Missouri knew of contamination in Springfield’s groundwater decades before anyone told residents //

Early in 2019, Ed Galbraith faced a crowd of some 200 unhappy Springfield, Missouri, residents. He wanted to make amends.

Galbraith, then director of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources’ environmental quality division, acknowledged that the state agency in charge of protecting the environment should have announced sooner that contaminated water had spread from an old industrial site near Springfield-Branson National Airport. Residents had recently found out that a harmful chemical known to cause cancer had been detected in the groundwater.

The contamination came from the site of the now-shuttered Litton Systems, a former defense contractor that had employed thousands of people in Springfield to make circuit boards for the Navy and telecommunications industry.

Litton used a toxic solvent called trichloroethylene (TCE) to wash the circuit boards and for years improperly disposed of it. The pollutant leached into the groundwater and into aquifers deep below the ground. It then spread to nearby properties, where it made its way into wells that supplied water to those who lived and worked near Litton.

The plant closed in 2007, six years after defense contractor Northrop Grumman bought Litton. Even after Northrop Grumman demolished the facility, the contamination problem lurked below the surface.

“For those people for whom this came as a surprise, especially for those who had TCE in their (water) wells and didn’t know it, I apologize,” Galbraith said at a public forum on March 13, 2019. “We didn’t tell people about it in a timely manner.”