage plant cannot handle the polluted site’s volume of wastewater at certain times, especially after heavy rains.
Ben Brantley, representing Carrier at this week’s Shelby County Groundwater Control Board meeting, said the proposal for an injection well, if approved, would meet drinking water standards and comply with federal regulations.
“We’re preserving a natural resource,” he said. “We’re just returning it to the aquifer without the TCE in it.”
Environmentalists point out that the groundwater polluted by the Carrier property is near another site polluted withchromium. The company currently filters TCE from the water it pumps, but not chromium. Carrier says it plans to move its extraction wells away from the chromium-tainted water.
But Amanda Garcia, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center, says these measures should hardly convince residents that the treated water will make for good tap water.
“We just don’t know enough about whether there will continue to be chromium pulled into...the new extraction well sites,” she says. “This is an example of why it’s important to have strong local regulations in place.”
The Groundwater Control Board also questioned whether the process could introduce other unknown contaminants into the Memphis Aquifer.
Board members requested Carrier further study alternative proposals to present at an upcoming board meeting.
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