“Mining groundwater” is how most people in Michigan get their water. It is a resource that needs to be managed responsibly, but we shouldn’t begin by allowing it to become polluted. The Pall proposal is to let the resource be polluted, then to prevent us from using it. Do you favor that?

One of the confusing things about this issue is that there is no “maximum contaminant level”, commonly called the “safe” level, set by the EPA for 1, 4-dioxane. Instead, the state has set “action levels”, which require regulatory action. A change in state law did increase the allowable action levels for 1,4-dioxane to 85 ppb for groundwater. The city’s settlement of its lawsuit with Pall has considerably hampered our ability to place sanctions on them, however. It negated part of the consent judgment that the city and other groups had obtained in an earlier court action (prior to the law change that relaxed action level standards). That consent judgment had required cleanup to the old standard of 3 ppb. The 2,800 ppb level is the designated action level for contaminants in water that has already reached the surface (not groundwater). Again, it does not mean that this level is safe, just that it is a regulatory action level. Pall is seeking to redefine this as not a groundwater contamination issue and to avoid the cleanup that the old consent judgment required.

I’ve probably oversimplified something. This issue is terribly complicated and I gave Conan Smith all my files.

Vince, thanks for the additional info. From that and other comments, though, it seems that the state, not the city, is the entity moving toward allowing higher levels.

A large business was using ground water in the Prohibition Zone to inexpensively cool an AC unit. The outflow was into a Sisters Lake, which started to show unexpected rising levels of dioxane, and they were asked to stop.

Geothermal heating/cooling wells that don’t remove water are generally still allowed.

And I think Roger Rayle should be up for a MacArthur Award for all his volunteer efforts and study on this environmental disaster.

“Well-exclusion” area!? That’s a nice way for the State of Michigan to tell us that they agree with the polluters and that cleaning up Pall/Gelman’s mess is too much of a burden on those responsible for the problem. It’s a euphemistic way for Governor Granholm to tell us that we can’t use our water resources because the state is unwilling to demand performance on this cleanup.

For 20+ years, this company has been performing a lackluster cleanup – knowing all the while that if they lingered long enough – the plume would be so out of control that they would be let off the hook. Unfortunately, they were right and we already have prohibition zones (well-exclusion areas) where citizens can no longer enjoy the full value of their property. We cannot afford to expand this absurd, non-solution to this problem.

I hope that the state rejects their plan and listens to the many voices throughout Washtenaw County and Michigan that want our clean water laws enforced with the utmost seriousness. Michigan needs to assure everybody that the Great Lakes State is firmly committed to protecting the world’s most impressive assemblage of fresh water.

Thankfully, our very able Washtenaw County Environmental Health staff is working to communicate the county’s position to the MDEQ. I hope we can make a difference and alter the state’s trajectory on clean water issues.

For those of us in the city of Ann Arbor, our municipal sources of water are threatened (and one well has already been shut down), but we are already not allowed to have individual wells,even for the purposes of irrigation. It has occurred to me that as water fees go up, it is not very cost-effective to use highly treated drinking water for irrigation, especially of non-food crops like lawns and flowers. In future we might want to explore the possibility of irrigation wells. This might affect that option also.