Just as the town of Jackson — population 28 — gets ready to fix its water quality problems, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the town’s water and sewer district for the years the unincorporated town has been out of compliance.
The U.S. Department of Justice sued the town’s water and sewer district Wednesday in federal court for 16 claims of contamination exceedances, failure to monitor and failure to provide public notice.
The district has also failed to monitor for a host of contamination, including asbestos, according to the court document.
The town has received $588,000 in grant money within the last year to tackle the problem.
Work is to begin this summer to drill three new wells to get the town back into water quality compliance, he said.
A message left on the home phone of one of the water service district members Friday was not immediately returned.
A sampling result in 2009 exceeded arsenic.
“People have been working on this for nine years now,” McGinley said.
The district’s water exceeded the arsenic standard “on numerous occasions” from 2009 to the present, exceeded the radium standard “on numerous occasions” since 2011 and exceeded the standard for radioactive substances from late 2015 to present, according to the court document.
It’s a terribly slow process.”