NY residents question state role in contamination
FISHERS LANDING, NEW YORK — Road salt normally helps keep the public safe. But in this small hamlet near the Canadian border, residents say it’s contaminating their wells and eating their appliances from the inside out. Worse, they believe the state misled them about the cause to avoid culpability.
Researchers from Virginia Tech, who helped uncover drinking water contamination in Flint, Michigan, think Fishers Landing’s problems were caused by runoff from a nearby salt storage shed run by the New York State Department of Transportation.
They also say the problem could be far more widespread than a single shed in a single town, with their analysis showing nearly half a million people across the state could face similar risks.
And while New York uses more road salt than any other state, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Vermont use similar amounts of salt per mile of roadway, meaning residents there could be at risk, too.
Unlike public water systems, private wells aren’t regulated, said Kelsey Pieper, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Boston’s Northeastern University who studied the Fishers Landing area while at Virginia Tech beginning in late 2015.
“There is no state or federal oversight of drinking water from private wells,” Pieper said. “It’s all on these communities.”
That means problems can build up, undetected for years.
Controversy over well contamination in Fishers Landing, a community of just 89 people on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, stretches back at least a decade before Virginia Tech got involved. Records show Steve Conaway, the owner of the local Thousand Islands Winery, began in 2004 to badger the state about high chloride levels in private wells on the property, which sits about a quarter of a mile from the state’s Collins Landing salt storage facility.
Conaway later sued the state but lost after a judge ruled the statute of limitations had run out. He declined to speak about his case, and it later fell to a relative newcomer to press for answers about what was happening to the area’s water supply.
In 2003, Stephanie Weiss and her husband bought an old farmhouse about two miles from the winery. An initial test of the property’s well showed a slightly elevated lead level that the couple attributed to a temporary uptick after stripping old paint from the house’s walls.
They would have two children in the home, but grew suspicious about the water over time. Appliances began failing, including a deluxe dishwasher that died within a year and a half. Later, after word about the problem at the winery got around town, neighbors with similar issues worried their well water might be bad too.
Weiss ordered another test of her well, about a decade after the first. It came back showing nearly 30 parts per billion of lead, double the federal limit for public water systems and six times the level many health experts worry about for children. While the family primarily drank bottled water, they used well water for preparing food, brushing teeth and showering.
“We were scared to death,” Weiss recalled.
While the family appears to be unharmed, Weiss couldn’t let go of the mystery over the lead. She started researching the issue and was shocked when her investigation led her to such a common substance.
“I don’t think most people, I certainly didn’t realize, it was really the salt contamination,” Weiss said.
Americans spread more than 48 billion pounds of salt on roadways every year. Transportation experts say it’s the best way to meet public expectations for winter safety, but scientists know its corrosive effects can harm roads, bridges — and even the environment.
When salt runs off a roadway and contaminates a lake, river or aquifer, chlorides in the substance can make water corrosive. If that water is then run through pipes or other infrastructure without proper safeguards, it can corrode lead from the lining of pipes, fittings, and fixtures.
Weiss also learned that the town of Orleans, of which Fishers Landing is a part, had hired an engineering firm and found that chloride levels were elevated in wells downhill from the salt shed. Another analysis ordered by the winery reached similar conclusions. When she learned several other homes also had high lead levels, the puzzle came together.
“That’s when I was like, ‘Oh, there’s actually something real happening here,’” Weiss said.
On a whim, she emailed Virginia Tech corrosion expert Marc Edwards, who was making national headlines for his investigations in Flint.
Edwards committed a team of researchers, led by Pieper, to examine the Fishers Landing contamination. They mailed more than 100 testing kits to the area. Using “The Gal’s Place” ice cream shop as a staging ground, 95 homeowners ultimately shipped water samples from their wells to Virginia Tech.
“It was a validation,” Pieper said. “We found higher levels closer to the salt barn.”
But state officials weren’t ready to concede.
Virginia Tech’s researchers felt confident in their findings — and they were alarming.
In 82% of the wells, sodium levels eclipsed a level the EPA says is safe for people on low-salt diets. About one in five homes had chloride levels above federal standards, and the same amount exceeded the EPA’s action level for lead or copper.
Further, wells positioned downhill from the salt shed had twice the level of chlorides as wells near major roadways, and triple the level in wells that weren’t near either. While researchers couldn’t definitively tie the toxic metals to the salt barn because they had not examined the internal plumbing of the homes, Pieper’s colleague performed a lab experiment that found the water corroded pipes.
While the evidence seemed clear that salt from the DOT’s barn was leaching into the water supply, state officials denied culpability. In at least three news reports from 2016 through 2018, New York DOT employees told reporters that a “geological assessment” or similar analysis showed groundwater under its Collins Landing salt shed flowed away from Fishers Landing homes.
Pieper and her colleagues had a professional interest in learning if the assessment refuted their findings, so she filed a request under the state’s Freedom of Information Law in June 2018 to see it.
In November 2019 — nearly a year and a half after her request — the state responded that it couldn’t find the geological assessment it cited as proof that the salt barn wasn’t responsible for the contamination.
“A diligent search of our files failed to identify any records,” the DOT’s records office wrote in response.
“We were a little shocked when they said they couldn’t find the report, especially because it had been referenced so many times,” Pieper said.
Asked about the discrepancy, DOT spokesperson Joseph Morrissey said in an email that the state had done no analysis of its own. He noted that the town’s sampling program found “poor groundwater quality” beyond salt, such as e. coli contamination.
“There was and remains no conclusive evidence that directly ties the Collins Landing maintenance facility to the well contamination,” Morrissey wrote.
In 2016, the town approved a $13.2 million water main project to pipe clean water from a neighboring community to about 500 homes. Orleans supervisor Kevin Rarick said the state kicked in $8 million of grant money. But the remaining portion is to be paid by residents via a no-interest loan, which Rarick said will cost $525 a year per home for what could be decades.
He’s publicly called on the DOT to take responsibility and pay the full costs of the project. While he believes the advocacy helped secure about half of the grant money, it has not generated lasting goodwill.
“They didn’t like when I called them out,” Rarick said.
Weiss says the clean water is a relief. But she holds the state accountable for the loss of her well, calling the additional cost an insult.
“I absolutely think the state should pay,” Weiss said, adding, “To me it's clear, that's the just and ethical thing to do."
The state appears to have done better by the town of Dannemora in northern New York. A 2013 engineering study ordered by the DOT found that salt had “likely” contaminated drinking water supplies there, and a 2016 Politico story reported the state had agreed to build a $4.7 million water system for 20 nearby homes.
The full scope of the problem could be even worse. Before Virginia Tech completed its analysis of the contamination around Orleans, researchers mapped the location of all the salt sheds and major highways across New York, and concluded that 35,000 people — 2% of those served by private wells — could be impacted by road salt storage facilities. Another 460,000 people — nearly a quarter of well users — could be impacted by road salt application.
The work added to a growing body of research.
A 2018 study of private wells in East Fishkill, New York, found that more than half had sodium levels above the health limit recommended by the EPA. The levels were highest in the wells nearest roadways, one of several reasons Victoria Kelly, a researcher at the nonprofit Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in the Hudson Valley, concluded road salt was to blame.
“There are enough of those wells that were contaminated that we think it’s definitely something we should be paying attention to,” Kelly said.
The DOT spokesperson said the state has implemented a bevy of best practices in recent years to reduce its overall salt use by 10%.
“We are extremely committed to maintaining public safety with the smallest environmental footprint that is feasible,” Morrissey said.
Yet signs persist of issues elsewhere. A family-owned farm in the Rochester area took the New York State Thruway Authority to court in January, claiming salt-laden runoff from the highway led to the deaths of more than 80 cows. Contamination has also been found in the Adirondacks, with research there pointing toward heavy contamination from state-owned roads.
The Orleans supervisor said when he was speaking out about Fishers Landing, he received calls from people “all over the state,” with similar experiences.
“New York state can’t admit fault, because it will open the floodgates,” Rarick said.
While Weiss worries that what happened in Fishers Landing will be repeated elsewhere, she still sounds amazed that so much trouble could be traced to a compound found on most dining room tables.
“Who cares about salt?” she said. “But it's much more important than that. Hopefully this will create some sort of road map for others dealing with similar issues in other places.”