An employee speaks with the owner of Scarff’s Wholesale Nursery. Scarff’s drilled four wells in an attempt to avoid pollution seeping from a nearby landfill, and still had to be connected to city water. Photo by Marshall Gorby, courtesy of the Springfield News-Sun

Big splash on the front of today’s News-Sun: my story on a landfill just south of New Carlisle. People may be drinking carcinogenic water and not know it, because years into EPA’s Superfund process, no nearby wells have been tested.

An obscure Ohio Department of Health tipped us off to the story. They’re concerned.

The aquifer there is slow-moving — imagine water moving through a jar of gravel and sand — but it serves something like two million people. Water activists around here get pretty fired up about it.

Vinyl chloride is the chemical they’re most worried about. It’s a potent carcinogen.