Columbus City Utilities is hoping to receive funds to help it remove long-lasting, toxic chemicals from the city’s drinking water.
The Utility Service Board voted Thursday to engage the firm Klein, Thorpe & Jenkins, Ltd. (KTJ) to support the utility as it seeks to join class action settlements by 3M and DuPont regarding PFAS in “aqueous film-forming foams products.” The board authorized a not-to-exceed amount of $10,000 for the firm.
City officials recently shut down a municipal well between Garden City and the railroad tracks on the south side of Columbus after testing by state regulators found PFAS at levels that exceed proposed federal limits.
PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — are a cluster of industrial chemicals associated with a variety of serious health conditions and have been used in products ranging from cookware to carpets and firefighting foams and consumer products since the 1940s, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Research suggests exposure to certain levels of PFAS can lead to reproductive effects in humans, developmental delays, increased risks for certain cancers, elevated cholesterol levels and weakening of the immune system, the agency says.
The substances are sometimes called “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down naturally in the environment — or do so slowly — and can remain in a person’s blood indefinitely.
Earlier this year, the EPA proposed strict limits of 4 parts per trillion in treated drinking water for two common types of PFAS — PFOA and PFOS — and said it wanted to regulate four others. Regulators also set nonbinding health advisories for PFOA and PFOS at 0.02 parts per trillion.
In the now-closed Columbus well, PFOA was detected in untreated water at 45 parts per trillion, according to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, which tested the city’s wells as part of a voluntary program to measure prevalence of the chemicals in public water systems across the state.
PFOA also was found in Columbus’ finished drinking water at 7 parts per trillion. PFOS was detected at 9 parts per trillion in one city well.
To things in perspective, 1 part per trillion is roughly the equivalent of a single drop of water in 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools, experts said.
If the proposed EPA limits take effect, water providers, including CCU, would be responsible for monitoring their systems for the chemicals and filtering them, a task that industry groups say is technically challenging and costly.
Faced with the burden of cleanup efforts, water utilities and others have filed lawsuits against 3M Co., DuPont and two other PFAS manufacturers, seeking financial damages to cover costs.
In June, 3M Co. agreed to pay at least $10.3 billion to settle thousands of lawsuits alleging that the company contaminated public drinking water systems across the country with PFAS, The Associated Press reported.
Earlier that month, DuPont de Nemours Inc. and spinoffs Chemours Co. and Corteva Inc. reached a $1.18 billion settlement to resolve lawsuits over PFAS contamination filed by around 300 drinking water providers, according to wire reports.
The cost of testing CCU wells and hiring the firm KTJ are both expenses that can be reimbursed under the settlement, said Utility Service Board attorney Stan Gamso.
“They’ll try to help us understand where the sources are coming from and how we should process these claims,” he said. “But more importantly, what equipment we may need either at the wells or at the processing plant or the sewage treatment plant, to determine what equipment it’s going to take to go through this process and help us get this straightened out.”
CCU Executive Director Roger Kelso said in a previous interview that he does not expect that any potential local allotment of settlement funds will fully cover the costs of filtering out PFAS from the city’s drinking water. That would likely mean that the city would need to raise rates to cover the rest, though how much they would need to be raised, if at all, remains to be seen.
“We could be looking at somewhere around $30 million (in cleanup costs),” he said, emphasizing that the figure is a “very preliminary estimate.” “… To implement the project, we would have to raise rates.”
Kelso said at Thursday’s board meeting that CCU is waiting on the results from some additional PFAS sampling from monitoring wells and hopes to have the data soon.
The utility is also working towards a joint project with the U.S. Geological Survey.
“USGS already has monitoring wells in our aquifer area here that measures the level of water inside the aquifer,” he said. “And what they’ve done is they’re expanding that to some degree for — what’s most pertinent to us is PFAS and some of the associated chemicals.”
The utility expects to work with USGS to discern how water flows through the aquifer and will also be doing some additional chemical background testing to determine how different materials in the water flow through the aquifer, he said. This should help CCU figure out the best places to put new wells and monitor the existing wells.
Where to learn more
Columbus City Utilities has added a FAQ section about PFAS on its website: columbusutilities.org/pfas-frequently-asked-questions/.
