Drilling For Oil Beneath The Reed School

By Andrew Gorosko

School workers are performing a major fuel spill cleanup within Reed Intermediate School at Fairfield Hills, where wells have been drilled through the concrete boiler-room floor to recover what may be 2,000 gallons of #2 heating fuel lying beneath the building.

During the school’s winter vacation this week, workers cut a 180-foot-long trench into the concrete floor of a corridor in “Lower Area 3” at the school. Piping to be installed in that trench will be used to extract the heating fuel that lies beneath that corridor. Before the trench was cut, the corridor was shrouded in plastic sheeting to prevent concrete dust from contaminating the school.

Dom Posca, who heads the school system’s buildings and grounds unit, said the cleanup project has proved to be quite complex, involving much effort to rectify the subterranean contamination caused when an estimated 4,000 gallons of fuel spilled out of fuel lines in the school’s boiler room in late December due to a mechanical failure.

Several wells have been drilled through the boiler room floor to suction up the fuel that has pooled beneath the building’s floor, he said. A variety of equipment has been installed to extract that fuel from the subterranean groundwater. The pooled fuel beneath the school is floating atop the underground water table.

Work underway in the nearby school corridor will create a passageway through which fuel lying below the corridor can be extracted and later disposed, he said.

“This could take some time…There’s a lot of work involved here,” Mr Posca said of the cleanup project.

State Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) inspectors are requiring that the town remove some potentially faulty plumbing, which links the school’s underground fuel storage tank to the boiler room, and to replace it with new plumbing, Mr Posca said. Until such equipment is installed, the state will not allow the school to switch its heating source from the current natural gas back to heating fuel, Mr Posca said.

The plastic sheeting shrouding the school corridor will be removed before students return from spring vacation on February 28, Mr Posca said. Air quality within the school will be tested to check for any health hazards, he added.

DEP environmental analyst Aaron Green said this week that so far, approximately 1,400 gallons of the 4,000 gallons of fuel that spilled, or about 35 percent of the spilled fuel, has been recovered.

Mr Green said it is unclear how long it will take to cleanup the fuel spill. “I would expect it to go several months,” he said. The cleanup is considered finished when residual contamination levels meet DEP’s standards for such cleanups, he said.

Mr Green said it is unclear how much of the spilled fuel made its way into the nearby Deep Brook, a pristine stream where trout spawn. Initial DEP estimates had put the spillage into Deep Brook at 50 to 75 gallons.

In late December, some of the spilled fuel followed the crushed-stone bedding that surrounds a sanitary sewer line that drains away from Reed School. That spilled fuel eventually surfaced about 1,400 feet away in the spot where the sewer line crosses beneath Deep Brook.

The fuel spill’s effect on the trout population in the brook will not be known until midyear, when the DEP conducts its annual trout census there. Deep Brook is one of eight streams in the state where the water is clean enough to allow trout to reproduce naturally.

Automatic cleansing equipment has been in use near the stream to prevent spilled fuel from entering the brook.

Because the fuel spill occurred approximately 4,000 feet from the source of the nearest public water supply, the spill does not appear to threaten that supply’s water quality.

Cleanup work has continued since the spill was discovered on December 29.

Some of the spilled fuel is believed to lie within the crushed stone packing that surrounds a five-inch-diameter sanitary sewer line lying approximately 17 feet below the surface of Old Farm Road. The gravity-powered sanitary sewer exits the school and runs eastward beneath Old Farm Road before making a sharp turn and heading northward toward Deep Brook.

Mr Green said it appears that most of the unrecovered fuel lies beneath Reed School. It is unusual that such a large fuel spill occurred within a building, Mr Green said.

It remains unclear how much it would cost the town to clean up the spilled fuel.

On February 16, the Legislative Council approved seeking $1 million in bonding, which would be supplemented by $216,000 in school funds, to be used toward the cleanup project.

A December 2003 spill of 4,550 gallons of #2 heating fuel at the then state-owned Canaan House at Fairfield Hills reportedly cost the state approximately $1.5 million to clean up. It took several months to clean up that spill.

The town’s attorneys have been reviewing the various contracts that the town entered for Reed School’s construction to learn if some cleanup costs can be recovered for the town through legal action.

Reed School, which houses fifth- and sixth-grade students, opened for classes in January 2003. Haynes Construction Company of Seymour was the general contractor for school construction.