By Julie McCay Turner
On Easter morning, River Steward Ralph Hammond walked to the far edge of his back yard to check on the Shawsheen River as he often does. Was the water high for this time of year? What would the flow rate work out to be? As a curious sort, such questions are not out of the ordinary for him.
Noticing a sheen of oil on the water, Hammond rode his bicycle upstream to see what he could learn. Discovering an oil sheen where the Elm Brook flows beneath The Great Road, he deduced that the spill did not originate in the Shawsheen. (Elm Brook flows into the Shawsheen just north of The Great Road.)
Within 20 minutes of calling the Bedford Fire Department, firefighters were deploying a containment boom across the Shawsheen River behind Hammond’s house. The Department had shifted into high gear and ultimately installed six containment booms.
Captain Mark Sullivan established a command center at the end of DeAngelo Drive. With three of Bedford’s well fields in the way of the spill, Capt. Sullivan contacted Jason Raposa, Water and Sewer Operations Manager for the Bedford Department of Public Works. The wells were shut down as a precaution, the Billerica Water Department was notified, and Clean Harbors was summoned. A full complement of hazmat workers was on scene well before noon.
The oil spilled from a crack in a transformer that crashed to the ground in the parking lot beside the Ametek building.
The pole holding the transformer was rotted at its base and simply fell over at some point on Saturday. Because the transformer was at the end of a service line, it did not affect power to other buildings or homes in the area.
Late Sunday afternoon Environmental scientist Christopher La Rose complimented Bedford’s early response to the incident with containment booms placed by Bedford firefighters. La Rose continued, saying that “the emergency sample we tested for PCBs this morning came back at fewer than 50 parts per million, well within Federal guidelines.”
Clean Harbors and Eversource will return on Monday and continue to monitor Elm Brook and the Shawsheen, especially with heavy rains forecast for early in the week.
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