MDI lab studying how PFAS spreads from rural schools to homes

Maine researchers are studying the role that rural schools could inadvertently play in spreading dangerous “forever chemicals” after those contaminants were found at high levels in the drinking water of some homes around Mount Desert Island High School.

In recent years, officials have clearly identified some major sources of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, including landfills, wastewater treatment plants, and manufacturing facilities. It’s less understood how the chemicals, which have been linked to cancer and other health threats, may spread from public institutions such as high schools into nearby drinking water supplies.

But Jane Disney, an associate professor at the independent MDI Bio Lab in Bar Harbor, said one factor could be that rural institutions are more likely to use septic systems and leachfields to dispose of their wastewater, rather than public sewers.

Those septic systems may provide more opportunities for the PFAS in cleaning supplies, floor wax or other common materials to get into the groundwater that ultimately supplies residential wells, according to Disney.

“A lot of people congregate in school buildings for whole days, and utilize the facilities. There is a lot of maintenance that needs to happen in an institution of that size,” Disney said. “So there is a lot of potential for contaminants to end up in the wastewater.”

Disney noted that it’s only been in recent years that the risk of PFAS contamination from those materials has become well-known to people outside the companies that manufacture them, amid a wider recognition at the state and national levels about the extent of the crisis.

On MDI, the risks became more apparent in 2022, when the local high school was one of three along Maine’s coast found to have high PFAS levels in its drinking water, prompting the installation of filtration systems.

Another outcome of that discovery was additional testing that found more PFAS contamination in the groundwater, surface water and wastewater around the school, as well as in the drinking water of some nearby homes.

MDI Bio Lab has a program, called Health Water/Healthy Aging , that has helped additional residents near the high school and Tremont Consolidated School to test their water supplies and, when necessary, deal with any contamination that is found.

As the results come in, Disney and her colleagues have also been studying exactly where the contamination has spread, and they’re working to publish some of their findings.

“We’re not even a year into this, but this is a new research direction for my lab,” Disney said. “We have some support to pursue it. We’re going to keep doing it, until we at least have some answers to local questions: how far, what’s the extent to which we’re seeing contamination, so that we catch every one we can.”

But Disney warned that there are dozens of other Maine schools that have also detected PFAS levels in their drinking water that exceed new federal limits . While those schools have installed filtration systems, Disney said there has not been a concerted push to help nearby residents do their own testing.