‘Startlingly high’ levels of PFAS pollution found in Warren County hot spot

This article originally appeared in NJ Spotlight News and is reprinted with permission.

A private well at the heart of a pollution hot spot in Warren County has levels of toxic “forever chemicals” that appear to be the highest recorded in New Jersey and among the highest ever seen in the nation.

Records from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection show that a drinking water sample from a private well at a self-storage facility in the area of South Lincoln Avenue in Washington Township had a total concentration of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — PFAS — of 18,997 parts per trillion. The sample was pulled from the well on June 13, 2023.

PFAS, often called forever chemicals, are a family of thousands of chemicals used for decades in a variety of applications and are now a widespread pollution problem around the world. The chemicals are incredibly durable, which makes them very useful but also means they are very difficult to break down. PFAS have been linked to serious health problems, including cancer and birth defects.

New Jersey has drinking water standards for three of the most common PFAS: perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA). Those regulations set a maximum level of 14 parts per trillion for PFOA and 13 parts per trillion for both PFOS and PFNA.

Well contamination at the storage facility dwarfed those standards, with PFOS at 8,350 parts per trillion, PFOA at 5,950 parts per trillion and PFNA at 354 parts per trillion. Other PFAS, which remain unregulated, were also found in the well.

What sparked the investigation

Caryn Shinske, a DEP spokeswoman, said department staff was not immediately aware of another drinking water well in the state that had been found to have similar levels of PFAS, though she cautioned that a complete review of well testing records had not been done in response to a request from NJ Spotlight News.

The DEP asked the Environmental Protection Agency to take over the response to the Washington Township pollution last year. Federal investigators have expanded the scope of well testing in the area in the months since, as they try to determine the exact extent of the pollution.

Elias Rodriguez, an EPA spokesman, said that agency is not aware of any other drinking water wells in New Jersey that have been found with PFAS at such high levels.

Testing results for private wells in New Jersey are confidential, protected by state privacy laws, so there is no publicly available database for NJ Spotlight News to review. The results of well testing for community water systems are available, however, and a review of that data found no well that came close to the levels at the storage facility well in Washington Township.

The only well serving a community water system in New Jersey that reached 1,821 parts per trillion for total PFAS concentration was also found in Washington Township, at a car dealership. The car dealership is roughly one mile south of the storage facility, just down Route 31. The dealership’s wells were first discovered to have high PFAS levels in 2019, and it was that detection that spurred DEP officials to begin investigating private wells in the area.

Similar results at a Michigan site

Environmental Working Group, a national nonprofit that advocates for PFAS regulation and cleanup, maintains a database of known PFAS contamination on and near military bases. Those records show that Department of Defense testing of drinking water wells near Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in the Pinelands found one well with a total PFAS level of 1,444 parts per trillion in March 2022.

“Those levels are startlingly high for drinking water,” Jared Hayes, a senior policy analyst for Environmental Working Group, said of the storage facility well. “No one should be exposed to those levels of PFAS.”

At least one other place in the United States is known to have PFAS pollution in drinking water wells at similar levels to the hot Washington Township well — Kent County, Michigan, where contamination from a tannery outside the city of Grand Rapids created what is now one of the most high-profile PFAS hot spots in the nation. Michigan state records show that of more than 1,500 wells sampled in that area, 10 had total PFAS concentrations of more than 10,000 parts per trillion. The highest concentration there reached 96,000 parts per trillion.

Even though the well at the storage facility in Washington Township is meant to be used for drinking water, it’s not clear that anyone is currently consuming the water there. The property owner has informed DEP that only bottled water is used at the site, Shinske said. The DEP has informed the owner of options to install a filter system on the well and be reimbursed through the state’s Spill Fund, but so far, the owner has not done so, Shinske said.

Are there treatment options?

Mike Furrey, the former owner of Agra Environmental who has been testing water quality in New Jersey for 30 years, said the highest PFAS sample he’d ever personally seen was around 400 parts per million. He added that contamination at the levels detected at the storage facility render PFAS filter systems ineffective, because the filters must be replaced far more often than usual.

“It’s not even technically feasible to treat it,” Furrey said. “If they put a home treatment system in, they’d be replacing it every six months. The carbon or the resin [filters] would not last that long.”

Abandoning the well altogether, Furrey said, is the only way to really deal with such a situation.

“You’d have to drill a new well or connect to a local system,” Furrey said. “That’s really the only solution — to get a public water supply to all those people.”

The storage facility well is at the epicenter of an area where toxic sludge from a nearby textile mill was spread on Washington Township farmland for about 20 years. The dumping was no small feat — officials estimate that between 12,000 and 14,000 gallons of the sludge was spread on the area daily during that time.

Testing of private wells is ongoing

The EPA is actively working to test almost 400 private wells in Washington Township, and officials are still urging residents to sign up. Property owners with wells found to be above drinking water standards are being offered bottled water, and the EPA plans to install filter systems on impacted wells in coming months. Washington Township is also working with the New Jersey American Water utility on a $12 million effort to expand the nearby public water system, to connect as many affected homes as possible.

Hayes said that response is what’s needed to protect public health — but he hopes that the parties who spread the sludge and caused the contamination decades ago will be held accountable.

“At the end of the day, the polluters are going to be the ones that need to pay for that,” Hayes said.