Roger Kelso
Columbus City Utilities has received bottles from state environmental regulators to collect new samples of the city’s drinking water to confirm the presence of PFAS, officials said.
The new round of testing comes after the city officials said earlier this week that they had shut down a municipal well between Garden City and the railroad tracks on Columbus’ south side following testing that detected PFAS at levels that exceed proposed federal limits.
PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — are a cluster of industrial chemicals associated with a variety of serious health conditions and have been used in products ranging from cookware to carpets and firefighting foams and consumer products since the 1940s, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Research suggests exposure to certain levels of PFAS can lead to reproductive effects in humans, developmental delays, increased risks for certain cancers, elevated cholesterol levels and weakening of the immune system, according to the EPA.
The chemicals are sometimes called “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down naturally in the environment — or do so slowly — and can remain in a person’s blood indefinitely. U.S. manufacturers have voluntarily phased out compounds such as PFAS, though there still are a limited number of ongoing uses for them.
City utilities Director Roger Kelso said the city plans to collect the samples next week and send them off to a lab for testing. However, it is not known at this point when the results will be available. It took about two months for the previous results to come back, officials said.
“We’ve received the new containers, and next week we’ll be doing that secondary sampling,” Keslo said.
The PFAS testing was part of an effort by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management to examine the prevalence of the chemicals in public water systems across the state and the efficacy of drinking water treatment, officials said.
IDEM began testing certain participating public water systems for PFAS in 2021. The effort has been broken into phases based on community size, with Columbus in the third phase of testing, which includes water systems that serve more than 10,000 people.
Participation in IDEM’s PFAS testing program was voluntary. Not every water system in the state opted to participate.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed strict limits of 4 parts per trillion for two common types of PFAS called PFOA and PFOS in treated drinking water. The EPA also wants to regulate the combined amount of four other types of PFAS.
To put the proposed regulation in perspective, one part per trillion is roughly the equivalent of a single drop of water in 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools, experts said.
In the now-closed Columbus well, PFOA was detected in untreated water at 45 parts per trillion, according to IDEM. PFOA also was found in Columbus’ finished drinking water at 7 parts per trillion, nearly twice the proposed EPA limit.
PFOS was not detected in samples from the closed well but was detected in untreated water from two other wells at 9 parts per trillion and 2.2 parts per trillion. However, PFOS was not found in finished drinking water.
Kelso said he expects that the closure of the well will reduce the amount of PFOA detected in the city’s finished drinking water in the new round of testing.
“That’s our current expectation,” he said.
Despite the detection of PFAS, Columbus’ drinking water met all federal and state safety standards last year, according to the city’s 2023 water quality report. PFAS are not currently a regulated contaminant, though local officials expect the federal government to start regulating them soon.
The EPA states on its website that it expects to finalize the proposed PFAS regulations by the end of the year.
