U.S. Water News Online
AVONDALE, Colo. -- The Army is building three treatment plants in hopes of keeping explosives-contaminated groundwater from migrating off the 20,000-plus-acre Pueblo Chemical Depot.
``We are well on the way to halting the contamination that's going off post,'' depot commander Lt. Col. John Megnia said recently.
Two of the systems will use filtration followed by treatment with granular activated carbon. Groundwater will be extracted from wells now being installed, sent through the system, and then put back in the earth.
A third system will be similar, but will add a process to remove nitrates.
The Army installed a treatment system in the town's public well last December after a byproduct of the explosive TNT was found in the water. Numerous private citizens whose wells are contaminated have been receiving bottled water from the Army for nearly two years.
Megnia said construction of the treatment systems, scheduled to be completed by June 7, will cost $6 million to $7 million, and ongoing maintenance and monitoring will cost about $1 million a year.
The state health department will oversee the process, as well as testing and monitoring of the completed plants, as part of a compliance order issued to the Army after off-base contamination was discovered.
The order gives the Army until June 4 of next year to halt all contaminant migration off base.
The contamination is the byproduct of a TNT washout facility built in the 1940s and abandoned in the 1970s.
Wharry said the operation involved hosing down used or obsolete munitions to reclaim the vessels they filled.
The explosives residue was sent into an unlined ditch that fed an unlined lagoon, he said.
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