Wrong Side of the Road

In help for PFAS in drinking water, geography matters

A month ago, when I wrote about the Military's response to PFAS ("Forever Chemicals") contamination in drinking water, I promised a follow up on the response to non-military sources. I haven’t post sooner as the story wasn't ready to be told. There was always just one more phone call or piece of data. Well, I'm still waiting, but the story's as ready as it's going to be, so here goes. The bottom line is that the response to PFAS contamination from non-military sources is a geographic lottery, both state-to-state and within a state. Most of the examples are from Washington, with a couple from elsewhere. You can catch up with previous PFAS posts here.

Where is PFAS coming from?

While some states have to contend with other sources such as manufacturing facilities, in Washington essentially all PFAS is drinking water originates in firefighting foam found at military facilities and airports, other fuel and transportation facilities and at fire stations, including rural fire stations. Washington State Department of Ecology is launching a take-back program to recover and dispose of firefighting foam concentrate. So far, around 100 of the state's 450 fire departments have registered with the program and have declared a total of 59,000 gallons of concentrate. The total will likely approach a quarter of a million gallons. Each of these fire departments has multiple fire stations, so the material is spread over a few thousand fire stations and will be staying there at least until Ecology completes an Environmental Impact Statement for the program.

How many wells will be affected?

These are the numbers that have taken the time.

The EPA has proposed new Maximum Contaminant Levels (MCLs) for several PFAS compounds in drinking water which may go into effect soon. Of these, the most likely to trigger exceedances and health concerns are PFOS and PFOA, the two most commonly used in firefighting foam. I tried to estimate how many drinking water wells in Washington might be exceed these new limits. That turned out to be quite difficult. The Office of Drinking Water is testing water systems with at least 15 connections (Group A water systems). Around 7.5% of water systems have at least one source testing above the MCLs. But that number includes systems on surface water (lakes and reservoirs), interties, combines sources, and so on, so the true number is going to be maybe 10%.

Can we extrapolate that 10% of group A systems to group B systems and private wells? Well (sorry), it's complicated. We need to hop over to a different agency, the Department of Ecology, to find out how many of these wells there are. Ecology can tell us they have a record of 831,000 wells, but that includes irrigation wells, injection wells, ground sourced heat pump wells, and so on. In short, they don't know how many of those are drinking water wells, but my contact at Ecology gave me a conservative estimate of 360,000.

Private wells on average are more remote than those serving more people, so a lower percentage might be contaminated. Overall, a reasonable estimate might be in the low tens of thousands of wells serving up to 100,000 people. Similar reasoning should apply nationwide.

What kind of help can people expect?

We discussed last time that the military is taking care of everyone, more or less well, with wells that test over the much higher EPA 2016 lifetime health advisory levels but have not yet recognized the proposed EPA limits. How are our federal, state, and county agencies, and communities, handling the non-military sources? First, a little refresher on the laws under which our agencies work. There are two main laws we need to mention here, both passed in the wake of public outrage over environmental incidents in the sixties and seventies, and one state law.

The Safe Drinking Water Act (1974) was established to protect the quality of drinking water in the US. In all states except Wyoming, responsibility for implementing the law is delegated to a state agency. In the case of Washington, that's the Department of Health's Office of Drinking Water. There are three important things to know; the SDWA regulates water purveyors, not polluters; and private wells and group B water systems (less than fifteen connections) are not covered, which means that in this state alone almost two million people are drinking water that's not protected by the SDWA.

Superfund, or CERCLA the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (1980), specifies that the "polluter pays" for cleanup of hazardous waste sites, and established a trust fund for cleanup of sites where no responsible party can be identified. This law applies directly to federal facilities such as military bases.

The Model Toxics Control Act, or MTCA, pronounced "Motca", is Washington State Department of Ecology's environmental cleanup law. It's modeled on CERCLA, and even includes funding for cleanup when a Potentially Liable Person (PLP) can't be found. The guiding principle remains that the polluter pays, so Ecology tends not to act unless a PLP can be found.

MTCA in practice around Washington State

Issaquah

After the City of Issaquah found unsafe levels of PFAS in its drinking water wells, the Department of Ecology found Eastside Fire and Rescue (EFR) to be the source and issued a notice of Potentially Liable Person to EFR. EFR and the City have jointly agreed to participate in cleanup. The city has installed a filtration system to remove PFAS from drinking water. This urban example is how the process is supposed to work.

Spokane

People in the West Plains are sandwiched between Fairchild Airforce Base, which we covered last time, and Spokane Airport, with both contributing PFAS to the groundwater. For a while there residents west of a dividing line, Heyford Road, were getting help from the Airforce, while those to the east—the wrong side of the road—were getting nothing.

Eventually, Ecology was able to name the airport a Potentially Liable Person, but persistent foot dragging by the Airport has led to the EPA having to step in to help Ecology with testing.

Timothy Connor

in his excellent blog, The Daily Rhubarb, has covered the West Plains story from the start, featuring the work of the West Plains Water Coalition in helping make this all happen. Tim has an index of all his reporting on PFAS on the West Plains here: West Plains “forever chemicals” investigation | Rhubarb Skies

Rural Fire Departments

Ecology has been reluctant to designate a Potentially Liable Person in rural areas. Although MTCA is supposed to have funds to support cleanup where no PLP can be found, in the case of PFAS in drinking water, that hasn't happened. It's true that designating a rural fire department as a PLP doesn't make much sense. The firefighters have been risking contamination by using the foam in life-saving work, and then go home to drink the same water. And what little money they have comes from the community anyway in bonds and levies.

And so, in the Hannah Heights community on San Juan Island, which has seen catastrophic levels of PFAS in drinking water, the best Ecology can do for now is find enough money under the couch cushions to go see where they would put monitoring wells if they had the money to drill them.

If the Harrington Lagoon community on Whidbey Island was on the west side of state highway 20, they'd be getting help from the Navy. On the east side, near a former fire station, they're getting nothing.

To be fair, Ecology doesn't have the staff to take on all the fire departments, even if money was no problem. It looked for a while that there might be a workaround. Ecology is offering investigative and replacement drinking water grants to county health departments to help with the workload. I pressured our county health department to apply. I received a three-page reply explaining why it wasn't going to work (sorry guys, if you're reading). There were issues with the limits not being law yet; with our demographics (too many Seattle tech millionaires); and most importantly, Ecology still requires a PLP!

For now, we're stuck in a loop like that immortalized in Joseph Heller's Catch-22. It goes like this:

Rule 1: No PLP without testing

Rule 2: No money for testing without a PLP.

Rule 3: See Rule 1.

Maybe the EPA can step in again to break the cycle in a couple of places, but this is going to need legislative action to resolve at scale.

Across the Country

A follower in another island community, Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, sent me a number of PFAS links from the Vineyard Gazette. Overall, that state seems to be doing a little better than Washington.

There was a glimmer of good news from The Maine Morning Star, writing that Maine senators back bipartisan bill on ‘forever chemical’ contamination in drinking water.

U.S. Senators Susan Collins, a Republican, and Angus King, an independent, joined two of their Democratic colleagues on new legislation to address contamination from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, in private wells — which deliver drinking water to more than half of all Mainers. 

The bill would amend the Safe Drinking Water Act to ensure that states have the flexibility to use federal funding to help private well owners test for toxins like PFAS, often referred to as forever chemicals, from their drinking water. Those dollars are part of the $5 billion provided in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, according to a news release from Collins and King. 

It’s good to see this issue getting traction at that level.

Meanwhile, we're all waiting for the other shoe to drop in the form of the new EPA MCLs. I'll be back on this story when that happens.

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Thanks, as always, for reading or listening. For the next few weeks, I’m in a writing workshop. I’ll be devoting my writing energy to workshop assignments, so my posting frequency here will be diminished for the duration. I’m looking forward to sharing the fruits of my labors with you at the end of the workshop.