By: E&P Staff Ten days after the Chicago Tribune exposed the shocking fact that Crestwood, Ill.'s public works department had been secretly adding polluted well water to residents' drinking water for more than two decades, federal authorities raided the village's offices Wednesday.
Agents from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) spent most of the day collecting records at the Crestwood Village Hall, the municipality's public works department and the Police Department. The agents would not discuss with news media what they were taking away.
The raid, though, was carried out with search warrants issued by the office of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, which "signals a significant turn in the case," wrote Tribune reporter Michael Hawthorne and freelancer Carmen Greco Jr. in a front-page article Thursday. Most environmental laws are handled in civil court, with criminal investigations not typically targeted at municipalities, they noted.
Hawthorne wrote the April 19 investigative article "Poison in the well" that documented Crestwood officials added water from a contaminated well to the village's drinking water supply for at least 22 years. Since 1986, the village had told state environmental officials it was getting all its water from Lake Michigan. But in an apparent effort to save money, the public works department also added water from the well, sometimes as much as 20% of the total supply. The village frequently boasted it offered the cheapest water rates in Cook County, which includes Chicago.
The well, known to be contaminated with toxic chemicals related to a dry-cleaning solvent, was closed in 2007.
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