GUERILLA INVESTING FOR DUMMIES

[mAjOr dAmAgE]

I found Edward Hayter. He escaped to Louisiana to live with his girlfriend. He dug a 480 foot well and poisoned the new guy.
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Edward Hayter wasted little time after the state sent him a letter in 2006 saying it had found gasoline contamination in his well on Brooklyn Circle.

Hayter paid about $9,500 to have a deep new well drilled in his front yard before putting the property up for sale. Most wells in the county are less than 30 feet deep. Hayter drilled his well to 480 feet.

Hayter said the contaminant — a gasoline additive called MTBE — had nothing to do with the sale of his home. He said he simply moved to Louisiana to be with his girlfriend.

He said officials with the Cumberland County Health Department advised him to drill the expensive rock well, saying it should take care of any contamination.

The Health Department approved the new well after testing it for coliform and e-coli bacteria. It never tested the new well for MTBE or other petroleum chemicals, even though it was aware of the MTBE contamination.

Shortly after Hayter moved to Louisiana, an official with the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources noticed the for sale sign in his yard and the state removed an expensive water filtration system that it had installed on the property.

Hassan Osman, a hydrogeologist with the state’s Underground Storage Tank Section, said he was unaware that Hayter had drilled a new well. He called it “completely unadvisable.”

Danny Soles, a supervisor who has worked with the Health Department for 41 years, said that, in hindsight, the new well probably should not have been drilled because it could pull contaminants into the deeper aquifer.

Kevin Edwards, who bought the house from Hayter as a rental investment last year, said he knew about the new well, but nobody ever told him about the contamination in the old one. Under state law, people selling their homes do not have to disclose such information.

“I just thought it was time for the well to be done,” Edwards said.

He said he would never have bought the property had he known about the contamination.

“That’s putting me at risk, and my family,” he said. “Why would I want to submit my family to bad water?”

Hayter has never met or talked to Edwards, who lives in Maryland. Hayter said he never saw or signed any paperwork asking about groundwater contamination. Both men used the same real estate agent, Nate Walker of Rosewood Realty.

Walker said Edwards was made aware of the contamination, verbally and through a written disclosure form. Walker promised to provide a copy of that disclosure form, but he never did, and repeated calls to his office and cell phone went unanswered.

Felisha McCollum began renting the house in March 2007. From her kitchen sink, she filled a glass of water that smelled like rotten eggs. The water was from the 480-foot-deep well.

“I have been complaining ever since I moved in here because it has, like, this foul odor,” McCollum said. “It’s disgusting. I won’t drink it.”

McCollum’s complaints to her rental management company, Rosewood Realty, finally brought action. In December, the Health Department sent samples from McCollum’s well to the state lab. The lab found 2 parts per billion of arsenic and a concentration of manganese slightly above the state limit.

Ken Rudo, a state toxicologist, advised McCollum that the arsenic level was above the state’s public health goals but below the state’s water quality standards.

“Consumption of two liters of this water a day over a 30-year period may result in an increased cancer risk,” Rudo wrote. “It is recommended to decrease your consumption of the water, which will reduce your cancer risk.”

Again, county health officials did not test the water for petroleum contamination. Health inspector Daniel Ortiz said the realty company paid only for a chemical analysis.

In January, the state conducted a petroleum test and found no MTBE contamination.

But McCollum still has no plans to drink it, and Edwards still wonders why nobody bothered to tell him about the MTBE or the arsenic.

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