A PFAS Sandwich

Two slices of good news with a bad news filling

This news update is part of a series on PFAS (per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, "Forever Chemicals") in drinking water. You can read all the previous posts here.

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At the end of the last update, we were left with three open issues: the Military's response to the EPA's new National Drinking Water Standard for PFAS; lawsuits challenging that standard; and testing of private wells with non-military sources of PFAS contamination. The last few months have brought us positive developments on two of these, and negative on the other. I'll slide the bad news in between two slices of good.

The Military

The DoD released a memo on September 3rd outlining a policy for prioritization of cleanup actions to implement the EPA's new National Drinking Water Standard. You can read the whole memo here. Here are some of the key passages:

To ensure cleanup begins as quickly as possible, the DoD Components will initiate removal actions to address private drinking water wells impacted by PFAS from DoD activities where concentrations are known to be at or above three times the MCL values.

This approach prioritizes action where PFAS levels from DoD releases are the highest, rather than delay action at these locations while ongoing remedial investigations continue.

DoD will then initiate remedial actions to address drinking water wells and public water systems with concentrations below three times the MCL value.

The DoD Components will consider in prioritized order: providing connections to public water systems; installing whole house treatment systems; providing point of use treatment systems; and providing bottled water.

The Military Departments will ensure that robust communication occurs before, during, and after actions are taken to address PFAS on and around DoD installations.

Overall, I feel this is a reasonable approach. Given the logistical impossibility of doing everything all at once, prioritization makes sense. Each service — Army, Navy, and Airforce — will now have to figure out how to implement this policy at each base, and how to set up public outreach. I'll be following how this goes, particularly around our local military PFAS site, Naval Air Station Whidbey. It hasn't happened yet.

Before this memo, the DoD was still working with outdated and much higher EPA lifetime health advisory limits, now recognized as not being protective of human health. Under this new policy, many more people will have their drinking water tested and will be offered remediation.

We'll put this one in the good news column, the bottom slice of bread in our sandwich.

The lawsuits

In June, the American Water Works Association (AWWA) and the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA) filed a petition with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review U.S. EPA’s Final PFAS Drinking Water Rule. The National Association of Manufacturers and American Chemistry Council filed a similar petition, as did PFAS manufacturer Chemours.

These three petitions have now been consolidated into one, which you can read here. The title page now reads:

AMERICAN WATER WORKS ASSOCIATION, et al., Petitioners,

v.

UNITED STATES ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY, et al., Respondents,

AWWA is the headline, while the polluters are hiding among the et al. In other words, the companies, towns, and cities responsible for providing you with safe drinking water are now carrying water for the very people who are polluting it, all while consuming the lion's share of the grant and low-cost loan money available for remediation and leaving little to nothing in the coffers for the mostly rural Americans drinking from small water systems and private wells.

Digging into the weeds just a little, there are four arguments in the petition. The first three are objecting to the EPA's use of a Hazard Index to regulate several PFAS compounds on the basis of their cumulative, rather than individual, concentrations. The fourth challenges the EPA's cost-benefit analysis of the new limits for PFOS and PFOA, the two PFAS compounds with the most well documented health effects. If there's a silver lining, it's that they're accepting that PFAS compounds are harmful and need to be removed from drinking water; they're just haggling over the price.

The brief asks the court to send the rule back to the EPA for revision. Ominously, a recent addition to the list of cases referenced in the petitioners' brief is Loper Bright v. Raimondo, the name of the Supreme Court case that overturned the Chevron Deference, the precedent that allows Congress to delegate the detailed rulemaking on new laws to federal agency experts. Safe drinking water is on the ballot in November.

This mess is the filling in our PFAS sandwich.

PFAS testing in private wells

Let's finish on some better news.

Back in March, in Wrong Side of the Road, I reported that the response to PFAS contamination from non-military sources is a geographic lottery. Private wells on one side Highway 20 here on the island, with PFAS contamination from a Navy base, were getting testing and remediation while those on the other side with PFAS from a rural fire station were getting nothing. The EPA had stepped in to help in around Spokane International Airport, the other side of the road from Fairchild Airforce Base.

Where we left it last time was that I'd sent a letter to the EPA Region 10 Administrator and to the Ecology Director asking the EPA to help Ecology with testing private wells for PFAS around rural fire stations on Whidbey Island and elsewhere as they are doing around Spokane International Airport. A flurry of emails ensued, many of which referenced the grant programs available. Unfortunately, the grants are not working. They're mostly only available to Local Health Jurisdictions, which in rural Washington are usually the counties, who don't have the time or staff to even apply for the grant, let alone spend the money. Two Ecology grants that could have helped will not even be funded for the next biennium.

With grants eliminated as a possible solution, we were able to move on to a meeting. That finally happened last Friday, with EPA, Ecology, Health, and me. I was able to make the case that the agencies needed to take direct action and that a prioritization like the DoD's, mentioned above, could make the task manageable. After some discussion, the Departments of Health and Ecology agreed to set up a pilot study, probably here on Whidbey, to test private wells and smaller water systems around one of the water systems that has tested positive.

I'll take that as a win, not just for safe drinking water, but for the style of trust-based activism I wrote about last week.

The emails and phone calls yielded results in part because of the months and years of relationship and trust building with individuals at these agencies, and then working to connect them to each other.

That's the top slice of bread for our sandwich.

Sorry about the filling.

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