Editor’s note: This article by Derek Carson was first published in the Bennington Banner on Oct. 19, 2016.
[S]HAFTSBURY — The state of Vermont has requested that Shaftsbury update its semi-annual well testing regimen to include many wells that were recently tested for PFOA, including residential wells.
“We’ve gotten a request from the state to modify our regular plan for monitoring the wells,” said Select Board Chairman Tim Scoggins at the board’s meeting on Monday. “We have monitoring wells that we’ve tested for years for various pollutants. We expected that PFOA would become one of those. The letter that we got that asked us to develop a plan suggested that at a minimum we should go back and test every well, including residential wells, that were tested lately that were above 10 [parts per trillion]. We thought 20 was a low number, but it turns out 10 is also an actionable number in the state’s mind.”
The state first discovered the chemical, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), at the closed landfill site in late July, in a concentration of 25 parts per trillion, just over the state’s advisory limit of 20 ppt. At 20 ppt, Vermont has the lowest health advisory level for PFOA in concentration in water in the country. Earlier this year the Environmental Protection Agency set its own health advisory level at 70 ppt.
In late August it was announced that none of the 24 wells tested within a quarter mile of the landfill site tested over 20 ppt, including the well that initially tested high.
“They want to keep an eye on those numbers that are above 10,” said Scoggins. “In this letter they talked about having an incomplete understanding of the way PFOA is being distributed around our landfill. My thought on that is that that seemed to be going beyond what Shaftsbury should really be required to do.”
Board member Art Whitman pointed out that it had been a fear of the board’s all along that the state would keep demanding more and more testing until it became financially impossible for the town to meet the demands. The board wrote a letter to the state in August, before it was announced that the wells were under the limit, asking the state for assistance in paying for future testing.
“As we contemplate our next steps,” the letter, which was addressed to Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Alyssa Schuren, reads, “our citizens are justifiably concerned about the potential cost of cleanup. In a worst case scenario, Shaftsbury could see hundreds of thousands of dollars in cleanup costs, depending on the results of well water tests. It could prove more than we can bear. It makes sense that a company that profited from pollution should have to pay to clean it up. It’s harder to understand why a town like Shaftsbury that acted in the public interest by operating a state-regulated landfill should be treated the same way. The task of dealing with solid waste is a statewide endeavor, executed locally under state law. Dealing with PFOA contamination from landfills is a state problem, not a burden that can or should be borne by the unlucky town. There are hundreds of closed landfills in the state, virtually one for every town. Some will have PFOA above 20 parts per trillion and some will not. Surely we will not dole out the burden by the luck of the draw.”
“We are asking the state to help us with the cost of PFOA cleanup,” the letter concludes, “PFOA pollution is a statewide issue that requires a statewide response, not just uncovering it, but cleaning it up.”
While the board has consulted a lawyer and is considering legal options, town administrator David Kiernan stressed that other paths might be more beneficial. “The board, working with our partners in the Legislature, have to come to a remedy for all the towns in the state,” he said. “We seem to be on the leading edge of it, but essentially us getting into a legal argument with the state is not going to be to our advantage at all.”
“The PFOA test is an expensive test because it’s such a sensitive test,” said Scoggins. “It measures in parts per trillion. We don’t measure anything else in parts per trillion.”
“Even when monitoring well eight (the well that initially tested positive for over 20 ppt of PFOA) was high, the residents were below 20, and before we could turn around, monitoring well eight was also below 20,” said Scoggins. “I think the idea that every well between 10 and 20 is suddenly something to monitored twice a year forever with this very expensive test for the sake of completing our understanding just seems like a state project, not a town of Shaftsbury project.”
The Shaftsbury Select Board meets the first and third Monday of every month at 6:30 p.m. at Cole Hall on Buck Hill Road in Shaftsbury. Full recordings of the meetings are available on Catamount Access Television, and on the station’s YouTube page.
