Below is a transcript of our conversation with Dr. Larry Lemke and Eleanor McFarlan: David Nicholas:
I'm David Nicholas and this is Central Focus, a weekly look at research activity and innovative work from Central Michigan University students and faculty. PFAS, forever chemicals contaminating our water. We're now finding them in many more waterways and it's the focus of research from Eleanor McFarlan, a geology major and May CMU graduate from Hastings and Doctor Larry Lemke, CMU Professor of Environmental Geology.
Larry Lemke:
So, this has been ongoing in Michigan for more than a decade, and I think recently the EPA has issued drinking water standards for five or six, PFAS and we are now catching up as a nation to where Michigan and other states who took the lead on this began more than a decade ago.
DN:
How far have we come in identifying target areas or potential areas where we might find the chemicals? Or are we at a point, unfortunately, where we're assuming that they could be found in almost any waterway?
LL:
David, I'll answer that question this way. Our ability to detect these chemicals through the analytical instruments that we have is increasing all the time. So we can (we can) detect them at lower and lower levels. We've been talking about parts per trillion. That's an extremely low concentration. Most of the other chemicals we hear about with environmental concerns, we're talking parts per million or perhaps parts per billion. But these are parts per trillion. And at that level, they are so ubiquitous in our environment that we find them everywhere. You find them in rainwater that comes down out of the sky. That's called atmospheric deposition. We find them in the groundwater. We find them in soils. So, they are literally everywhere. And they're probably in you and in me and in Eleanor as well.
DN:
And that brings you Eleanor McFarland into the conversation. You're one of several students that have worked with Dr. Lemke and you're from the west part of Michigan. Was it brought to your attention, was there local news coverage of these man-made walleye ponds in Belmont in (in) Kent County? When did you become aware of that and (and) you, with Dr. Lemke deciding to focus some research and study on that particular area?
Eleanor McFarlan:
Some of the maps showed the walleye ponds on them and some of the maps didn't have them on. So, we weren't exactly sure if they were still being used to stock walleye, so we actually ended up contacting some people from the DNR and finding out (if) that it was still in place. But at that time, there wasn't really any (any) coverage or anything going on with the ponds besides just the normal Walleye Club going to stock them. And then we weren't 100% sure really what was going to happen until we kind of showed up and looked at the site. We basically looked at the compounds that the EGLE and the DNR had sampled for in their wells and we compared it to what we were finding in our surface water sampling. We did find typically less PFAS overall in the pond samples than in the groundwater samples, which makes sense because you have the surface water with less PFAS mixing in with the pond.
LL:
The source of these PFAS, we believe, was a landfill that was operating in the 1960s when I was in elementary school, and this is a (a) legacy contaminant. Now that Eleanor and her generation have to deal with after 50 or 60 years. Groundwater flows very, very slowly. So, the tannery waste that was put into this landfill, leached into the groundwater flowed more than two miles, as Eleanor said, until it reached the point where now it's coming back up to the surface. We have a mantra in geology and in groundwater geology where what goes down must come up. So, the flow path is completed by coming back to the surface and that's where Eleanor chose to look in these ponds to see if the PFAS traveling underground in the groundwater for more than five or six decades is now coming back to the surface.
DN:
Eleanor, you're starting graduate work this fall at the University of Wisconsin. How will we start to potentially see the overall effect the bodies of water as large as our Great Lakes?
EMcF:
It's in a lot of places and I think it's in a lot more bodies of water than sometimes people think just because, like, we're talking about this landfill that was disposing of tannery waste back in the 1960s and we're still seeing it now in higher concentrations because it's been traveling for so long. I think once people start looking into these sites and testing for PFAS in these areas that it's (it's) going to be a little bit bigger than it, (than it) is right now.
DN:
Thanks to both of you for sharing the insight and the information on what the threat is and how we're dealing with it. Thanks very much to both of you for your time.
LL:
Thank you.
EMcF:
Thank you.
