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tify the highway department of the test results and request a postponement of the closure action.
However, that request produced no results, and by noon Monday the springbox had been closed, its three water outlets buried under a facing of stone and cement.
And the resolution reached by the highway department hasn’t satisfied any of those involved in the controversy - not even the Great Falls resident who raised the original question over the spring’s safety.
Robert Stimpson, told Tuesday evening of VDOT’s action, called it “too bad ... a cop-out, really.” His intent in contacting the county Health Department, Mr. Stimpson said, was not to have the spring closed. “I just had some basic health concerns — which have never been answered.”
He said that his hope was that a monitoring program would be set up over some period of time to establish whether or not the spring is contaminated, and if so with what. In making his original inquiry, Mr. Stimpson said, “I told them I didn’t want it closed -- I just wanted to know if it was safe . . . I’m disappointed. I had really hoped they would come up with a program to monitor it. If it was tested and found clean it would have been the very best news.”
Mr. Judd called the closing of the spring “an aggregious over-reaction on the part of the Department of Health -- an over-reaction to a problem which doesn’t exist,” he added, referring to the water samples which indicated that the spring is free of contamination.
“There were so many reasonable options. The only unreasonable one was to cement up the spring based on inadequate evidence,” Mr. Judd said. “. . . They chose the worst possible option: depriving the public of a resource, desecrating a public monument, and then walking away and trying to pretend they acted in the public good.
“It’s like starting a forest fire to
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