"Residents blame PBA for dry wells"

By Theresa Hegel, Intelligencer, August 29, 2010:

Last month, Robert Schlitz, 75, turned on the tap at his East Rockhill home, and nothing happened.

After 42 years with no problems, his 90-foot well, which had weathered several droughts, had run dry. He spent nearly $10,000 to drill a 280-foot-deep replacement well.
Hoping to retire soon, Schlitz was reluctant to dip into his nest egg for the work, but saw no other choice.

"When you do without water for a couple of weeks, you'd do anything to get water," he said.

If it were just an isolated incident, Schlitz and his 39-year-old daughter, Regina, might have dismissed it as one of the pricey surprise pitfalls of homeownership.

But farther down West Schwenkmill Road, another neighbor had to drill a new well within two weeks of the Schlitzes. And three more neighbors were policing their water usage to keep their own private wells from going dry.

"When wells go dry this quickly, something happened to trigger it," said . . . [a neighbor], who has been turning his water pump off at night to help nurse his shallow well back to health. . . . [He] and his wife have been conserving water - taking short showers and doing their laundry at a Laundromat.

"My well's not in good shape," he said.

The hot, dry summer hasn't helped the wells on West Schwenkmill, but neighbors believe it isn't the only culprit. They're concerned that nearby wells operated by the Perkasie Borough Authority have been drawing down their water supply.

In particular, the neighbors point to a July incident when Perkasie had to refill its competition pool at Menlo because it had drained overnight.

"I think that's the thing that broke the camel's back," . . . [a neighbor] said.

The PBA provides water and sewer to more than 4,000 households in Perkasie, East Rockhill, West Rockhill and Hilltown. The authority draws water from six wells, five of which are in East Rockhill.

The wells that concern Schlitz and . . . [his neighbor] are about a mile away from their homes and sit on 168 wooded acres off Three Mile Run Road that the water authority has owned since 1889.

"We've been there for a long, long time," said Gary Winton, PBA manager.

Winton says the borough authority does not believe its wells have any affect on the wells on West Schwenkmill.

"What occurred is we haven't had any measurable precipitation since April," he said, adding that the wells that have been going dry have mostly been shallow ones, fewer than 100 feet deep.

He also refuted the idea that Perkasie's pool refilling would have had an effect on the wells. The water authority keeps 3 million gallons of water in storage to handle situations like water main breaks or fires. The pool refill would be of an equivalent nature.

The water authority already monitors just under 50 private wells that surround its system. Winton said PBA will be adding a few of the West Schwenkmill wells to the list. The authority's hydrogeologist also will be doing some groundwater monitoring over the next month, he added.

If the investigation shows that the water authority adversely affected the residents, the PBA would develop an action plan to fix the problem and make restitution for those whose wells had gone dry, Winton said.

The answers the water authority provides are not sufficient for several of the residents of West Schwenkmill. They argue that if dry weather is the only culprit, the authority should have issued drought warnings or voluntary water restrictions.

"My question is why not put an alert out to people who have shallow wells," Regina Schlitz asked.

But Winton says the water authority only can issue warning when the water levels drop to 225 feet above their well pumps. Last week, the water level was 342 feet above the pumps.

"We're not anywhere close to seeing a drought on our system," he said.