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.
It’s Thanksgiving week here in the USA. This year, I’m giving thanks to my friends from PFAS-affected communities across the state, at our environmental non-profits, and at the EPA and the State Departments of Ecology and Health, for the following pieces of good news that I have to share about PFAS in my home state and further afield.
In March this year, we reported on this Funding for PFAS, including on a letter to Ecology that several of us from PFAS-affected communities cosigned with Toxic-Free Future and other environmental organizations. In June this year, several signatories of the letter met with the director of Ecology to discuss this further.
In case you think that you can’t make a difference, here’s a direct quote from the Funding Strategy Document:
In March 2024, Ecology received a comment letter from a coalition of environmental advocates, including Toxic-Free Future, Zero Waste Washington, and Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, among others. In June 2024, Ecology representatives met with Washington residents affected by PFAS in drinking water. In both cases, the strategy was modified to account for information received.
The Strategy document is 88 pages long. I’ll be back with a more complete review in due course. For now, I’ll point out that it addresses two concerns: that state agency staff often operate in silos and that a coordinated approach is needed; and that funding is similarly fractured into multiple programs that can both overlap and leave gaps, and that a centralized funding source is needed. Both are music to my ears.
The funding still needs to make it through the legislature in a tough budget year. I’m here to help.
Secondly, following the June meeting with the Director of Ecology, I 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. A flurry of emails resulted in a meeting between me, EPA, Ecology, and Health, resulting in an agreement 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’ve since learned that the pilot study may be expanded, with the funding above, into a statewide prioritized testing program, while EPA Region 10 is looking at rolling out something similar throughout the region, so in Alaska, Idaho and Oregon in addition to Washington. More what I have it, probably in the new year.
Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate!
Thanks, as always, for listening or reading. Next week we’re leaving for New Zealand for the month of December. I expect to have plenty to write about!
The work described in this post took me many hours. If you value this work and feel moved to support it, a paid subscription to Mostly Water is a great way to do that, and of course I’m always grateful for your comments, likes, and shares.
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.
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.
Thanks, as always, for listening or reading. The work described here took me many hours. If you value this work and feel moved to support it, a paid subscription to Mostly Water is a great way to do that.
It’s been a minute since we did a PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or “Forever Chemicals”) in drinking water roundup. If you’d like to start at the beginning of the PFAS saga, you can find all my earlier PFAS posts in the previous roundup. Here are my diary notes since then with posts, news, and links.
March 10, 2024. In Wrong Side of the Road, we showed that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had stepped in to help the Washington State Department of Ecology (Ecology) in testing private wells in the area of PFAS contamination from Spokane International Airport, who previously had not been receiving the same testing as their neighbors across the road in the area of contamination from Fairchild Airforce Base.
March 22, 2024. In Funding for PFAS, we discussed a letter that Toxic-Free Future and partners, including myself, sent to Ecology, urging the agency to put forward a plan for solving the PFAS in drinking water crisis facing Washington state, and requesting a meeting with the Director.
April 19, 2024. EPA action designates two widely used PFAS as hazardous substances under the Superfund law, improving transparency and accountability to clean up PFAS contamination in communities. In Discretion is the better part of designation, we showed that the EPA’s enforcement discretion in its PFAS Superfund designation will help make sure that the polluters, not the victims, pay for cleanup.
April 26, 2024. The new drinking water rule is published in the Federal Register, with an effective date sixty days out on June 25th. The Safe Drinking Water Act requires parties challenging a regulation to file a petition within 45 days of its publication in the Federal Register, or by June 10th.
May 8, 2024. I reach out to the Department of Defense (DoD), Naval Air Station Whidbey, Fairchild Air Force Base, and Joint Base Lewis-McChord, who also look after Yakima Training Center, for their plans to comply with the new EPA Drinking Water rule. I receive responses from just the first two, both stating that DoD would issue a policy by June 24th, the day before the rule comes into affect.
May 29, 2024. EPA Region 9 issues a Unilateral Administrative Order (UAO) under the Safe Drinking Water Act to the U.S. Air Force for the Tucson International Airport Area Superfund Site to develop a water treatment plan for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) for EPA’s review and approval.
June 7, 2024. The first of at least three lawsuits against the new drinking water rule is filed. The American Water Works Association (AWWA) and the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA) file 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.
June 13, 2024. The signatories of March’s letter to Ecology have our requested meeting with the Director and staff. I am able to point out that on Whidbey Island, as in Spokane, wells in areas contaminated by military sources of PFAS are getting tested but those contaminated by non-military sources are not. I request the same testing for these communities as Ecology is carrying out with EPA help around Spokane International Airport. The Director asks if have asked EPA directly. I have to say that I have not. After the meeting, I begin to research the most effective channel to do just that.
June 24, 2024. The promised DoD policy does not appear. I am assured that they are working on it.
June 25, 2024. The new drinking water rule for PFAS comes into effect
June 28, 2024. In a 6-3 ruling, split along ideological lines, the Supreme Court in the Loper Bright case overturns their own 1984 Chevron Deference decision As Substack’s own
The administrative state, which conservatives have spent decades attacking, has operated since the Chevron decision in 1984 on the basic premise that Congress passes laws and agencies issue regulations that implement them. What happened when a regulated entity didn’t like an agency’s decision? They could sue.
The longstanding Chevron deference doctrine required courts to defer to agency action when the law was ambiguous and the agency’s view was reasonable. That came to an end on Friday, when Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority in no uncertain terms, “Chevron is overruled.” After Loper Bright, it’s up to the courts. Judges need no longer defer to subject matter experts at a federal agency after the Supreme Court wrote that the experts have “no special competence” and decided courts were better suited to make these decisions.
July 8, 2024. Following up on the conversation with the Director of Ecology on June 13, I send 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.
July 26, 2024. An article in the local paper mentions PFAS contamination in the Whispering Pines mobile home park’s water system here on Whidbey Island. I’ve been tracking this one. It’s just across Highway 20 from the Naval Air Station Whidbey’s Area 6 Landfill, which is known to be contaminated with PFAS and other contaminants such as dioxane. Despite pressure from the local EPA office, the Navy will not consider stepping out their areas of testing and responsibility to include communities like Whispering Pines until the DoD issues a policy decision on the new PFAS rule.
August 2, 2024. EPA Region 10 has received my letter and calls me with some clarifying questions while they work on an answer.
August 12, 2024. I learn about the Air Force’s refusal to treat PFAS in drinking water around Tuscon Airport when the story hits mainstream news. I write to my DoD contact asking if this is the new PFAS policy. I receive a very apologetic answer saying they can’t respond directly and need to coordinate all media queries through DoD’s Public Affairs office. If I wish, they will work with the media office to get me an official comment. I ask for an official comment.
Regulations ignored credible research and didn’t fully protect human health, independent scientists say. The move follows allegations that the process of developing the figures was corrupted by industry-linked researchers aiming to undercut strict new US PFAS limits and weaken standards in the developing world.
Safe drinking water is on the ballot in November.
Well, as you can tell, a lot has happened, or, in some cases, not happened, since the last roundup, but much remains unresolved. We have more loose ends than we started with. I hope we can tie some of them up soon.
It took just three weeks for the consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision overruling the Chevron deference to be felt in undermining drinking water protections for the public. Chevron is just a foretaste of the wholesale destruction of the administrative state laid out in Project 2025.
Safe drinking water is on the ballot in November.
In the coming weeks, I’m excited and honored to have two guest essays scheduled in other publications. I’ll be sharing links to those with you. At the end of the month, I’m giving a talk on water system consolidation. I’ll tell you all about it. I promise it’s more fun than it sounds. Starting with that conference, I have four visits scheduled over the next few months to Central Washington and the Yakima and Columbia rivers. I’ll be looking at the region through a water lens and reporting back.
Houses are nestled on the hillside above Harrington Lagoon, downhill from a water well that for over a year has tested positive for PFAS on Thursday, June 22, 2023, in Coupeville, Washington. (Ryan Berry / The Herald)
The EPA’s new rule only applies to water suppliers that serve 15 or more residents, known as “Group A” water systems. At least 1 million Washington residents have private wells or use smaller water suppliers, called “Group B” systems.
The Safe Drinking Water Act doesn’t protect these wells, some of which are near Harrington Lagoon. Those wells also likely have PFAS contamination, Lovie said.
“They’re not eligible for any of the loans or grants that Group A water systems can get to take care of these problems,” he said. “They’re not subject to requirements for testing for PFAS.”
Lovie and officials with Ecology — who have been tracking PFAS for years — said the EPA’s rule is a milestone in addressing drinking water contamination. But it’s only the first step in organizing funding, testing and cleanup efforts for the large and looming PFAS problem.
“This is not a finish line,” Lovie said. “This is a starting line.”
For as long as she can remember, Tamara Ross’ family hasn’t liked the taste of drinking water at Harrington Lagoon.
So they’ve always brought bottled water to their vacation homes in the idyllic community east of Coupeville on Whidbey Island. The family has owned property there since 1955. They now have three homes right next to each other.
“I love it,” said Ross, who goes there about once a month. “It’s our slice of heaven.”
A new study published this week was showed that toilet paper is a major contributor to PFAS in wastewater.
Rural Washington State relies heavily on septic systems for sewage treatment and on ground water wells for drinking water. In voluntary testing of public water systems in Washington State, PFAS compounds have been detected in about 10% of them. Could PFAS from our toilet paper be showing up in our drinking water?
“For members of the general public who are attuned to drinking water contaminants, the EPA announcement is raising concerns, according to John Lovie, president of the Whidbey Island Water Systems Association. Located in Washington state, the association counts about 100 water systems as members, which range in size from several thousand customers to just three or four. “
“Overall our member water systems are positive about the draft rule changes,” association Vice President John Lovie said in an email. “They recognize that their patrons are concerned about what is in their drinking water and want to know this information. At the same time they are concerned about the financial and administrative burden of this rule on water systems that may have as few as 15 hookups and rely on a volunteer board.”
