That detail, once it became public, changed how the whole neighborhood understood what had happened.
The well hadn't just been an old hole in the ground the HOA was entitled to fill in for tidiness.
It had been unknowingly doing a job nobody currently alive remembered it was built to do.
Venting pressure and heat from a buried hazard nobody in the neighborhood even knew existed until I refused to accept "it's nothing" as an answer.
Diane Prescott was removed from the HOA board by unanimous emergency vote nine days after the state case opened.
Though by that point, the removal was almost a formality.
She'd already stopped attending meetings, and her attorney had begun responding to HOA correspondence on her behalf.
Carla Marchetti, despite living out of state for nearly a decade, was named in the same enforcement action, both for her original decision to conceal the initial discovery and for referring Diane to the same off-the-books contractor arrangement she'd used herself.
Her cooperation with investigators, Dennis told me privately, would likely reduce her personal liability significantly.
It would not eliminate it.
The financial exposure for the HOA itself turned out to be the detail that finally made the entire community treat this as an emergency rather than a scandal to whisper about at the mailbox kiosk.
Remediation of a confirmed legacy contamination site of this scope, according to the state's initial estimate, would run somewhere between $400,000 and $700,000.
A cost that, absent some other resolution, would have to be split across every homeowner through a special assessment running into the thousands of dollars per household.
That was the number that turned neighbors who'd barely spoken to me in years into people knocking on my door to ask what came next.
I hadn't run for anything.
Hadn't campaigned for anyone's attention.
But for about two weeks that fall, my front porch turned into an informal town hall.
People I'd waved to maybe a dozen times in three years started stopping by with real questions.
How bad could this get for their own property value?
Was it true a school district had been affected too?
Did I think the association would survive this financially, or would people start walking away from their mortgages entirely?
I didn't have good answers to most of it.
I wasn't a lawyer.
Wasn't a financial adviser.
Wasn't anybody with the authority to promise a single person that their home equity would come out the other side of this intact.
What I could tell them honestly was what Priya and Dennis had told me.