By Alex Brooks
County Environmental Health Director Richard Elder came to a meeting of the Petersburgh Water District Committee on Wednesday, February 24 attended by several Town Board members, Supervisor Schaaphok, and some residents who live near the Taconic plant in Petersburgh. Elder discussed many issues related to the presence of PFOA in the water in Petersburgh.
[private]
He described the County’s testing program, which is currently testing private wells within a half mile of the Taconic plant, and his coordination with State and Federal authorities who are also doing testing in the area.
He said they have a weekly conference call with all State, County and Federal agencies that are involved in responding to the PFOA contamination problem in which they share the information that they have gathered and coordinate their activities for the coming week.
He said he didn’t have any testing results to share on that evening, but he expected to have a lot more information to share in a week or two. His agency had taken 15 new samples that day, and he said it usually takes a week to ten days to get results back.
Many people in the room had questions for him. Those who live near the Taconic plant asked if the County knew about the PFOA problem in 2003 when Taconic tested their wells for the first time. Elder said the County heard about that only because Taconic wanted to install a carbon filter on their water system, and they needed County approval to do that.
But if the water needed to be filtered, didn’t that raise questions in the minds of County personnel? Elder said at that time PFOA was not considered to be a dangerous substance or a toxin. It was not regulated by any State or Federal agency, there were no health advisories about it, and not much was known about what effect it had if ingested. Until a month ago, it was not on any federal list of hazardous substances. The only federal guideline on PFOA was put in place in 2009. It is a health advisory saying that the use of drinking water sources found to have PFOA in concentrations of 400 parts per trillion or more should be discontinued.
Elder was asked if the three wells that the Petersburgh Water District uses to get its water have been tested individually to see if some of them have less PFOA or none in the water they are pulling up. Elder said they have tested the wells individually, but they do not have results back yet.
Petersburgh Water District Well #2 which supplies most of the water for the District, is 444 feet deep. Two other wells used by the Water District, Well 5 and Well 6, are shallower – 150 to 200 feet deep – but these latter two wells do not produce very much water anymore. They did produce a lot of water when they were first drilled, and it is possible they could be restored to productivity if the water they are pulling up is less contaminated.
He said, “Right now we are doing fact-finding. We need to know more about the level and extent of the contamination before we can decide what to do about it.”
Water Superintendent Ben Krahforst asked Elder if anyone is testing water near the old landfill site on Jones Hollow Road. He was concerned that materials containing PFOA might have been dumped there years ago. Elder said he would try to get that tested as soon as possible.
Elder said accurate testing for these low concentrations of PFOA is difficult, and it requires sophisticated equipment and good training to do it accurately. He said there are currently only 12 labs in the country certified to do this testing, and the more places where PFOA is discovered, the more backed up these labs become. They are working as fast as they can. Elder is concerned that an increase in demand might make it difficult to get samples processed in a timely way.
First Test Results Coming In
Petersburgh Supervisor Peter Schaaphok met with State officials who have been working on testing wells near the Taconic plant. He said they have the first few results, which they shared with the Town. Schaaphok said there was a wide range of results, from 12,400 parts per trillion to 25 parts per trillion. When there are only a few test results available, the State has to be careful about how they release that information publicly, because of privacy concerns – they don’t want to say what the level is at a particular house. When they have more data, they can use averages and other data techniques to get across what level they are finding without saying what levels they found at any particular residence. Both the State and County expect to have a lot more data about PFOA levels in the water in Petersburgh within a week or so.
Boys Scouts Help
Distribute Water
Boy Scout Troop 222 of Petersburgh was on hand this past weekend to help Town officials with the distribution of free drinking water to Town residents. Boy Scout Troop 222 Scoutmaster Andy Zlotnick said Town officials asked the scouts for help and they were glad to oblige. Zlotnick said he saw it “as a chance for the scouts to give back to their community and learn about the importance of public service.” The 12 scouts and five adults kept the supplies of bottled water stacked up by the registration table and assisted residents loading the water into their vehicles.[/private]