RICHLAND (WKZO AM/FM) — A large crowd of Richland residents turned out to hear what environmental officials had to say about a plume of contaminants leaching from a long bankrupt factory that has impacted some wells and may have contaminated many more.
Right now no one knows how many.
5-houses initially tested positive for PFOS, they are now waiting for test results on 24-more. If they find those wells are tainted, they will expand the testing zone again.
County Health officials are already offering free bottled water and filters to the homes at highest risk.
Long term solutions may include whole-house filtering systems or abandoning private wells and hooking up to city water, but they aren’t there yet. Those kinds of discussions won’t take place until the size of the plume is better defined.
The plant that is the suspected source of the chemical, closed nearly 30-years-ago and frustrated homeowners are wondering why it took health officials this long to figure out there was a problem.
The problem is that there was limited information on just how dangerous PFOS really may be. In 2016, the Federal Government greatly lowered what it considered to be a safe level for the compounds in drinking water, after finally getting around to testing them.
The new standard became .07 parts per billion (ppb) which is about six times lower than agency standards set in 2009, which were .4 ppb for PFOA and .2 ppb for PFOS.
That immediately created dozens of new contamination hot spots, where they knew the chemical existed, and many more undiscovered hot spots that had never been tested for the compound because it simply wasn’t an issue.
Private industry is creating new compounds a lot faster than the Government can test them.
This is not the first time homeowners and entire communities have fallen victim to irresponsible corporations who make their profits and leave a ticking time-bomb behind in the soil.
It’s not unusual for it to take years and years to discover the toxicity of chemicals, and many decades to clean it up.
Local and state health officials will do what they can to mitigate the situation, but PFOS was only recently recognized as a potential health threat because of lab tests and the science is shaky.
It’s not the fault of the agencies now handling the cleanup, they are often understaffed and underfunded and they can’t act until they have the facts.
That may not be enough for anxious parents who say they have already been exposed to the danger for far too long.
The big difference is that in this post-Flint environment, the investigation began as soon as PFos was detected in sewage coming from this area.
Water and filters are being passed out as soon as problems are found and while it may seem like a snail-like pace to the impacted homeowners, compared to other contamination responses, its moving at an above average clip, and agencies are making public commitments to pursuing the problem until its fixed.
In the meantime they are advising residents in the high risk area to use bottled water for cooking, drinking, making formula or ice cubes. Pets should also get the bottled stuff.
They say it’s safe to use it for showers, laundry, doing the dishes and watering the lawn, but you don’t want to use it for watering a vegetable garden. Capturing rainwater might be an alternative source for that job.
Local officials are promising more meetings when they have more information.
They say as soon as an address is identified as having higher than acceptable levels, they will be delivering bottled water and free filters within hours.
