The Environmental Protection Agency is continuing testing following Wednesday’s detection of a possible presence of mercury at Fairmont Park’s pond. Salt Lake City officials reiterate that there’s no risk to public health.
The initial detection of mercury was announced at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, and at a hurried news conference an hour later, Mayor Erin Mendenhall said EPA officials would arrive Thursday for more tests. Mendenhall stated the EPA will now serve as the lead agency on the incident to determine “the appropriate short and long-term response.”
“We were brought on by the State of Utah for the request of Salt Lake City to help them kind of assess the situation,” said Valeriy Bisyayev, the federal on-scene coordinator from the EPA’s Region 8 office. “Right now, we’re still kind of in the assessment phase, and so we’re still trying to figure out what happened, why it happened. There are other factors that are kind of in play, but we’re really still doing assessment, we’re still continuing to do testing and things of that nature.”
Laura Briefer, director of Salt Lake City’s Department of Public Utilities, emphasized that the incident has not impacted the drinking water system, and that the pond’s water is not used for irrigation. However, a portion of the city’s irrigation canal system that feeds the Parley’s water users exchange has been “temporarily halted” until the city has more information.
“The waterway I’m talking about is part of the city’s old canal system – the Parley’s water users exchange,” Briefer said. “Most of the water that comes into that system is from Utah Lake. It’s transported via the Jordan-Salt Lake canal basically from the Utah Lake, all the way up to downtown Salt Lake City. There is a pathway for this water to enter into that system, and so out of an abundance of precautions, we’re not doing water deliveries through that system until we have more information.”
The city will be testing Fairmont Park’s pond first to see what they find. If it seems there’s high contamination, they’ll start “stepping out into the system,” and the city may still do a test if the results are low or nonexistent, Briefer said.
The source of the mercury remains unknown, and Bisyayev said further testing will be focused on trying to determine where it came from. However, he does not think this is an intentional contamination by someone trying to cause harm, he added.
“[Construction in the area] could be a possible source, so that’s one of the things that we’ll look through,” Bisyayev said. “I’ve ordered satellite imaging – back to like 1932 is the furthest back I can go at the moment. So we’re just trying to get as much information as we can — hopefully, we can find a source. But you know, honestly, things and practices from back in the day, they weren’t documented, and we probably might not know.”
Symptoms of mercury poisoning include nausea and vomiting, but it is more of a “chronic exposure concern,” Bisyayev said. Most adults and healthy, young individuals are “probably going to be okay,” but it does take a long time for acute toxicity of mercury to take effect, with children and older adults being more susceptible.
“We don’t know what kind of mercury this is yet,” Bisyayev said. “We still have to do some additional testing to figure out speciation and some other forms. You can get acutely poisoned from it, but you would have to do a large ingestion or a large inhalation amount of it.”
In the meantime, federal support staff are being deployed to help Bisyayev “get a better understanding of the area and the characterization of the site.” The EPA is continuing to test to find the source of the possible contaminant, and everything will be done out of an abundance of caution, Bisyayev said.
If the testing proves there’s mercury in the pond area coming from some upper source, they will find the source and Bisyayev will work to clean up the pond to “leave it better than when we got here.”
“Things are still good and safe,” Bisyayev said. “We’re just trying to get more information before we move forward.”
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