‘People are devastated:’ At hearing, PFAS harms take center stage

EAST LANSING, MI — To say contamination at the former Wurtsmith Air Force base has harmed Craig Minor and his family would be putting it mildly.

Minor, a retired lieutenant colonel, lived with his wife, Carrie, in Oscoda in the mid-1980s, when base drinking water came from on-site groundwater wells.

Then, in 1989, their son, Mitchell, was born with severe cerebral palsy and microcephaly. Mitchell eventually died in 2020 at age 30. Carrie later suffered miscarriages. Craig has had tumors removed from his back and been hospitalized for unidentifiable prostate issues. His liver and spleen are enlarged and his kidneys are low-functioning.

In 2019, Craig’s blood was tested and the levels of toxic PFAS were elevated. In particular, the amount of PFHxS, a signature component of PFAS-based firefighting foam used by the military and airports, was nearly 20 times the national average.

“This is just the beginning of the list,” said Minor, who testified Monday, Aug. 1, during a U.S. Senate homeland security and government affairs committee field hearing in East Lansing, which was convened by Sen. Gary Peters, a Democrat from Michigan and the committee chair.

Minor urged the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Department of Defense (DOD) to acknowledge how severely PFAS pollution has harmed veterans and provide presumptive health care and disability benefits to PFAS-exposed veterans at home as is being done for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits overseas.

“I know we’re all looking forward,” said Minor. “I know that we’re talking about this being in fish and all that kind of stuff. But we’ve got to turn around and look back at what’s left over from that tsunami; and that’s actually people that are devastated and having difficulty — the ones that are still alive — getting through life.”

Beyond veterans health concerns, long-running struggles with the overall pace and adequacy of cleanup at Wurtsmith figured heavily in Monday’s field hearing, which brought senior officials from the U.S. Air Force, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) to testify alongside state regulators, experts and advocates.

A senior Pentagon official, Richard Kidd, deputy assistant defense secretary for environment, was scheduled to appear but was unable to attend due to a COVID diagnosis.

The hearing comes ahead of major changes in the regulatory landscape for PFAS. Bruno Pigott, deputy assistant administrator in the EPA office of water, said the agency will propose national drinking water standards for PFOS and PFOA by the year’s end, with the intent of finalizing those rules, which would apply to water utilities nationwide, by the end of 2023.

The standards would build upon EPA’s new draft toxicity analyses for both compounds, which dropped what’s considered a safe longtime exposure level in drinking below what labs are currently able to even detect.

Although the advisory only pertains to two compounds, Pigott indicated support for regulating the PFAS family as a class — an approach favored by advocates but fiercely opposed by industry. Because the chemical family is so large, “it may be easier to deal with them and regulate them in a way that approaches them by class,” he said.

The dramatic decrease in the federal drinking water safety level this summer, which was set at 70 parts-per-trillion (ppt) in 2016, is based largely on epidemiological studies that assess actual exposure in humans rather than solely on how animals respond to the chemicals in a lab.

Patrick Breysse, director of the ATSDR, the toxicological arm of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, stressed the need for more epidemiological studies such as the national PFAS Multi-Site Study, which includes people in the communities of Parchment, Belmont and Rockford, and Michigan’s MiPEHS study in the same locales.

“We need the evidence of humans, in particular, to understand what we would call ‘exposure responsibility’ — how much (PFAS) in the water, how much the body results in how much disease,” said Breysee. “That information can be used to more effectively set safe standards and safe levels going forward.”

Pigott also said another big step on the regulatory front is coming soon. In the “next month or so,” EPA will designate PFOS and PFOA as “hazardous” under the federal Superfund law, which, among other things, will allow the agency to order cleanups and recover remediation costs.

“That’s an impending decision that’s coming up really quickly,” Pigott said, adding that pollution enforcement using the new authority would begin shortly afterward.

That enforcement would almost certainly fall upon the Department of Defense, which is responsible for hundreds of PFAS pollution sites at bases worldwide. Nancy Balkus, deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for environment, framed the new EPA safe exposure levels as a complicating factor for military remediation strategy, because “almost any water source will then be unable to be used for drinking water.”

Peters pressed Balkus on points of contention between the state of Michigan, Wurtsmith activists and the Air Force, attempting a several points to extract commitments on issues such as community member access to base technical cleanup meetings, which Balkus said are supposed to be limited to the Air Force and state regulators.

The Need Our Water (NOW) group in Oscoda wants a seat at those meetings, which were previously open to the community until several years ago. Cathy Wusterbarth, a NOW co-founder who serves on the base cleanup advisory board, said NOW has a “dream team” of technical experts including Mark Henry and Bob Delaney, two former Wurtsmith site managers retired from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE).

“We have valuable information and it should be used,” said Wusterbarth.

Prompted by Peters. Balkus appeared to commit to adhering to state standards during interim and later cleanup stages at Wurtsmith, which has been a major point of dispute between the Air Force and the state going back several years. Balkus said the Air Force is “fully supportive” of incorporating state standards in the final cleanup phase as well as “in our upcoming interim remedial actions.”

The Air Force is expanding those stopgap actions in Oscoda, Balkus said, revealing plans to install a new groundwater capture and treatment system at Pierce’s Point on Van Etten Lake and a stormwater capture and treatment system on the Three Pipes Drain, which empties to the Au Sable River.

As for whether the Air Force would begin using the EPA’s new safety exposure levels, Balkus was less clear, saying “we will have to go back to some of our sites” and review data on detections below 70-ppt. John Gillespie, an Air Force environmental engineer who also testified, said past sampling efforts stopped at “half” the 70-ppt mark.

“We’re really gearing up to go back down and re-sample around all our installations,” Gillespie said.