KAFB fuel spill plume appears to spare several wells
Monitoring data shows it moving north rather than northeast
That Kirtland Air Force Base fuel spill plume may not be heading toward Albuquerque drinking water wells after all.
Leaders of the fuel spill cleanup team say the latest data from monitoring wells along Louisiana Boulevard indicate the plume is moving north rather than northeast toward the nearest drinking water wells.
“It looked before like it was going directly to Kirtland (well) 3,” Dennis McQuillan, a geologist with the New Mexico Environment Department, said this weekend. “But it appears to be going more north than northeast.
“That’s good news all around for those wells up there. Clearly it is not making a beeline to Kirtland 3 or Ridgecrest 3. The jury is still out on Ridgecrest 5. But we are breathing easier on these wells.”
Kirtland 3 is on the Air Force Base, east of Louisiana Boulevard and north of Gibson Bou- levard. Ridgecrest 3 is west of Wyoming Boulevard and several blocks south of Zuni Road. Ridgecrest 5 is just south of Zuni and several blocks east of Louisiana.
The fuel leak, which is believed to have been seeping into the ground for decades, was first detected in 1999. Estimates of the amount of fuel spilled range from 6 million to 24 million gallons. The greatest concern has been that the spill would contaminate drinking water wells in the Southeast Heights.
McQuillan and other officials involved in the effort to define the extent of the contamination and get rid of it have said all along that there is no imminent danger to the drinking water supply because the plume has been just inching along.
Even so, the fact that all six monitoring wells bracketing Louisiana between Gibson and Anderson Street to the north were clean, meaning they found no sign of contamination, suggests the plume is not moving toward Louisiana and the drinking water wells and may be smaller than previously believed.
“Before, we thought the drinking wells were more at threat,” said Adria Bodour, the Air
Force’s lead scientist on the cleanup. “This is telling us they are not. This gives us bookends for where the plume is migrating. It helps me map out where I can put extraction wells. It helps me make good decisions.”
Extraction wells will pull out groundwater contaminated by ethylene dibromide, an aviation gasoline additive, and feed the tainted water into pipes that send it to an activated carbon-filter cleaning system on the Air Force base. The rig for drilling the first extraction well went up this past week in the west parking lot of Christ United Methodist Church at 6200 Gibson SE.
McQuillan and Bodour talked about the data from the Louisiana monitoring wells Saturday during a six-hour Kirtland Air Force Base field trip attended by more than 100 members of the public and experts in geology, hydrology, groundwater chemistry, microbiology and other disciplines.
Designed to give the public a better understanding of the fuel leak contamination and the issues involved in removing it, the expedition went to previous contamination sites and geological deposit displays off base and finished up on the Air Force Base, for talks by Bodour and others near the origin of the Kirtland fuel leak.
Bodour said the assumption had been that the plume would be pulled toward the drinking water wells by the pumping of those wells. Now, she said, it appears the plume may be following an old river bed, an old alluvial channel.
McQuillan said three more monitoring wells will be put along Louisiana to find out if the data they collect supports or contradicts the promising results produced by the other six. The three new monitoring wells will go down about 550 feet, deeper than the previous six — three of which went down about 490 feet and three that were about 510 feet deep.
Plans had called for three more extraction wells to be drilled this year. But if the spill is smaller than had been believed, that might not be necessary. That will be determined, in part, by additional monitoring well data col- lected on Georgia Street between Ross Avenue and Anderson Street.
“If we need two, we need two,” Bodour said. “If we need three, we need three. We are still marching forth with our mission to pump and treat.”