Mike Wolanin | The Republic Columbus City Utilities Director Roger Kelso addresses guests during a ribbon cutting ceremony introducing the remodeled and updated area of the Columbus City Utilities building in Columbus, Ind., Thursday, April 20, 2023.
The detection of long-lasting and highly toxic chemicals linked to cancer and other illnesses in Columbus’ drinking water and the subsequent closure of a municipal well has raised questions about how vulnerable the city’s water supply is to emerging contaminants.
Last week, city officials said 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.
Currently, officials say it is hard to identify the sources of the contamination at this point or how long the chemicals have been there, though they said they plan to investigate.
PFAS have been widely used across the globe and can be found in many places, including numerous consumer, commercial and industrial products, according to the EPA. A recent study by researchers at New York University found PFAS in automotive lubricant, engine oil, grease and hydraulic fluids.
That suggests that there could be a number of potential sources for the PFAS contamination in Columbus’ lone source of drinking water.
“It’s completely possible that it has been lurking around at very low levels for the past 20, 30 years,” said city utilities Director Roger Kelso. “It would not necessarily surprise me. …It’s just difficult to know just how long it’s been floating around in our system.”
“It could be from anything around here,” Kelso added.
Surface contamination possible
Currently, all 22 of the city’s municipal wells, including the well that was shut down, draw water from the same source — the White River and Tributaries Outwash Aquifer System, which flows southward underneath several Indiana counties, including a central portion of Bartholomew County and the city of Columbus.
The Indiana Department of Natural Resources has described the aquifer system as having the “greatest potential of any aquifer system in Bartholomew County and can meet the needs of domestic and high-capacity users.”
However, there are parts of the aquifer system in the county that “lack overlying clays” and are “highly susceptible to contamination from surface sources,” according to DNR. The rest of the aquifer system in the county is classified as “moderately susceptible to surface contamination.”
“Our aquifer is a little different than some in the state,” Kelso said. “A lot of the ones in the state basically were put down by glacial till, and they have a clay layer that kind of protects them from things on the surface. Ours, while there may be glacial till in it, it’s basically a big sand bed without that confining clay layer. It makes it a little more susceptible to certain things.”
Though PFAS were detected in samples of untreated water in several city municipal wells, the chemicals don’t appear to be uniformly distributed throughout the aquifer, even within Bartholomew County.
Locally, concentrations of three types of PFAS were “literally an order of magnitude higher” in samples of untreated water taken from the well that was shut down than in other municipal wells, officials said.
PFOA was detected in untreated water in that well at 45 parts per trillion, according to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. The next highest concentration of that chemical in a Columbus municipal well was 5.4 parts per trillion.
PFBS was detected in untreated water in the now-closed well at 40.9 parts per trillion. The next highest level detected in a local well was 14.2 parts per trillion.
In addition, PFHxA was found in the closed well at 29.6 parts per trillion. The next highest concentration in a Columbus well was 8.9 parts per trillion.
To put those numbers in perspective, one part per trillion is roughly the equivalent of a single drop of water in 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools, experts said. Previous efforts to test for the chemicals in Columbus were done at the parts per billion level, which would not have been sensitive enough to detect the contaminants found during the recent test.
Local origin?
The data currently available suggests that the PFAS contamination in Columbus’ may have originated locally, officials said.
Most of the public water systems around Columbus that have participated in voluntary testing with IDEM have not detected PFAS in samples of untreated water, including in some wells that use the same aquifer system as Columbus.
In Bartholomew County, Eastern Bartholomew Water Corp. also taps into the White River and Tributaries Outwash Aquifer System, but no PFAS were detected in their wells, according to the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and IDEM.
Additionally, no PFAS were detected in the Hope Water Department’s wells, though Hope uses a different aquifer system, according to state records.
Downstream from Columbus, in Jackson County, testing at Natural Public Supply Inc., which has provided water to a mobile home park in Seymour in the past, did not detect any PFAS. That provider also uses the White River and Tributaries Outwash Aquifer System, state records show.
However, PFAS were detected in untreated water at the Edinburgh Water Utility but not the finished drinking water, according to IDEM. Edinburgh uses the same aquifer as Columbus, according to state records.
Officials suspect that the general area near the well that was closed in Columbus may have been used to store several types of chemicals over the years, Kelso said.
While it is possible that a contaminant could have gotten into the aquifer in any number of counties north of Bartholomew County and made its way to Columbus’ well field, officials said that scenario is unlikely.
“Whatever it is has started in our general area, maybe a little bit north in the Edinburgh area,” Kelso said. “…I don’t think it’s coming from real far away.”
Superfund sites
At the same time, the aquifer that serves as Columbus’ only source of drinking water runs underneath three sites in the city that were at one point on the list of most polluted places in the country.
Those sites, which have been cleaned up or are in the process of being cleaned up, have been known as “Superfund” sites. The EPA says that PFAS have been found in soil or water at or near landfills, disposal sites and hazardous waste sites “such as those that fall under the federal Superfund and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act programs.”
Locally, one of those sites was a 19-acre landfill that the city operated from 1938 to 1966 next to East Fork White River about five blocks from the Bartholomew County Courthouse.
The landfill reportedly accepted municipal and industrial wastes – including solvents, acids, bases, paints and heavy metals – and “led to soil and groundwater contamination,” according to the EPA. An estimated 3.46 million gallons of waste were dumped in the landfill from 1951 to 1966, The Republic reported in 1985.
Though the landfill was closed in 1966, the EPA and others didn’t start evaluating options for environmental remediation at the site until 1988, according to federal records.
In 1985, concerns were raised that the soil in the former landfill site was “permeable” and that “rain could help carry chemicals to a shallow aquifer system,” according to coverage in The Republic at the time.
The site has since been remediated and the EPA plans to remove it from the Superfund program’s National Priorities List.
However, it is not known whether regulators looked for PFAS during the cleanup efforts or subsequent groundwater monitoring, as little was publicly known about the toxicity of those chemicals at the time.
PFAS were generally considered biologically inactive until around 2000, according to research recently published in the journal Annals of Public Health. Groundwater monitoring at the former landfill ended in 2003, according to the EPA.
Another place in Columbus that used to be on the Superfund program’s National Priorities List is a 1.5 acre site at 1716 Keller Ave., where electroplating operations at the site contaminated soil and groundwater with cyanide and heavy metals, including chromium, in the 1980s.
The EPA states that the city cut off service to the facility due to, among other things, illegal dumping of waste on the ground surface at the site, failure to install a waste treatment system and one severe spill that interrupted operations at the city’s wastewater treatment facility.
A 1992 report from the EPA states that, at the time, “the only remaining activity is the restoration of the aquifer.”
There also are an estimated 3.4 acres of contaminated groundwater beneath Garden City, with the highest concentrations of contamination located at the intersection of 900 Jonesville Road and County Road 100, according to the EPA. Currently, several homes and businesses in Garden City rely on filtered drinking water.
The Republic has asked IDEM if there are any plans to test the groundwater monitoring wells near the current and former Superfund sites for PFAS but did not receive a response.
Though it is hard to say when the local PFAS contamination occurred, some of the PFAS detected in Columbus’ water may be more recent than others, according to Marta Venier, assistant professor at the Indiana University O’Neill School of Public Environmental Affairs, who studies these chemicals.
“PFOS and PFOA are what we call the legacy PFAS, so to speak, in the sense that they are the ones that were used first,” Venier said.
Then some companies later switched to other types of PFAS like PFBS, PFHpA, PFHxS and PFHxA “because at the time they were thought to be a better alternative,” though they turned out to be about as toxic as the legacy PFAS. All four of those PFAS were detected in untreated water in Columbus.
Venier estimated that some of the newer PFAS have been more commonly used for roughly the past 10 to 15 years.
“Finding them in water is not necessarily good news,” she said.
What happens next?
Next week, city officials plan to collect the new samples of the city’s drinking water 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.
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.
In the meantime, city officials are undertaking a “more rigorous evaluation” of treatment technology to completely remove PFAS from the city’s treated drinking water.
The most promising option right now involves activated carbon treatment, which uses specialized filters to absorb compounds, according to the EPA. The filters would look like silos outside of the treatment plants and can be expensive, Kelso said.
City officials are in discussions with attorneys over the possibility of joining a lawsuit against some manufacturers of PFAS.
In addition, the EPA has made $2 billion available to states and territories to address emerging contaminants like PFAS in drinking water. The funding comes from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
The entire congressional delegation representing Columbus — Rep. Greg Pence and Sens. Todd Young and Mike Braun — voted against the bill, federal records show.
“We are very confident that we can come up with sound, cost-effective removal processes,” Kelso said.
“This is a little bit more complicated than just screwing a Britta filter onto the end of a faucet,” he added later in the interview.
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.
