COLLINSVILLE — Officials here say residents should filter their tap water before drinking or cooking with it because of an unexplained increase in levels of PFAS chemicals that are now too high for its water treatment plant to fully remove.
The city discovered the contamination in samples taken in May. New tests confirmed the problem in August. Officials told the city council this week.
The so-called “forever chemicals,” in high enough concentrations, are linked to various health conditions, including cancer.
The city doesn’t yet know where the contamination is coming from, and officials are recommending residents use charcoal filters, reverse osmosis, or anionic exchange point-of-use filters for tap water as “three options known to remove PFAS,” said Michael Crawford, the chief operator of the Collinsville water plant.
Crawford said water system upgrades to allow for “total PFAS removal” from the city’s finished tap water aren’t expected to be in place until 2029, at the earliest.
He announced the recommendation at the City Council meeting Tuesday.
PFAS chemicals are found in a dizzying range of manufactured products, from everyday consumer goods to firefighting foam and countless industrial uses. Crawford’s memo to city officials noted their status as a “global-scale contamination issue,” saying that trace amounts of the chemicals are present in the blood of every living person today.
In a Wednesday interview, Crawford described the city’s PFAS contamination issue as an alarming mystery that marks a relatively sudden shift, after steady periods of testing that showed no problems from the chemicals.
He said it’s not clear what the source of the contamination is, if it’s coming from a certain direction, or if it’s from a one-time event that will dissipate over time.
The city draws its water from the American Bottoms aquifer, belowground. Last September, the city shut down one of its six wells, where isolated PFAS contamination was present.
After that, “we couldn’t even detect PFAS coming out of the finished end of the plant,” said Crawford.
But that changed after water sampling in May, when ensuing test results from a lab showed PFAS levels in the city’s remaining wells climbing to the point where its water treatment system can’t fully remove the chemicals.
“Their results just flew in the face of all the trends we’d been seeing for the last five years,” said Crawford, explaining that the city sought a second round of testing, which confirmed the findings last month.
“It was a heartbreaking result,” he said.
Now he said the city aims to “get facts out there, so people can remain safe and healthy.”
Other obvious options don’t exist until water plant upgrades can materialize as a long-term solution. Crawford said, for instance, that a second well has also been disabled because of motor issues.
“Unfortunately, we just don’t have the capacity to shut down more and more wells,” he said.
The ordeal is all the more unfortunate because Collinsville’s water system is relatively new, coming online in 2019, after years of design — back when it appeared that its water source was devoid of PFAS issues.
“It was just bad timing,” said Crawford. “So now we have to retrofit a new system.”
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Bryce Gray | Post-Dispatch
Energy and environment
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