A fractured pump on the well that holds back a toxic underground plume beneath Chillicothe has put the city’s mill site on a clock. The U.S. Paper Mill alerted the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency on November 12 to a pump fracture on the water well that has been containing the plume of underground chemicals, and the decades-old, 90-foot pump will have to be replaced at a cost of thousands of dollars, the Chillicothe Gazette reported.
The plume itself is a legacy of a cookware manufacturing plant that closed in the 1990s, according to the Gazette. Since the Pixelle paper mill announced it was closing down, the site’s new owners have been pumping water into the well to keep the underground water tables away from the plume — a containment routine that depends on the pump now broken. In a news release, the U.S. Paper Mill said migration of the plume could, over time, contaminate land and groundwater in farmland, residences and the Scioto River, the Gazette reported.
“As we work closely with the Ohio EPA and the City of Chillicothe, the residents of this community need to understand this is a potentially urgent situation,” U.S. Paper Mill Utility Superintendent Aaron Anders told the Chillicothe Gazette. “Without replacement of the pump, the water table could potentially rise high enough to release contaminants from the plume.”
The company was careful to separate the risk ahead from the water residents are using now. Anders told the Gazette that residents do not need to be concerned about their water at the moment, but that the company wanted to be transparent about what was happening with the plume and the well. “We are doing all we can to protect the community that we love,” Anders told the Chillicothe Gazette. The mill is also working with Howmet, the owners of the former cookware site, to monitor water levels and water quality while the fix is arranged, according to the Gazette.
How the plume got here matters to why a single pump carries so much weight. The contamination dates to the cookware plant that operated on the site before closing in the 1990s, and it sits underground rather than in any building or tank — which is why containment is a water-management exercise, not a cleanup crew with drums. Pumping holds the water table in a position that keeps groundwater away from the plume; stop pumping long enough, and the rising water table can reach the contaminants and begin moving them. The plume’s future was already a live public question when the paper mill changed hands — the Gazette’s earlier coverage asked whether the toxic plume would be affected by the new owner of the mill site — and the pump fracture has now turned that hypothetical into a maintenance emergency.
The timing compounds the pressure on Chillicothe. The mill site is already at the center of the city’s finances: as NewsForce247 reported earlier Saturday, Chillicothe faces a $1.2 million budget gap as paper mill pain hits City Hall. An environmental problem at the same site — one whose worst case, in the company’s own release, reaches farmland, homes and the Scioto River — lands on a city government with little slack to absorb surprises.
Elsewhere in the region, industrial-scale projects are drawing the same kind of scrutiny over land and water: a proposed power plant for a data center near Piketon faces a December 10 hearing in Pike County, and state money is flowing the other direction in Southeast Ohio, where a $300,000 grant is funding home repairs for low-income homeowners. Chillicothe’s plume problem is the inverse of a development announcement — it is the long tail of an industry that left decades ago, surfacing again through the site that replaced it.
What we know — and what we’re still waiting on
What we know: the containment pump fractured, the mill notified Ohio EPA on November 12, the replacement is a decades-old 90-foot pump costing thousands of dollars, monitoring with Howmet is underway, and the company says residents’ water is not a concern at the moment. What we’re still waiting on: how long the replacement will take — the company told the Gazette it is not sure how long it will take to solve the problem, or how long the water table would take to rise — and what Ohio EPA requires of the site while the well is down.
What happens next is the replacement itself, on the fastest timeline the mill and its regulators can manage: source and install a new 90-foot pump, keep monitoring water levels and quality with Howmet in the meantime, and keep the water table below the plume until the well is whole again. Until that work is done and verified, the plume beneath Chillicothe stays exactly where it has been for decades — held in place by a system with no working pump.