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Wednesday, March 27, 2002

By Don Hopey, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

The state Department of Environmental Protection has started supplying bottled water to the 200-pupil Bruin Elementary School near Petrolia in northeast Butler County after tests confirmed the presence of sulfonic acids in the school's drinking water.

The school, in Karns City Area School District, as well as residential sites in Bruin, Fairview and Parker townships and Fairview Borough are included in a newly expanded area where the DEP yesterday began delivering bottled water because sulfonic acids and resorcinol from industrial dump sites have contaminated the groundwater and public water system.

The announcement of wider contamination came as two groups, Citizens for Pennsylvania's Future and Small Towns Opposed to Polluted Sites, said they will hold a community meeting to discuss the water contamination problem at 7 p.m. today at the Petrolia Fire Hall.

Two weeks ago, the DEP announced it would supply water as a precaution to more than 100 homes and businesses in Petrolia, a town of about 500 people.

The recent discovery comes about two years after sulfonic acid and resorcinol were found in wells that served about 140 households in the area. Since then, water supplies in the area have undergone periodic testing.

Although state scientists aren't sure what, if any, health effects may result from ingesting sulfonic acids, the state is supplying the bottled water as a precaution. No prohibition has been issued on using Petrolia's public water for bathing or washing clothes.

The chemicals from Koppers Co. and the former Witco Chemical Co. were dumped into abandoned strip mines in the 1950s and 1960s and leeched into the town's public water supply, which is obtained from wells.

The resorcinol contamination comes from waste dumped at three former strip mines, also in the 1950s and 1960s, by Koppers, which operated a plant that produced the toxic adhesive. That resinous substance once used to bind together layers of rubber in tires, is listed as a hazardous waste by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.