CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – Last week there were two curiosities about PFAS, or forever chemicals.
First, from Weston: two of the village’s drinking wells have elevated levels of forever chemicals. Their response has been completely reasonable. Both wells were taken off-line. The remaining wells continued to pump water to village residents. Since then, one well has remained shut down and the other was put back into service with a temporary filtration system. The village’s long-term strategy is to drill two new wells. When the clean water from those wells is blended with the village’s other wells, they’ll be in compliance. Note, PFAS won’t be eliminated. But it will be low to the point that the water meets environmental standards.
Second, a there’s a PFAS mystery in eastern Oneida County. 15 private wells in Starks Township have tested positive. And they are in a rural area, literally the middle of nowhere. There’s no industrial activity in the area — no known source of the contamination. That leads to two logical questions: Are there sources of these forever chemicals that we don’t know about? Could things like rainwater runoff or agriculture activity be sources? Most experts say that’s unlikely. Or are PFAS tests inaccurate? We are testing parts per trillion, which is an unfathomably small number. Is it possible, when measuring things to such a fine point, that one sample could test positive and another, taken from the same source, could test negative? At a minimum, we should insist on triple-redundancies. Water consumers should not be asked to spend millions of dollars on fixes when the problem may be in the testing, not in the contamination.
The cases from Weston and Starks raise questions about Wausau’s PFAS approach. Weston has found a less expensive alternative. Has Wausau considered a different approach? And if we can’t identify the source of contamination in small private wells in Stark, how will we ever find the source of contamination in a larger water system like Wausau?
And, in Wausau, why are we spending huge amounts of money and jacking up rates before we have good answers? The rate hikes have focused the thinking of many Wausau Water Works customers. They’ve come to realize that only a small portion of the water that comes to our home is used for drinking or cooking. Why will we filter all the water, when some of it is used for laundry, lawn watering, and car washing? And how much money could be saved if we filtered, at our homes, only the water that we drink?
Chris Conley
Comments