The fight for safe drinking water

Maria Powell used to believe that science would prevail.

She co-founded the Midwest Environmental Justice Organization in 2005, hoping to draw attention to the danger pollution poses to humans.

A shelf in the corner of her home office is filled with books on dangerous chemicals, toxic sludge and pollution. She stockpiled the latest studies on plastics, PCBs, pesticides and endocrine disrupters, confident that science would be persuasive, if she could just get people to pay attention to it. Lately her optimism has been replaced by despair.

“I used to think that all this science was going to change things — I just got so demoralized, I looked at these papers and they’re not doing anything so I went through weeks of purging into the recycling bin,” Powell says. “I don’t have that belief anymore that the science itself is going to change things. You have years, decades, thousands of studies and it’s not the thing that makes a difference.”

Although she now doubts that science will save the day, Powell continues fighting to get the word out. Of particular concern these days is a chemical group known as PFAS, which some scientists label the “new lead.”

PFAS have been making headlines in Madison for more than a year, thanks in large part to Powell. She’s been consistently raising the alarm, and often is one of the few people holding city, utility and state entities to account. 

Last month, her mission got a boost from Hollywood with the release of the new Todd Haynes movie, Dark Waters. Starring Mark Ruffalo, it dramatizes another crusader: corporate attorney, Rob Bilott, who helped a West Virginia town take on DuPont for poisoning the community with PFOA, a key component of Teflon.

But in Madison, Powell is still waiting for a public reckoning that she believes this health threat requires. “You need water, you don’t have a choice.

“There is a problem,” she says. “Let’s put it on the table, get people engaged in it, hold polluters accountable and clean it up.”

So what are PFAS?

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a group of man-made chemicals that includes PFOA, PFOS, GenX, and many other chemicals.” First created in the 1930s, there are now more than 4,000 PFAS.

These chemicals contain carbon-fluorine bonds, which are some of the strongest in nature, and it makes them extremely resistant to breaking down; it’s why they are dubbed “forever chemicals.”

The chemicals were initially seen as a scientific marvel, producing fabrics that are waterproof but breathable (Gore-Tex); nonstick cookware (Teflon); dental floss that easily slips in-between teeth (Glide); and a foam that can extinguish burning jet fuel. The chemicals are also found in numerous cosmetics, microwave popcorn, food packaging and more.

Beginning in the ‘60s, scientists began to suspect they could be harmful to human health. The evidence of their danger has only grown.

Thousands of scholarly articles link PFAS to a dizzying number of health effects: testicular cancer, kidney cancer, impaired fertility, ulcerative colitis, liver damage, thyroid disease, pregnancy induced hypertension/preeclampsia, and decreased antibody response to vaccines, just to name a few.

“We have several epidemiology studies, some of which are quite strong,” explains Linda Birnbaum, who retired as director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program in October. “I wouldn’t say that the data is strong enough to say that everything is caused by PFAS, but I would say there is enough to say that PFAS are not nice chemicals that certainly have the potential to cause adverse effects in people.”

Joseph Braun, associate professor of epidemiology at Brown University, has authored 19 studies related to PFAS. “There’s pretty strong evidence that they do seem to be linked with adverse health outcomes. And more likely than not, it’s causally so, particularly for things like cholesterol,” Braun tells Isthmus. “Also in children, these per-fluoroalkyl substances are associated with decreased vaccine response and possibly other alterations to their immune system.”

While the compounds are not federally regulated, the EPA issued a health advisory in 2016 for a combination limit of just two compounds, PFOS and PFOA at 70 parts per trillion, or ppt. However, some states and scientists say this level is too high.

Because they don’t easily break down, these compounds build up in the environment, animals and humans. Two of the most studied and well-known PFAS compounds, PFOS and PFOA, have a half-life — the time it takes for the amount to drop by half — in humans of 5.4 years and 8 years, respectively.

The class of chemicals are estimated to be in the blood of over 98 percent of Americans.

People can be exposed in numerous ways, including through the food they eat (particularly fish caught in contaminated water), food packaging and cookware. Infants can be exposed through household dust.

And in Madison, people are exposed simply by drinking the water from their faucets. PFAS have been found in 14 of the 23 wells that supply water to residents.

It’s known that fire fighting foam used at Truax and burn pits at Dane County Regional Airport are a source of PFAS contamination, and other sources are possible.

The Madison Water Utility insists that its water is safe to drink. However, state regulators have not yet established what’s a “safe” level for human consumption of PFAS. And some scientists argue that any exposure is unhealthy.

“What we’re going to find out, it’s going to be like lead. The desired level is zero,” says Laura Orlando, an environmental health professor at Boston University who studies toxic substances, including PFAS, and their exposure to humans. Orlando notes that lead concentrations are measured in parts per billion, with 15 parts per billion being considered dangerous. But PFAS are believed to be unhealthy at just a few parts per trillion.

“We’re talking about concentrations that are very, very, very small,” Orlando says. Small concentrations that can have huge health effects, particularly on infants and children.

Elise Sunderland, professor of environmental science and engineering at Harvard University, points to the work of her colleague, Philippe Grandjean, who found that a safe level of PFAS in drinking water would be 1 ppt.

“This is not very popular work,” Sunderland says. “If you’re talking [1 part per trillion] many, many systems are over that level. And then it becomes a problem.”

In 2019, the Madison Water Utility tested all of its wells. Well 15 near the Dane County Regional Airport had 54.97 ppt total PFAS. Two wells near Blooming Grove ranked second and third in contamination: well 9 had 51.55 ppt and well 23 had 42.56 ppt.

The utility publicly reported the levels in some wells as “present,” rather than listing the precise amounts detected. Upon request, the utility provided the lab reports that detail measurements for each well. Amy Barrilleaux, the utility’s spokesperson (and an Isthmus contributor) says officials believed giving exact measurements would be “misleading.”

“The numbers we get from the labs that are above the detection limit but below the reporting limit are a lab estimate,” Barrilleaux writes in an email. “That means that the lab doesn’t have full confidence in the value. So the best we can say with confidence is that a particular compound is present.”

Wendy Heiger-Bernays, a clinical professor of environmental health at Boston University, says it is troubling that the Madison utility didn’t initially provide precise measurements. “If they don’t tell us what those are, we have no way of knowing,” she says. “I have never seen that. Never.”

In its reporting, the utility also didn’t add up the various PFAS chemicals found to provide a total amount. “That’s because PFAS compounds aren’t really an apples-to-apples comparison,” Barrilleaux says. “Some types are far more concerning than others.”

Birnbaum counters that adding up PFAS levels has value for both scientists and residents. “We don’t know whether PFAS are acting additively or synergistically,” she says. “As a first cut, just adding things up to get an idea of how much is around, I don’t think is a bad approach.”

Powell grew up along the Fox River, near Green Bay. At 15, she started working to help pay her family’s bills. In her 20s she studied biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. To afford tuition, she worked as a cocktail waitress, cleaned houses and worked at public parks. At times, she was homeless, sleeping in cars or boats. While living in California, she learned that she and her seven siblings had grown up swimming in and eating fish from a river dangerously contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

“When I found out about it, I was really super angry,” she recalls. “We were probably, by the way, swimming in PFAS too.” The Fox River is now an EPA superfund site.

After learning about pollution near her hometown, Powell’s studies took on a greater significance.

“I was a biology major, I liked biology and I cared about human health,” she says. “But I realized that human health could not really be understood without looking at the environment.”

Around the same time, her family began suffering from a variety of health problems.  “My sisters started having babies and having severe pre-eclampsia,” she says, referring to a pregnancy disorder that puts both mother and fetus at risk. “We all started having thyroid problems, immune problems. I became more interested in environmental issues and freshwater.”

“We grew up swimming in this, eating this and having no clue of it,” she adds. “It is very clear that we are all affected by it.”

She empathizes with the working class families living at Truax Apartments, a public housing development near the U.S. Air Force Reserve base, where a PFAS-laden firefighting foam has been used in practice exercises for at least 50 years.

Powell also worries about Hmong residents, who regularly eat panfish they catch in Starkweather Creek. In October, the DNR discovered foam in the creek near the Olbrich Park boat launch. The foam turned out to have a PFAS concentration of 87,516 ppt, while water in the creek tested at 507.5 ppt.

Touyeng Xiong, a Hmong resident who is the vice president of Midwest Environmental Justice Organization, says his community is mostly unaware of the risks. “Over the past decade, my neighbors and I have fished for and consumed panfish caught from Monona,” he says. “We do not … know the extent of the [PFAS] contaminants that may be in these fish.” Now that more is known about the risks of PFAS exposure, Xiong says he is “appalled that the city and state have not done much to prevent continued exposure.”

In early December, Public Health Madison and Dane County sent out English-only letters to residents along Starkweather Creek recommending that citizens avoid swallowing water or foam from the creek. The letter noted that the DNR is testing fish in the creek.

Powell and former Ald. David Ahrens, who represented a far east-side district until April 2019, have been asking officials to test the fish since spring 2018. Two summer fishing seasons later, Public Health Madison and Dane County finally posted warning signs along the creek, in English, Spanish and Hmong.

Pau Xiong, an East High senior who is Touyeng’s sister, says her family stopped eating panfish, but worries about other Hmong residents who continue eating it. “They didn’t know that our waters were contaminated with PFAS, so I am still trying to continue spreading the information.”

Early in 2019, Vicki Liu first heard about PFAS in a neighborhood web post.

She looked up where her drinking water came from and was horrified to discover it was contaminated well 15.

A web developer at Shopbop, Liu started researching the chemicals, attending meetings and talking to neighbors about it. She sent scientific literature to the Madison Water Utility, and eventually helped start an online petition asking for well 15 to be shut down. When a pregnant couple moved in nearby, Liu told them about the contamination in the neighborhood well. The family promptly sold their house and moved to the west side.

“I think it’s a bigger problem than we’re being led to believe,” Liu says. “I’m just really concerned because a lot of the communities that are affected are lower-income communities and they may not be aware of what they are drinking.”

Emails obtained by Isthmus show that the utility was uncertain about what to do when PFAS were found at 55.69 ppt in well 15 last February.

Joseph Grande, water quality manager at the Madison Water Utility, sought advice from Doug Voegeli, director of the environmental health division at Public Health Madison and Dane County. Voegeli responded: “I think that the mayor wants to shut down this well and we are stating that it is not necessary.”

Then-Mayor Paul Soglin did order well 15 shut down the following month. In an Isthmus-sponsored March 18 mayoral debate, Soglin nevertheless said that he would drink water from the well because “we have the documentation that the PFAS in that well...come nowhere near the safety level where you get concerned.” Satya Rhodes-Conway, who went on to win the election, joked that she would drink the water “because I’m not going to have any kids.”

Former Ald. David Ahrens was surprised the city shut the well down. At the time, he was serving on the water utility’s board but he’d never seen any indication that officials were worried about contamination. “They never would say there was a problem,” Ahrens remembers.

Since the well was closed, officials have sent mixed signals about the reason. At first, the water utility said it was being done to give residents “peace of mind” until regulations were proposed.

But on Dec. 3 — nine months after the well closure — the utility posted a lengthy article on its website, giving a new reason for the closure: “Madison Water Utility eventually took well 15 offline, not because of PFOA and PFOS, but because of a substance called PFHxS.”

Another polyfluoroalkyl chemical, PFHxS, is commonly found in firefighting foam. It remains in humans for at least eight and a half years and is costly to remove from drinking water. Boston University’s Heiger-Bernays calls PFHxS “really nasty… really problematic.”

Grande says well 15’s water is still safe to drink. “There is no reason from a strictly regulatory reason why that well is off,” he says. “Of course there is a public relations side of this, you know, or a public trust side and I would say that that’s why the well is currently off.”

Voegeli agrees. Responding to questions from Isthmus, he writes “Levels of PFOS and PFOA were/are below the current federal health advisory level and nearly all of the state levels that were in place at that time (and now, including the current levels proposed by DHS/DNR of 20 ppt).”

While on the council, Ahrens had pushed for a public task force that could provide recommendations on the threat. “Bureaucracies are not at their best in dealing with issues that might reflect on some of their failures,” he says. “So we needed to find a way around that. We thought this committee would be able to do that.”

The push for a task force has since petered out. Mayor Rhodes-Conway says she has no plans for one. “City staff have been working on this issue diligently for quite some time and have been very proactive about working with other agencies.”

Ahrens remains concerned about how the city is informing the public about drinking water contamination.

“The notion of telling people that ‘there is nothing to worry about, the water is healthy’ — to say that in an unambiguous sense, it’s not a scientific approach. There is a tremendous amount of doubt and uncertainty on what is the nature of these chemicals. I was particularly concerned about its effect on children and children who are in utero.”

City officials say they’re waiting for state and federal agencies to establish guidelines for PFAS contamination. That could be a long wait.

Wisconsin’s timeline for developing health standards for PFAS will take up to three years. On Nov. 14, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources held its first public hearings on drinking and groundwater standards.

At the hearing, industry lobbyists pushed for restraint. Scott Manley, executive vice president of Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce who also represents the Water Quality Coalition, argued the state should regulate just two compounds, PFOA and PFOS.

Manley claimed that both compounds have health effects just at “very high levels” and that not all PFAS compounds are a hazard. Braun, the epidemiologist from Brown, tells Isthmus there’s no evidence to support that. “There is not any compelling reason to think that there is a threshold for the effects of PFOA or other PFAS, which means there is no ‘safe’ level of exposure.” 

Industry lobbyists are also pushing the state to wait for the EPA to set standards before establishing its limits.

“It will probably be quite a while before the EPA comes out with anything and when it does, I doubt whether it will really be protective of the population,” says Birnbaum, who has observed the EPA set standards in the past. “It will be very focused on one or two, maybe three or four of the thousands of PFAS that are out there. I think many of the states are moving ahead in setting their own regulations, or their own health advisory levels, which are more health protective.”

In December, key provisions that would require that PFAS be listed under the Superfund and Clean Water Act were removed from the National Defense Authorization Act for 2020.

Grande says the utility is waiting for direction from either the state or the federal government. “The standards will dictate the future for how we operate our system — well 15 is currently off and will be off for I’m sure another year at a minimum,” says Grande.

As the city waits for standards, one of the key sources of PFAS in Madison’s water supply continues unchecked. The DNR has been unsuccessfully trying to get the Wisconsin Air National Guard, the city of Madison and Dane County to assess and eventually clean up PFAS contamination around the airport. The Guard says in an emailed statement to Isthmus that it is “awaiting authorization” to evaluate the “nature and extent of contamination” at the site. 

But Rhodes-Conway says funding for assessment and cleanup is unlikely for compounds that are not listed under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act. “This is why I think it is so important for state regulations around any future construction at the site to address PFAS contamination,” Rhodes-Conway tells Isthmus in an email.          

In mid-December, the EPA started taking public comments about whether to add PFAS to the Toxic Release Inventory list, which would require industry to submit annual reports on the substance. Comments will be accepted through Feb. 3.

The Wisconsin Assembly has approved a bipartisan bill that would prohibit training with firefighting foam containing PFAS, and only allow its application in emergency fire response or in testing approved by the DNR.

Until the extent of contamination from Truax and the airport can be documented, it’s impossible to say how far, and for how long, the PFAS pollution has spread. The known contamination from Truax is in Starkweather Creek and well 15, with a base 753 feet below ground. How PFAS got into other wells in Madison is a mystery.

“So far the DNR has done an inventory of potential sources in the well 16 and 15 areas,” says Barrilleaux. “We don’t have a lot of information for what the potential sources are for the other wells.”

In 2020, the Madison Water Utility plans to test all wells once for PFAS and do follow-up testing as needed. At this time, there is no plan for quarterly testing, which scientists have recommended for contaminated wells.

Powell admits that she at times feels hopeless in her effort to get people to pay attention to such a clear health danger.

“I guess [I feel] angry because Madison is so privileged,” she says. “We have so much education here, we have tons of resources — we could do so much better on all of these chemical issues, we could be really aggressively stopping sources of PFAS.”

But she keeps at it in part because she worries about the people who are unaware that their tap water might be poisoning them and their children.

“The side that makes me the most sad about my work is going out to these low-income communities where people are struggling with racism, classism, poverty, every struggle you can think of,” she says. “I feel like we have an obligation to tell them — to talk to people about their exposures.”

For Powell, asking community members with the fewest resources to testify at city meetings “doesn’t seem fair” and so often she is the only one in the room, speaking on their behalf.

In the meantime, Midwest Environmental Justice Organization, with funding from the Center for Health, Environment & Justice and the People’s Action Institute, is working to create a People’s PFAS Action Team. Her hope is to have community-led public meetings and engagement on the risks of PFAS and standards.

Although Powell might feel like she’s waging a lonely battle, she has allies around the country, fighting a similar fight. 

“What we need is people continuing to talk about it,” says Harvard’s Sunderland. “Because it’s the only way we’ll get quick action.”

[Editor's note: Four PFAS readings on the well map were corrected. Well 7 is at .38 ppt, not 0 ppt. Wells 19, 28 and 30 should have been reported at 0 ppt even though lab reports showed trace detection of PFAS. Because similarly low levels of PFAS were found in the well water and controlled sample, additional testing would be necessary to confirm whether or not PFAS were present in the well water. The article was also updated to note that lead concentrations are measured in parts per billion, not million.]