The legacy of Michigan's industrial history includes several places around the state where land and water are contaminated by so-called forever chemicals, or PFAS (per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances). Scientific consensus is that contact with PFAS has serious repercussions for human and animal health. The state has spent years trying to develop a cleanup strategy.
MLive reporter Garret Ellison joined Stateside to talk about where the state's effort to clean up PFAS contaminated sites stand right now.
Earlier this year, Governor Gretchen Whitmer declared Sept. 21-25 PFAS Awareness Week. The state encourages Michiganders to "take steps to reduce their exposure to PFAS through actions such as sampling their private drinking water well to see if it is impacted by PFAS, checking the Eat Safe Fish guides before consuming locally caught fish, avoiding foam on surface water, and reducing the use of consumer products that can contain PFAS," according to the State of Michigan website.
"Michigan's been dealing with [PFAS] in an intense way for almost a decade. But, you know, really the chemicals were first found here in about 2010, 2011, found by the state at Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Oscoda," Ellison said. "But it, it was sort of dealt with intermittently, quietly site-specific ways until the Wolverine contamination in 2017 kind of blew up."
While the Wolverine contamination brought PFAS contamination to the forefront, there are locations in Michigan that are impacted by the substances that may not be as widely known.
"The amount of sites in Michigan where there's a known source of contaminants and it exceeds the state's criteria for cleanup or remedial criteria in groundwater is about 350. And that's sites with known sources," Ellison said. "There's also another about 40 areas known as area of interest investigations where it may be like a neighborhood with low detections and some wells, and they're not exactly sure where the contaminants are coming from, but they may be exceeding what is considered to be safe drinking water levels. So there's a response going on."
The Michigan PFAS Action Response Team was created in 2017, and Ellison said the state has since then been testing drinking water and testing fish in order to find other locations that may be contaminated. There's also concern about contaminated groundwater entering farm fields and leaching PFAS into the agricultural products from those fields.
"The state launched a large scale public water supply testing effort, and that was an effort to identify all the municipal and community water supplies across Michigan that may have had the chemicals, and they did find lots of public water systems that had them," Ellison explained. "And that directly led to state rules in 2020, requiring testing and filtration in a lot of these water supplies. So there has been, you know, through finding the data, there has been concrete steps taken to reduce people's exposure to it. That doesn't necessarily mean that we're done dealing with PFAS, though."
Despite the work to locate the current 350 contaminated sites, Ellison said there's not a lot of work being done to clean up those locations. Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Oscoda is operating several interim remedial systems, which target hot spots on the base. It's meant to be a stopgap system until a larger base-wide remedial treatment plan can be put in place, according to Ellison.
"I think it's worth remembering, particularly now that we're in the midst of PFAS Awareness Week, that it was really sort of ordinary regular citizens who put us on this path," Ellison said. "In the Rockford area, it was a citizen group led by a woman named Lynn McIntosh, who was a piano teacher who just, you know, kind of refused to be deterred. [...] And, you know, citizens like her just sort of refuse to take no for an answer. They continue digging. They continue finding evidence of the use and disposal of this stuff, and eventually forced the hand of regulators. It was regular citizens that put us on the path to getting here."
