OSCODA, MI — The U.S. Air Force has taken some flak over its refusal to comply with Michigan rules limiting how much toxic “forever chemicals” would be allowed to remain in discharge from an expanding groundwater treatment system.
The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) has low thresholds for how much pollutants can go back into the environment from a treatment system at the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Oscoda.
In a call with reporters, Air Force officials said federal law prohibits it from complying with those rules, but they argued that’s its a moot point anyhow because the system will meet state thresholds even if it’s not designed to do so.
“It is a good news story for everyone that the treatment we use does, in fact, achieve — typically — non-detect levels,” said Mark Correll, deputy assistant secretary of Air Force Installations, Environment and Energy.
“Now, that doesn’t mean that we have the authority to go design a system to do that,” Correll continued, adding that “it becomes more an academic discussion about what the levels are because the result you’re going to get is a good one.”
Correll and others involved in Wurtsmith cleanup spoke with journalists on Friday, April 9. The call comes roughly a week after Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer took steps to force the Department of Defense to conduct a stricter cleanup in Oscoda and elsewhere in Michigan by invoking provisions in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
Whitmer’s action — which Correll said has “much broader implications to the entire program” and is being separately addressed through Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s office — followed a March 25 meeting in which the Air Force drew criticism from activists and former state regulators upset that treatment won’t be designed to comply with state law.
The Air Force is taking public comment until April 17 on plans to expand a groundwater treatment system at the old Fire Training Area No. 2 next to Clark’s Marsh, a nearby wetland where some of the most highly PFAS contaminated fish and wildlife in Michigan are found.
The state of Michigan is also holding a community meeting on April 20 and there’s an Air Force Community Restoration Advisory Board (RAB) meeting on April 21.
The system expansion is one of several interim cleanup actions the Air Force agreed to undertake last year under heavy pressure from activists, state regulators and members of Congress — which gave the military $13.5 million in supplemental funding specifically for new stopgap cleaning measures at the former base in late 2019.
In the March 25 meeting, Air Force site managers said they wouldn’t design the new treatment system to comply with state rules limiting PFOS discharge to 16 parts-per-trillion (ppt) and PFOA discharge to 8-ppt. Those levels mirror new state drinking water standards enacted last year. Air Force attorneys said federal law lets them ignore such state rules until later stages in a slow-moving cleanup process.
Correll and others, including Stephen TerMaath, chief of the Air Force Civil Engineer Center in Texas that’s overseeing Wurtsmith cleanup, said repeatedly on Friday that remediation efforts in Oscoda are strictly governed by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, (CERCLA) also known also as the federal Superfund law.
Correll and TerMaath pointed numerous times to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s health advisory level of 70-ppt for PFOS and PFOA in drinking water, citing CERCLA as requiring that level govern actions protecting human health around the base. That level has been widely criticized by academics and state regulators as offering inadequate protection from the chemicals and it only pertains to two of many different PFAS chemical variations.
Michigan’s drinking water standards passed last year are four to eight times lower than the EPA advisory level.
Michigan laws, however, won’t be applicable at Wurtsmith until several years from now when the Air Force completes more investigation and study, Correll said. And there’s no guarantee the Air Force will adhere to them when it reaches that point.
“We will consider the standards,” he said. “At this point I can’t guarantee, ‘yes’ that’s what’s going to be selected.”
That position has generated conflict between the Air Force and the state, as well as with local officials and activists who call the whole argument a smokescreen.
Anthony Spaniola, a Detroit area attorney who owns a home on Van Etten Lake across from the base, says the National Wildlife Federation has analyzed the Air Force’s arguments and concluded that “nothing in CERCLA stops them from complying with state law right now.”
Correll’s assertion that the Air Force is prohibited from designing a treatment system to meet state law is “totally false,” said Spaniola, who has also argued that EGLE should take a firmer stance on the issue.
He said Air Force officials have previously told locals that they’re reluctant to commit to complying with Michigan law out of concern it would set an expensive precedent for the hundreds of other bases where PFAS chemicals are polluting the groundwater across the nation and the globe.
Spaniola said refusing to design the system to meet Michigan requirements now is poor project management and a waste of tax dollars because it’ll eventually have to be fixed.
“They should do it now from a financial and public health standpoint,” Spaniola said. “But the flip side is, if they aren’t going to do it now, why should we believe they are going to do it at some point down the road? Particularly given their track record, when they have made promises and violated them on this very issue?”
{jcomments on}