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Sunday: Battling tainted water Page 2 of 7 Other industries have left a taint elsewhere in the region, creating plumes of contaminated groundwater up to 9 square miles, some containing cancer-causing chemicals. Often the cleanups seem endless. At 15 locations in the metro area, special wells have been extracting and filtering out pollutants from groundwater for up to 39 years. In other places, regulators hope soil bacteria will render chemicals harmless in the future. One plume of pollution beneath St. Louis Park probably won't be flushed clean for a century or longer. "It is almost like when you throw dye into a jar of water," said Michael Convery, a supervisor in the Health Department's well management section. "It is hard to get it back again. It just spreads out." Suburbs bear the brunt When Jim Altier built a house outside Bayport, Minn., more than three decades ago, he and his family could look across farm fields and see the IDS Tower in Minneapolis. Trees have matured to block the view, surrounding his house with a canopy of green. He not only escaped the city, he no longer can see it from the back porch. But there's a crack in this idyllic picture: Altier's well is polluted with an industrial solvent. So are about 260 other nearby wells. He now has an activated-carbon filter, like many other Baytown Township residents, though for at least 14 years he and his family drank tainted water. "I had mixed feelings about it," said Altier, a retired Air National Guard mechanic who worked around solvents in his job. "... I feel better that the filter system is in there." He still wonders if the chemical, known as TCE, affected his first wife, Teddie, who died of leukemia in 1997. State health officials have reported no cancer clusters in Washington County, but Altier said he is not sure he believes it. More than 1.8 million metro residents get tap water from the ground. Suburbs have a disproportionate share of the metro area's major groundwater chemical plumes, most of them created when the land was an open space. "They were places that people thought were good places to bury stuff or dump stuff," said Michael Kanner, who heads the state Superfund program for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. "Some of the industries needed more land.... It was easier to move outside the city." To be sure, many places have groundwater pollution. Cities struggle to clean up so- called brownfields for redevelopment. In rural and some suburban areas, nitrates from fertilizer and other sources often contaminate wells, putting infants at risk. httn•//zznznzi ctartri}~nnP rnm/1 (177/v-nrint/ctnrv/14~ 1 X45 htmi 9/~ i /?nm