- A significant portion of the groundwater underneath west Ann Arbor and Scio Township is contaminated with 1,4-dioxane, an industrial solvent known to cause cancer and liver problems in lab animals.
- It’s been there for more than 40 years and contaminated dozens of residential wells. But it has never been fully cleaned up.
- Advocates and the state disagree about the plume’s size, movement and the danger it poses to residents in the future.
Marianne Martin has lived in the same house since 1972. She bought a home in Westover Hills, a small neighborhood in Scio Township just west of Ann Arbor, as a “challenge” for her and her newly retired father to work on.
“It was just perfect, and it was a fix-me-up house,” she said. “It was something I could afford to do little by little.”
But that neighborhood was irrevocably changed in 1986 when the county notified residents that their drinking well water was contaminated with a chemical known to cause liver issues from a plant across the road.
Gelman Sciences LLC, a medical filter manufacturer, had slowly dumped wastewater laced with 1,4-dioxane into the ground around its facility for almost 20 years before it was discovered.
The contaminant had traveled through groundwater underneath nearby homes and businesses. Over 120 drinking water wells in Scio Township had to be plugged or paved over. Martin’s was one of them.
“The water was poisoned.”
Martin taught several subjects in high school in Whitmore Lake, a small community about 20 minutes north of her neighborhood. With a teacher’s salary, she could afford to update the house only one project at a time.
The largest project was a much-needed upgrade to her water system. Living outside the city meant relying on well water and a septic system rather than being connected to Ann Arbor’s water infrastructure. The systems that came with her house were old and needed to be replaced.
Martin doesn’t remember how much it cost, but similar work performed today would cost at least $6,000 to $8,000.
But in April 1986, the Washtenaw County Department of Health discovered 1,4-dioxane in a Westover Hills drinking water well. State and local officials held a public meeting for Scio Township residents at the beginning of May of that year. The health department issued a drinking water health advisory for Westover Hills on May 16.
News of the contamination also traveled by word of mouth, Martin said.
“Everybody panicked and started asking questions,” she said. After testing, she discovered her new well was contaminated too, although she remembers the levels being low.
Humans can absorb dioxane through ingestion, inhalation or skin contact. Little is known about how it impacts human health. But studies on mice and rats show it can cause damage to the liver and kidneys — including cancer.
Martin’s new well was unusable.
“You couldn't touch the water. You couldn't bathe in it. You couldn't cook with it. You couldn't brush your teeth in it,” she said. “You couldn't do anything with the water at all.”
For months, Martin and her neighbors had to rely on bottled water for everything. Gelman paid for six families to use rooms at a nearby Holiday Inn for bathing because their wells were so contaminated, according to a 1988 University of Michigan case study. Martin considered herself lucky because she could shower at work without shelling out money for a hotel.
“It was not just inconvenient,” she said. “It was frightening.” She compared it to the August 2003 Northeast power outage and more recent extreme weather events.
“You see that just the basic necessities are so paramount in people's lives,” she said. “And when it's taken away, that's when you realize how important that is.”
The experience took a mental and emotional toll on her, she said.
“I think that was more scary for us, not knowing if and when we would get drinking water,” Martin said.
In November 1986, the city of Ann Arbor began annexing the neighborhood. Houses in Westover Hills were hooked up to city water, with Gelman agreeing to foot the bill.
But homeowners had to keep their septic systems until they failed. When that happened, homeowners would have to pay to hook up to the city’s sewer systems.
Martin had to pay for a new waste disposal system — again.
“I got sick every time I thought about it,” she said. “I take out a loan and put all this money into these vital areas [of the house] and now they're just destroyed.”
These days, that kind of work would cost an average of $6,000, depending on the property size and permits needed.
“We finally got water, but it cost us dearly,” Martin said.
A brief victory
In 1988, Martin and several other residents sued the company for $1.3 million in damages. They wanted Gelman to pay for the sewer connection, as well as for property and emotional damage the contamination caused.
Martin requested $60,000. She had developed TMJ dysfunction from grinding her teeth due to stress, she said in court documents.
Residents were also concerned about possible adverse effects dioxane could have on their health. The complaint asked Gelman to pay $1.4 million into a “medical surveillance fund” over the next 20 years.
But Gelman successfully barred any testimony about the chemical’s potential negative health effects, court documents show. The case went to trial in 1990 — without that information.
At first, Martin and her neighbors won almost $75,000.
But Gelman argued that because the residents had refused earlier settlement offers, they should cover the company’s legal costs at the jury trial. And in 1991, a judge agreed.
The residents owed Gelman about $20,000 more than what Gelman had originally been ordered to pay them, according to court documents. Martin owed Gelman over $7,000.
The court case is where Martin’s advocacy ended. Since that decision more than 30 years ago, she hasn’t joined any citizen advocacy groups.
“We were so tired and so stressed, and we just wanted a break,” she said.
Gelman was acquired by Pall Life Sciences, which became a subsidiary of Danaher Corporation in 2015. None of the three companies responded to repeated requests for comment over email, phone and mail.
Mapping the contamination
Martin admitted that she hasn’t kept up to date on the management of the plume and litigation over it. She said she does know there are concerns the plume could possibly reach the source of Ann Arbor’s drinking water. She’s worried she’ll go through the same thing all over again if the city water she uses now were to become contaminated, she said.
In 2001, Gelman (owned by Pall Corporation at this point) found dioxane in a municipal drinking water well. The well had been pulling water from a deep aquifer state officials and the company thought was safe from the plume.
That indicated the plume was continuing to spread farther than Gelman — and state officials — knew. The well was shut down and a judge banned groundwater use in the area of the plume.
Today, the city draws 80 to 85% of its drinking water from Barton Pond, which is part of the Huron River. The plume originated about three miles southwest of the pond, but is now a mile wide and four miles long. Official maps show it is staying within the groundwater use prohibition zone.
The zone marks an area in Ann Arbor where groundwater use is prohibited and the plume’s spread is expected — and allowed. The state does not take additional action unless the dioxane plume moves beyond those boundaries.
Roger Rayle, chair of Scio Residents for Safe Water and the Coalition for Action on Remediation of Dioxane, doesn’t trust that assessment.
“Gelman is getting away with not knowing what their problem is,” he said. His house is potentially in the plume’s path.
Rayle, a retired software engineer, got involved in 1993 and hasn’t stopped since. He manages a trove of documents and data about the plume.
He’s been using that data to map the plume for over 30 years. Rayle started with copies from the township pasted on poster boards. Now he uses dozens of layers in Google Earth to chart the plume’s depth, concentration and reach.
There’s one big difference between his maps and the official ones. Rayle’s maps include a meandering finger in yellow, extending north toward Barton Pond.
That represents recent low-level hits on residential wells in Scio Township and Ann Arbor Township — more than a mile north of the plume’s known boundary. The wells weren’t part of the state’s regular monitoring plans, and the townships paid for additional testing based on resident concerns.
The results were a surprise for state regulators, said Chris Svoboda, an environmental quality analyst at Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy and the project manager for the former Gelman site.
“That was new information to us,” he said. “I don't really think a ton of people were expecting that.” The state and county started monitoring hundreds of wells in the area after the township published the testing results. Officials publish those results online every year.
But monitoring those wells is all EGLE can do within the current legal agreement between the state and Gelman. The test results are below the legal requirements set for Gelman and the state to take more aggressive action, like supplying bottled water.
The low-level hits are a sign that EGLE and Gelman need to do more, Rayle said. He wants more monitoring wells and bottled water supplied for residents with those low-level hits.
“Shouldn’t that be paid for by the company?” he said. Gelman is paying for the residential testing, if indirectly, according to EGLE. A 2014 settlement of $500,000 funds the annual testing, Svoboda said.
But that money will eventually run out. EGLE will request additional funds from the department when that happens, Svoboda said.
Anticipating the spread
Ann Arbor Water, the city department that manages the city’s drinking and wastewater systems, is shouldering its own costs to monitor the plume, said Molly Maciejewski, the water treatment services manager.
“We are definitely concerned that it could be headed towards the river,” she said. The city tests for dioxane in Barton Pond quarterly. And it’s already paid $200,000 to install additional sentinel wells near the river, Maciejewski said.
The latest investment has been the city’s pilot plant. That’s a facility separate from the main water treatment plant. A2 Water uses it to test new water treatments, before implementing them at the main plant.
The Gelman plume isn’t the only reason they have it — PFAS contamination in the 2010s cost the city millions of dollars to install truck-sized filters. The pilot plant is an opportunity for the city to test removal methods for a variety of contaminants, if the worst were to happen.
“It is definitely one of our priorities to make sure that, if dioxane ever did reach the river, our treatment process would be able to handle that,” Maciejewski said. The city would use ozone, ultraviolet radiation and hydrogen peroxide to strip dioxane from the water. A2 Water already has access to ozone and UV radiation, but would need additional space at the main plant to deal with dioxane contamination, she said.
EGLE maintains that the plume isn’t a threat to the pond.
“It's moving further away from the source, and that is to be expected,” Svoboda said. “But it is staying confined to that prohibition zone.”
The residential well hits could be coming from other sources, like failing septic tanks, Svoboda said. Dioxane can also be an unintentional byproduct found in consumer products like shampoo, so trace amounts could be leaking from wastewater, he said. But because the level of contamination is so low, it is impossible to definitively determine the source of the dioxane in those wells, Svoboda said.
He acknowledged that Gelman is the most likely source. And since dioxane is a human-made chemical, it does not occur naturally. Someone had to introduce it into the environment.
Disclosing contamination
Martin is also worried her new neighbors may not even know the plume is under their homes.
The city, township, and state have no mechanisms for informing new residents that their house sits above contaminated groundwater. Neither does the citizen advocacy coalition. More than 40 years after it was discovered, the plume can easily hide in news archives.
On paper, sellers are required by law to disclose known environmental contamination. The emphasis is on “known” — awareness is key to the Michigan’s Seller’s Disclosure Act, said Todd Waller, vice chair of government relations for the Greater Metropolitan Association of Realtors.
“As long as the seller is aware that they are inside the Gelman plume, item number ten of the seller's disclosure does require them to reveal that substantial fact,” he said. The act contains a line specific to environmental contamination.
Most Michigan municipalities have their own “quirks” that realtors learn as they work there, Waller said. In Ann Arbor, the Gelman Plume is well-known among realtors, he said.
His brokerage provides a pre-written disclosure for sellers living above the plume. That includes a map of the plume and where clients can find more information. And if he’s working with a buyer, he’ll tell them if a house they’re eyeing is above the plume, he said.
But enforcing the disclosure act isn’t as straightforward, said David Favre, a professor of property law at Michigan State University.
“There's almost no consequence for not disclosing it on that form,” he said. “It's simply a way for Michigan to make sellers be more forthright about what their property actually looks like.”
One potential consequence would be a civil suit between the buyer and seller, he said. And that suit would hinge on whether the contamination impacted the property’s value.
“I just simply haven't seen the precipitous drop in house values as a result of [being over the plume],” Waller said. Every house over the plume is hooked up to city water, and all drinking water wells have been plugged. Residents wouldn’t be exposed to the plume through their drinking water, and the houses are all habitable, according to state and county officials.
At the end of the day, it’s up to buyers whether they want to live in a house that is in close proximity — but not necessarily directly exposed — to the environmental contamination, Waller said.
There is ample public information available about the plume. That makes disclosure even murkier, Favre said.
“If there is public information about this, then the seller doesn't have the same level of duty,” he said.
Washtenaw County, the city of Ann Arbor and the state of Michigan all have their own online information repositories. The Ann Arbor Public Library has a bookshelf of binders just for Gelman documents and data. And then there’s Roger Rayle’s online archive.
But none of that information is tied to individual residential properties. Buyers have to know to look in the first place. Documentation about a specific property could also be present at the County Register of Deeds, said Kristen Schweighoefer, director of the Washtenaw County Environmental Health Division.
The department may place a deed restriction on any house with “a direct pathway to human exposure in exceedance of state criteria,” she said in an email. Those documents would carry forward with the property through changes of ownership, she said.
The only problem is that the practice appears to be relatively recent. A review of county records showed houses with wells that were contaminated in the 1980s, like Martin’s, don’t have those documents on file.
What we don’t know
At 79, Martin still wonders if the well water she drank for almost 14 years has permanently harmed her health.
“It crosses your mind now and then,” she said. “When you have a health issue or something [it’s] like, ‘Well, what does this mean?’”
Martin remembers undergoing medical exams as part of the lawsuit’s discovery process. Paperwork from the case shows that Gelman required the plaintiffs to answer questions about any hospitalization or treatment “prior to the date you became aware of the alleged contamination.”
But since the court barred any testimony about possible negative health effects related to dioxane, the jury never learned about it. And the plaintiffs’ request for funding of medical monitoring never came to fruition, either.
To this day, it’s still unclear how the plume could have affected the people who drank from it for years. The plume has a 20-year “head start,” Rayle said, from when Gelman started dumping dioxane to when a University of Michigan graduate student discovered the contamination.
With that 20-year gap, it is unknown how long dioxane was in residents' wells before it was discovered — and how long they had been drinking it.
Tomorrow, we’ll explore what makes dioxane so tough to remove from water and why one advocate wants to learn more about how it affects human health.
