Background: The Pascoag, RI Water Contamination Event

Pascoag is a small village in the north-west corner of the state of Rhode Island. It's a fairly middle-class, middle-income community, with an economy struggling to recover from the collapse of the textile industry. About 5,000 people in Pascoag receive their water from the Pascoag Utility District (PUD); the rest have private wells.

From May of 2001 through the summer months residents began noticing a funny taste and smell to their water. Some called the utility district to complain about this. The utility district ran tests for bacterial contamination and began to chlorinate. They told residents that it was probably the chlorine that they were noticing. In August, one homeowner got fed up and took a water sample to the state Department of Health (HEALTH). HEALTH found that the water was contaminated with MTBE, a gasoline additive. The contaminant was coming from a leaking underground storage tank at a gas station near to the aquifer for the town wells.

On September 1, 2001, the PUD and HEALTH told residents, first via an announcement on the 11 o'clock news on Saturday night, that they should not drink their water. This advisory would later be revised to include prohibitions on drinking the water, cooking with it, or bathing children under the age of 6 in it.

For the next 4 months, residents drank and cooked with bottled water, showered at friends' houses or at the Harrisville hockey rink in the next village, waited for their water to be safe again, and wondered what the short and long term effects on their health would be.

During these 4 months, officials from a variety of different local, state, and federal agencies struggled to identify the source of the contamination, decide how to address the problem, obtain water for residents in the short term, and plan a long term remediation plan. The full remediation of the site to drinkable standards is expected to cost over $2 million and take up to 5 years.

Eventually, legal proceedings initiated by a group of community members resulted in the establishment of an interconnection with the water district for the village of Harrisville, a neighboring village also within the town of Burrillville. On January 19, 2002, HEALTH approved that residents could turn on the faucets again.

This is only a brief narrative from what was a long, complicated, and multi-faceted situation. For more information about this period, please see the sites for Pascoag: Lessons Learned, Clean Water Pascoag, the HEALTH Pascoag Archive, and the PUD MTBE Archive.

Some Pascoag statistics:

• Pascoag is a village in the larger town of Burrillville in the north-western corner of the state
• According to the 2000 census, the population of Burrillville is 15,796, and the median household income is $52,587
• The Pascoag Utility District (PUD) provides municipal water to about 1,200 customers in Pascoag, or about 5,000 people
• The PUD's biggest customers in terms of overall water usage are the Danielle Prosciutto factory, the Overlook Nursing Home, and the Bayberry Health Center.