The state’s latest round of testing in Bennington has shown that nearly 20 home water wells contain elevated levels of industrial contaminants, leading investigators to further expand the test area in town.
Among the 83 local wells tested between June and December 2023, 19 contained PFAS levels beyond the state’s safety limit of 20 parts per trillion for drinking water, said Richard Spiese, an environmental analyst at the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation.
The three wells with the highest recorded amounts of PFAS showed levels between 47 ppt and 54 ppt, he said. Those wells are located along Hickory Hill Road, among the Bennington neighborhoods south of Route 9 that were the subject of the testing.
Another 43 wells registered PFAS — perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances — within Vermont’s safety limit, Spiese said. The rest showed non-detectable levels of the synthetic group of chemicals, which has about 15,000 variations used in a wide range of consumer products and industrial processes.
Based on these findings, the state is planning to retest the same group of wells and expand the inquiry to another 100 to 150 residential wells in southern Bennington, Spiese said.
Last year’s discovery came as workers for the Department of Environmental Conservation were randomly testing sites around the state for the presence of PFAS in water wells. State investigators discussed their initial findings at a public meeting in Bennington last fall.
“Bennington and Pownal are definitely ground zero for PFAS,” Spiese said in an interview, “and that’s based on the history of how the chemical came into use in the state.”
The highest PFAS levels that state regulators have detected so far in Bennington were between 2,000 ppt and 4,600 ppt, when officials investigated residents’ complaints that two local manufacturing facilities had contaminated their soil and drinking water with the chemicals linked to health problems.
Dubbed “forever chemicals,” PFAS are highly toxic because they build up in the human body and never break down in the environment.
Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, which owned the manufacturing facilities, settled with the residents in their 2016 class-action lawsuit. The plaintiffs are receiving financial compensation and/or medical monitoring, and many have since had their homes connected to municipal water or water treatment systems.
Bennington’s town manager, Stuart Hurd, said the municipal government hopes to also connect the new group of affected homes to town water lines. The town is currently seeking state funding to start the infrastructure project.
Cindy Thomson, a Bennington resident whose water well was recently found to have PFAS levels above the state safety limit, said she’d like to see all the affected homes get hooked to the town water supply. They include a house she is renting out on Hickory Hill Road, where she also owns land.
“I was thinking about building a house up there, but I just can’t see investing my money with the water situation the way it is up there,” she said. “I certainly don’t want to drill a contaminated well.”
Meanwhile, the Department of Environmental Conservation has provided bottled water to 16 of the recently discovered homes with elevated PFAS levels. Among them, 11 have been fitted with water-filtering systems to replace the bottled water.
The state is still investigating which entities could be the source of this batch of PFAS-contaminated water wells. They are located south of the “zone of concern” in the class-action suit. In the public meeting last fall, Spiese said the source could be Saint-Gobain, a combination of sources or a different entity altogether.
There are other potential sources of industrial chemicals in the affected area, he said, including landfills and old manufacturing facilities.
Matt Chapman, director of the Department of Environmental Conservation’s Waste Management and Prevention Division, said the department started the random well water testing in 2023 partly to see if PFAS issues might exist in places where there are no known industrial sources.
“PFAS is in our clothes, in our detergents and cleaning products. It’s in our electronics,” he said. “There’s just, unfortunately, so many things in our society that contain perfluorinated compounds that we’re finding it in areas that we wouldn’t want or expect it to be.”
This continued testing, Spiese said, will help officials keep communities safe and aid in their probe of where the contaminants originated. If the polluters have the resources, he said, the state wants to compel them to contribute to the process of understanding how extensive the contamination is and in the ongoing remediation work.
“Our state law says the polluters should pay,” Spiese said.
