With the second attempt, well drillers hired by Pittston town officials may have found a good source of water for Greg and Arlene Snow.
On Thursday, Greg Snow said the 500-foot-deep well drilled by Rolfe Well Drilling was producing about 2½ gallons of water a minute. Now, Snow said, he and his wife are waiting for test results to tell them whether the water is free from salt contamination.
At a special town meeting in September, Pittston voters authorized town officials to spend $35,000 to pay for testing, legal fees and drilling a new well for the Snows, after testing showed their well had been tainted by road salt stored at the town’s highway maintenance garage, which sits north and east of their property.
Snow said he’ll commission his own test of the water to make sure the water is free from any other contaminants as well.
The new well is only 100 feet from the first drilled well. At a Board of Selectmen’s meeting Oct. 24, town officials said that well, drilled to more than 800 feet, had come up dry – something no one expected.
“We did all kinds of studies to get the best solution,” Roger Linton, the board’s chairman, said Thursday.
After the Snows first approached the town more than a year ago with a complaint about their well water, rounds of testing determined that the source of the contamination was road salt.
During a site visit in late August 2017 by the state Department of Environmental Protection, town officials learned that outdoor storage of salt had been a problem nearly three decades earlier on that site.
The Snows have been unable to use the contaminated water for drinking or cooking, and they have been advised to take only short showers.
They say everything in their home that water has touched has sustained damage, including pipes and appliances.
Town officials had hired their own expert to survey the ledge on the property to help determine the best location for a new well.
At the Oct. 24 meeting, town officials had debated what to do after the first attempt didn’t work out; drilling a second well would add to what had been spent to date.
“This has been going on more than a year,” Selectman Greg Lumbert said at that meeting. “The more we drag it out, the worse it’s going to be.”
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