According to The Wichita Eagle, state officials in Kansas waited years before notifying residents that water contamination may have affected their private drinking wells.
Although the Kansas Department of Health and Environment uncovered evidence that a dry cleaning chemical known as perchloroethylene, or PCE, had contaminated groundwater in Haysville in 2011, the agency failed to act or alert residents for more than six years, according to a report in The Wichita Eagle.
The state’s Department of Health and Environment told The Wichita Eagle that it had initially assumed the contaminated groundwater was moving away from nearby residents’ private drinking wells, and so they classified the issue as a low priority.
State officials have been clear in emphasizing that the public water supply for the city of Haysville has not been affected, meaning residents who are connected to city water are not at risk for having consumed or bathed in water contaminated with PCE.
It was unclear to Bustle if some residents remained dependent on potentially contaminated private wells.
The Haysville groundwater contamination is reportedly not the first time state officials have been slow in alerting residents of contamination.
In 2009, The Kansas Department of Health and Environment found evidence of a PCE contamination in Wichita, The Wichita Eagle reported.
According to The Wichita Eagle, the law directs the Kansas Department of Health and Environment not to specifically look for contaminations related to dry cleaning chemicals and to instead, make every "reasonable effort" to keep contamination sites within the state off the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund list.
But Kansas Department of Health and Environment Director of Environment Leo Henning told The Wichita Eagle that the agency has established priorities.
"There’s never going to be enough money to do everything at once, so we have to prioritize," the paper reported Henning said.