Krancer: Cabot-Funded Filters Can Treat Dimock Arsenic

Here’s Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Sec­re­tary Michael Krancer’s response to the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency’s deci­sion to send water to four Dimock homes.

DEP just received EPA’s volu­mi­nous pack­age today and we are review­ing it. We will take more time to fully eval­u­ate all the infor­ma­tion and data that EPA has pre­sented, which it says is behind the action it pro­poses tak­ing and the requests it is mak­ing. Our review, so far, tells us that EPA does not seem to have pre­sented any new data here. More than a year ago, DEP’s enforce­ment action addressed this issue and ensured funds were set aside to resolve the water qual­ity issues for these home­own­ers. Funds were set aside for each home­owner to have a water treat­ment sys­tem installed. The sys­tem would address para­me­ters EPA ref­er­ences here, includ­ing arsenic and man­ganese, and would pro­vide water that meets and exceeds safe drink­ing water stan­dards. We agree that addi­tional sam­pling should be con­ducted in Dimock and we are actively work­ing with EPA to con­duct addi­tional sam­pling at the affected homes and at 57 other residences.