Unley residents unperturbed about water contamination scare.
KIM Smith and his wife Jo have loved living at their Unley townhouse since they purchased the property on Mary Street about 10 years ago.
His home was one of 300 properties — including those on Charles Lane, Little Charles Lane and Tyne Place — which received a letter from the Environment Protection Authority on Monday evening about a potential trichloroethylene (TCE) contamination.
The harmful chemical was also behind a precautionary evacuation of homes at Clovelly Park and demolition of 25 buildings in 2015.
“There’s nothing we can do anyway,” Mr Smith said.
“It’s a matter of wait and see — what comes to light and then react accordingly whatever that may be.
Mary St resident Andrew Wood, 28, was calm about the potential risks.
Mr Wood, an engineer, has lived in his parent’s property on Mary St for the past 10 years.
“I imagine there is quite a bit of this (testing) done in Adelaide.” Mother-of-one Hongmei Xie, 37, has been living on Mary St for three years with her daughter, Aneesa, 13.
“I don’t know if that has anything to do with the contamination,” she said.

Waterline installation planned for Waynesboro area properties with contaminated water.
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Trichloroethylene (TCE) and tetrachloroethylene (PCE) were found in drinking water at properties on Welty Road in 2007.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection agreed to grant up to $500,000 to extend public-water service to the properties.
Washington Township is facilitating the project in cooperation with the Waynesboro Borough Authority, which will own the waterline on the section of road between the stone bridge and sharp curve.
Borough and township crews will work on and around East Ninth Street, State Hill Road and Welty Road.
"It’s expected to be completed this construction season," Washington Township Manager Mike Christopher said last week.
The source of the contamination was not pinpointed, but some of the highest lab results were linked to a nearby spring.

South-side Tucsonans mobilize for another water-pollution struggle.
Robles, who has lived in that area for most of her 55 years, is organizing an effort to gather hundreds of written legal claims alleging that water contamination is causing illness in the area — claims that could ultimately lead to a lawsuit.
Such claims and litigation are nothing new on the south side, where groundwater has been known to be tainted with cancer-causing trichloroethylene since 1981.
In both cases, the residents won financial settlements from Hughes Aircraft Co. and other parties held liable for dumping TCE into the ground as long ago as the late 1940s.
However, it wasn’t known to exist in the area’s groundwater until 2002.
At a community meeting last Monday, hundreds of residents packed a south-side ballroom to hear Robles and an attorney who won well over $100 million in various TCE legal settlements, Richard Gonzales, discuss the past and possible future legal cases.
Second, residents would have to prove that they’ve been drinking contaminated water in recent years.
In the past two weeks, the residents got potentially good news from state authorities.
On April 3, Arizona Department of Environmental Quality official William Ellett emailed Robles that the department has asked the Arizona Department of Health Services to “look into doing a health consultation for TCE and 1-4 dioxane” concerning pollution near Tucson International Airport, and examining the pollution’s possible association with cancer and lupus.
Linda Robles recounts her family health issues as she sits in her studio apartment near South Sixth Avenue and West 29th Street.

After outcry from residents and a U.S. congressman, the state attorney general’s office has sued companies in Grenada and Water Valley that allegedly dumped toxic chemicals, including Trichloroethylene (TCE), polluting the groundwater and air.
The suit alleges the Grenada facility operators, which manufactured hubcaps, dumped TCE directly onto the land on which the subdivision was built.
The state is also suing The Boeing Co., which never operated the plant, a statement from the company said, but merged with Rockwell years ago.
"They had water that was well water at the time.
As recently as January, the EPA announced the cancer-causing chemical currently exists as a vapor inside the Grenada facility at rates exceeding the federal action level, the highest threshold designated by the agency.
In Yalobusha County Circuit Court, the state is suing EnPro Industries, the company that acquired the liability for the contamination in Water Valley, Oldco LLC and Goodrich Corp.
The suit alleges Holley, a division of Colt Industries, leaked, spilled, or intentionally discharged TCE from its storage tanks outside the plant, "such that it leeched into the soil and migrated into the groundwater underneath the plant premises."
The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality is still conducting cleanup at the Water Valley site that began nearly 30 years ago.
"Defendants fraudulently concealed the continuing presence of pollution in the soil and groundwater on their plant premises and intentionally misrepresented the status of remediation efforts," the Water Valley suit alleges.
EPA would not comment on the litigation, and DEQ released the following statement: "We are not a named party in the lawsuit; however, we are aware of it.

Nanotechnology could have a big future as a tool for upstream oil and gas and other industries to use to clean up contaminated water, Professor Michael S. Wong of Rice University, Houston, told the SPE Gulf Coast Section’s R&D Study Group recently.
In addition, Wong said, “An exciting new role for catalysis is in the treatment of produced water for reuse.” Introducing a catalyst into a chemical process can bring about or speed up a chemical reaction, with the catalyst remaining unconsumed in the reaction and thus able to act repeatedly.
Only tiny amounts of catalyst are needed to achieve these effects.
Wong stressed the advantage of catalytic conversion techniques over the established methods of activated carbon adsorption and air stripping that are used to remove many contaminants from water.
Treating TCE-Laced Water He posed the example of treating water contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE) by traditional methods vs. a catalytic technology that his research group has developed.
Activated carbon treatment can remove it from water, but when the carbon becomes saturated with TCE, the carbon must be disposed of or cleaned by burning off the contaminant.
While one problem has been solved, “you now have another contaminated stream to deal with,” Wong said.
By adjustments in the amount of palladium, the surface coverage of the catalyst can be altered as needed.
The catalyst has performed very well in the laboratory, he said, and his group is working to bring the technology into field applications.
NEWT Partnership He also discussed work by the Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT), a collaborative initiative between universities, industrial companies, and other organizations.

Yet even as contaminants continue to spread, the Air Force wants to finish part of the cleanup with a laissez-faire strategy, raising alarm at the local water board.
The approach—adopted by environmental agencies at toxic cleanup sites across the country—leaves contaminated groundwater to remain untreated and instead slowly diminish over time.
It’s a strategy that saves money for polluters but could jeopardize drinking water supplies and cost taxpayers dearly.
That includes when contaminants are expected to degrade over a period of years rather than centuries, and when there is no risk of polluted water seeping into, and spoiling, fresh water supplies.
If the pollutants aren’t correctly monitored, they could continue to spread and contaminate nearby aquifers.
In California, for example, water-quality authorities and the Air Force have been locked in a protracted battle over pollution at the George Air Force Base.
The Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board, the agency overseeing the cleanup, claims the contaminants won’t degrade to safe levels for up to 500 years if MNA is applied as proposed by the Air Force.
But the Air Force disputes the water board’s dim assessment of MNA for the site.
That directive and the EPA’s updated guidelines state that MNA shouldn’t be applied when, among other things, the source of pollutants isn’t yet under control, when the tainted groundwater still is spreading and when the contaminants won’t break down to safe levels within a “reasonable” period.
At some Superfund sites, critics say, MNA has been applied in circumstances that clearly violate the agency’s guidelines.