PARCHMENT (WKZO AM/FM) – Lt. Gov. Brian Calley has declared a state of emergency for Kalamazoo County due to the ongoing health and safety concerns followiing the discovery Thursday of PFAS contamination in the drinking water for the city of Parchment and Cooper Township.
“This declaration will allow the state to supply additional resources to help with response efforts and ensure the health and safety of residents in Parchment and Cooper Township,” Calley said. “State and local officials and members of the community have been working in full partnership to ensure people in the area have safe water in the short, medium and long term”.
It follows the Local State of Emergency declared by the County this weekend, and the decision to seek state aid and resources to help pay for what is to come.
They say so far 7,000 cases of water have been distributed to local resiidents who are being advised not to drink the water.
The water will be available 8am to 5pm Sunday and beginning Monday, the water station at the high school will be open from noon to 8pm. . Anyone who lives in Cooper Township and isn’t sure about their well water is also welcome to pick up bottled water at Parchment High School. .
County Health Director Jim Rutherford says they have established a new hotline number for citizens to call if they have questions or are shut-ins and need to have water dropped off. The new number is (269) 373-5346.
And they have now scheduled a town hall meeting for Tuesday at the Haven Reformed Church at 5350 N Sprinkle Rd. It will begin with an open house at 5:30 and an update on information and a question and answer period at 6pm. Work continues this weekend to wrap up flushing the Parchment Water System with clean water from Kalamazoo’s Water Reclamation plant.
Incident Management Specialist Mark DuCharme with the MDEQ says they are designing a testing plan for the private wells and monitoring wells in Cooper Township, which will give them an idea of where the chemical is coming from. They say they have narrowed down the source of the PFAS to a couple of sites that they will be investigating.
City Utilities Director Jim Baker says they are flushing the system which should be done soon, but he says it could take several weeks to get all the required testing done and the permits completed to allow Parchment to use city water. That’s if they decide that’s the direction they want to take. That may be disappointing news to Parchment residents.
They are using strategically placed pumper trucks to flush out the lines
Fuller calls the group of agencie representatives and volunteers working to mitiigate the situation, “Team Kalamazoo”.
Homeowners in Parchment and Cooper Township connected to the Parchment Water System should stop using tap water for drinking, cooking and baby formula. Any ice made with tap water should be thrown out. It should not be used for pets or farm animals or for watering food gardens.
It can be safely used for watering lawns, laundry, washing dishes, cleaning, showering and baths.
The situation continues to unfold but local officials say they have a plan, with the initial goal of restoring clean water to the residents of Parchment.
But they also say that there are still a lot of unknowns, and they need to do testing and investigations and inquiries to determine how long Parchment residents may have been exposed.
There may be some questions that can never be answered.
Lt. Governor Brian Calley traveled to Kalamazoo Friday to get a first hand look, and praised the local agencies for their quick response. He also noted that the only reason it was discovered was because smaller municipal water systems were ordered by the state to test for PFAS, the first and only state in the nation to do such testing. Larger systems like Kalamazoo’s, have been doing it for years.
He thanked everybody who was participating in the quick response, from the experts and engineers to the Parchment Football team who spent the morning moving thousands of cases of water out of semi-trailers and into the trunks of cars and SUV’s.
This is all breaking just before the Primary and the Mid-term elections and it’s become grist for politicians, some who are trying to assign blame and others who are trying to avoid being assigned. In a state where the Flint water crisis is still fresh in the minds of many, this can look the continuation of a pattern.
State Senator Jim Ananich is critical of the Snyder Administration, saying in a midday teleconference that the Snyder administration was warned 6-years ago by a DEQ specialist and toxicologist that PFAs were going to be a problem, but his report was shelved. Ananich, who represents Flint, says this could have all been avoided, but instead the Governor is “patting himself in the back for the quick response” to a problem he is responsible for.
Ananich is calling for hearings. State Senator Margaret O’Brien agrees that hearings should be held on the PFAS report, but says first they must address the health risk. She says its way too early to start blaming anyone.
