POWNAL — The Pownal Fire District 2 water system is again under a do-not-drink order, but this time perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) pollution is not the cause.
District and state officials said the directive was issued last week after chlorine in the water system that serves about 130 households or businesses in south Pownal fell below the level needed to prevent bacteria-related contamination.
Mark Smith, chairman of the district board, said the problem developed after a regular maintenance procedure for the filtering system installed near the district’s well head off Route 346. The enclosed filter system was installed after the well water was discovered in 2016 to be contaminated with the industrial chemical PFOA.
Tests are being done to determine exactly what happened and how to restore the necessary chlorine level, but Smith said higher levels of iron and manganese were detected in the water, and “iron content eats up chlorine.”
While a solution to the problem is worked out, bottled water is being provided to customers of the district. The do-not-drink order also prohibits cooking with the water, which took on an orange color, Smith said, as iron content rose.
FILTERING ISSUE
Maintenance of the district’s granular activated carbon filtering system is not handled by the district. It is being done through Unicorn Management Consultants, the firm hired by American Premier Underwriters to oversee the PFOA remediation efforts.
The contamination source was identified by the state as the former Warren Wire/General Cable factory, located about 1,000 feet from the well head, which once coated materials with liquid Teflon containing PFOA.
American Premier Underwriters had insured the current owner of the factory building, Mack Molding, when that company purchased it primarily for use as a warehouse.
Dana Nagy, supervisor with the Drinking Water Community Operations Section of the Department of Environmental Conservation, said Monday that the results of water samples taken are pending, but the goal is “to whittle down where the elevated levels of iron and magnesium are coming from.”
Those levels “make it impossible to keep the disinfectant (chlorine)” in the system, Nagy said, and the metals content also prevents boiling the water to purify it because that would concentrate the iron and magnesium.
The don’t-drink directive will remain “until Unicorn can figure out what’s wrong with the system,” and reconfigure how the water is filtered and treated, he said.
PERMANENT SYSTEM
Smith said he believes water filtering and treatment would become easier to manage if a proposed permanent water filtering system is installed at the district well head.
He said the state is still reviewing plans submitted by Unicorn and the district as the preferred long-term solution to PFOA contamination.
The current carbon filtering system was expected to be temporary and operate for about two years when it was installed in 2016, Smith said.
The district’s well system was established during the 1990s, before perfluorooctanoic acid was recognized as a threat to groundwater supplies.
However, in 2016, levels of PFOA higher than the state’s 20 parts per trillion standard for drinking water were found in the well, prompting the need for filtering
Warren Wire and General Cable used Teflon coatings at the factory site, beginning in the late 1940s, and stack emissions from a high-heat drying process used are believed by state officials to have spread the PFOA through the air and through soil into the groundwater.
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