Schools across Maine confront unique challenges in ridding their water of ‘forever chemicals’

Days before winter break ended in December 2022, Bill Hansen was relieved to learn that Jordan-Small Middle School in Raymond had no traces of ‘forever chemicals’ in tests of the school’s water system.

Hansen, the Windham Raymond School District’s facilities director, was on vacation in Rockland at the time, visiting venues for his daughter’s wedding, as test results for the harmful chemicals called PFAS began rolling in for schools statewide.

He initially thought if Jordan-Small was in the clear, then so was Raymond Elementary, just down the road. It was a promising start for the district east of Sebago Lake and its six schools.

“We’re doing good,” Hansen said at the time. “This is awesome.”

But a couple of days later, on Dec. 30, Hansen received a bombshell. Raymond Elementary’s well water tested nearly 50 times higher than the state limit for PFAS levels. Just three days before students returned, the school learned it had the most contaminated public water system in the state.

School and district staff members were in a bind, and they had to get to work right away.

“There wasn’t a lot of time to turn that around,” Hansen recalled.

Raymond Elementary is one of dozens of schools, mobile home parks, local water districts and other community water systems that tested above the state’s limits for PFAS in 2022, data from the Maine Department of Health and Human Services shows.

As some of those schools close in on the two-year mark of when their PFAS issues were diagnosed, each is in a uniquely different situation, reflecting the complexities of ridding public water sources of the tiny ubiquitous chemicals that earn their ‘forever’ moniker from the thousands of years they take to break down in the environment.

Raymond Elementary, for example, is close to securing a new safe drinking water source around the start of the upcoming school year. But others, like Deer Isle-Stonington High School in Hancock County, are further away, delayed by funding complications or the prolonged process of planning and installing complex PFAS filtration systems.

These efforts will only grow in Maine as other water systems face newer, more stringent federal rules with deadlines unfurling over the next few years, requiring dozens more owners and operators to expunge their water systems of even smaller concentrations of PFAS.

And although much of the current costs for public PFAS filtration systems are covered by state and federal grant money, some local officials The Maine Monitor spoke with are concerned that systems will have trouble sustaining the operations costs of their filters, and installation grant money could run out — leaving schools, communities and homeowners in a race for whatever piece of the pie remains.

DHHS, tasked with distributing funds to public water systems for PFAS filtration, doesn’t expect to have enough funds to help all the state’s public water systems meet the new federal standards, according to Lindsay Hammes, an agency spokesperson.

“It is anticipated that the available funding will not be sufficient to meet the needs of all Public Water Systems that will exceed the federal (PFAS limits),” Hammes wrote.

Legislative origins

School districts and other public water systems (which have varying definitions, but mostly include those that serve more than 25 people for more than two months a year) began testing for PFAS in 2022 after the Maine legislature passed a landmark law regulating the harmful class of compounds in public drinking water a year prior.

The legislation required owners and operators of public systems to notify users if their results showed combined levels of six state-regulated PFAS above 20 parts per trillion, one of the more stringent action levels in the U.S. at the time.

The law also requires owners to pursue filtration to rid the water of the chemicals, but the state Department of Health and Human Services has not had to take any enforcement actions to date, according to a department spokesperson. But the department has sent violation letters for public water systems that have missed deadlines for submitting PFAS test results.

After receiving test results for Raymond Elementary, Hansen contacted Superintendent Chris Howell, who notified students’ families. Hansen and Mike Duffy, the district’s safety support specialist, then shut off the school’s water fountains and worked to get enough bottled water to support the school’s more than 250 students and staff members.

Principal Elisabeth Peavey handled more direct communication with parents. She said they had relatively measured reactions, likely because of all the other PFAS news swirling at the time.

“I think news (outlets) putting out that information made it so people were somewhat aware that there’s potential for schools to have (PFAS) in their system,” Peavey said.

Stories of PFAS contamination in Maine have been inescapable. The class of compounds, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, has been used in a wide variety of products like rain jackets, non-stick frying pans and carpets. Their use in firefighting foams have led to widespread contaminations on military bases, including in Maine.

The effects of PFAS on human health are still being discovered, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Controls have linked the chemicals to weakened immune responses, kidney and testicular cancer, and pregnancy-induced blood pressure disorders.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the federal standard it set for PFAS in April is supposed to account for this risk, according to the agency.

Its rules will require public water systems to limit two more common and harmful PFAS compounds to 4 parts per trillion. Though it is far lower than Maine’s 20 parts per trillion standard, the state is in the process of updating its standard to align with the EPA’s.

In pursuit of solutions

The difficulties of managing the school’s PFAS contamination set in rather quickly. Raymond Elementary’s facility staff were suddenly tasked with lugging five-gallon water jugs up and down the school’s halls, and cafeteria employees were hoisting them to prepare meals.

“The bottles are so heavy,” Peavey said, “and it was causing some physical back pain for our kitchen staff.”

Eventually the district hired temporary employees just for transporting water — an added cost to the water itself. After initially relying on a donated supply from nearby Poland Spring, the school began paying around $350 per week for water from Gorham-based supplier H2o7.

In the background, Hansen, Superintendent Howell and other district officials worked to acquire federal money from the Small Public Water System Emerging Contaminant Grant, funding managed at the state level by DHHS’s Drinking Water Program, and made available to schools and smaller water systems.

With $60,000 in grant funding secured, the district hired Portland-based hydrogeology firm Drumlin Environmental to begin analyzing the extent of Raymond Elementary’s PFAS contamination, testing groundwater, soils on the school grounds, and mapping the aquifer used by the school’s well.

Much of Maine’s most severe PFAS contaminations originated from the wastewater sludge once used as fertilizer and spread on the state’s farmland, especially around Fairfield and central Maine.

The source of Raymond Elementary’s contamination was not so clear-cut. Though Drumlin Environmental found traces of PFAS in the soils near the school’s wellhead, Hansen said the use of PFAS-laden fertilizer was unlikely because the school is in a wellhead protection zone and fertilizer use is restricted.

Hansen only had flimsy guesses where the school’s high levels — 950 parts per trillion — originated. Officials with other districts afflicted by PFAS contaminations were similarly perplexed by their origins, which complicated how they came up with solutions.

Raymond’s solution, for example, was eased by the location of the suspected source: the soils surrounding the wellhead.

Hansen said it was likely the well’s lack of reinforced piping led to the PFAS seeping in near the surface, so Drumlin dug boreholes until identifying another area to tap into the school’s aquifer, upslope of the current well, that repeatedly tested negative for PFAS.

The district drilled a new well a few hundred feet from the original, reinforcing it with additional steel casing. But what the new well lacked in PFAS it made up for in high levels of radon, a naturally occurring radioactive gas commonly found in areas composed of granite, like Raymond and the Sebago Lake area.

That meant the district had to purchase a special radon removal system, which Hansen predicts will be installed by the start of the school year. The cost of the planning, engineering, construction and equipment totaled around $100,000, according to Howell, with the state covering 60 percent.

PFAS filtration systems have cost around $50,000 for smaller schools, but Raymond’s new system won’t require the routine maintenance and upkeep required of PFAS filtration systems.

Complications elsewhere

The paths for some other school districts have not been as straightforward. For Regional School Unit 76 in southern Hancock County, Superintendent Daniel Ross said he’s not sure when the district’s two schools with elevated PFAS levels — Deer Isle-Stonington High and the Brooklin School — will finish their PFAS filtration systems.

Like at Windham-Raymond, Ross said he and his district immediately began applying for public funding after receiving test results in December 2022 that put the Brooklin School and Deer Isle-Stonington as the systems with the fourth- and fifth-highest PFAS levels in the state.

The district received a grant through the state Drinking Water Program, but because of stipulations that required domestically sourced materials and an environmental impact study, the initial estimates for the PFAS filtration systems that met those requirements was around $550,000.

State funding would cover 90 percent of the estimated cost of installing a filtration system, but that would still leave local taxpayers on the hook for around $55,000 in project costs, a steep amount for a school district of its size, Ross said.

After a year undergoing the planning process for that system, Ross said the Drinking Water Program changed its tune and allowed the district to pursue a cheaper solution from a different company, which would cut the cost to around $60,000 per school. The entire project would be funded by the grant.

Ross welcomed the news and praised the DWP for its attentive assistance throughout the process, but didn’t understand why it took so long for the DWP to make that judgment.

“When you are dealing with large amounts of money, it takes time to get everything through,” Ross said. “Even though (the recent update is) welcome, it would have been nice to know this a year ago so that we don’t get so far into this thing only to backpedal and delay finding a solution even further.”

The DWP is not involved in the design process of public water systems’ PFAS filtration solutions, said Hammes, though it recommended a less costly but still effective design that would take less time to install.

In the meantime, the district has been paying around $1,000 per month to purchase bottled water from Poland Spring and is back to square one in planning for the PFAS filtration systems. The Brooklin and Deer Isle-Stonington school boards only recently received initial quotes for the new systems, which they are comparing before selecting a contractor.

“We want them all to have clean water to drink, but if we’re going to have to bring in bottled water, at least having a smaller school population causes that not to cost quite as much” as larger school districts, Ross said.

Ross’ district, and Deer Isle-Stonington High in particular, are in a deeper dilemma because of the area’s fragile hydrogeology.

While Raymond Elementary had the option to dig a new well in an uncontaminated area, the archipelago that includes Deer Isle and Stonington has especially fragile freshwater sources nestled under a thin layer of granite, according to Annaleis Hafford, vice president for Olver Associates. (Olver Associates was initially consulted for RSU 76 PFAS filtration systems and is contracted by Stonington to run the Stonington Water Company, where Hafford is the operator.)

“I think that the concern is if they drill another well, it may not have any productivity and it also may still have PFAS in it,” Hafford said, as well as the elevated levels of radon that accompany granite.

Hafford and the town of Stonington face similar difficulties in securing its drinking water system. Although the town does not have elevated PFAS levels, it is highly susceptible to drought and leaks in connections to residences.

“In the summer, every day we tend to lose water,” Hafford said. “The water tank is dropping now and it’s only the beginning of July.”

The Stonington Water Company is trying to increase the system’s resilience by building a new water storage tank and identifying every leak, but that hasn’t stopped Hafford’s consistent worries over her eight years of leadership.

“Every gallon is important to us,” Hafford said.

More common solutions

While Windham-Raymond and RSU 76 may be outliers in the intricate process for schools to mitigate PFAS, the more common and streamlined approaches to filtration have still operated on relatively lengthy timelines.

By the Canadian border in Hodgdon, the town’s high school and elementary school are also looking at August completion dates after more than a year and a half on bottled water. Hodgdon’s district, Maine School Administrative District 70, received $60,000 for each school to install granular activated carbon filtration systems, according to Superintendent Tyler Putnam.

One of the more common and less expensive systems, they work by slowly pumping groundwater through a carbon media which then captures PFAS passing through, like flies in a spider web.

Though effective, some water officials say the system also has weaknesses. The extraction process results in the filter filling up over a year or two. Unless it’s replaced, a clogged filter will hit a threshold called “breakthrough,” and begin releasing concentrated amounts of PFAS back into the filtered water.

The Hodgdon schools’ filtration systems will have three redundant filters to account for this, according to Sienna Faessler, the Haley Ward engineer overseeing the systems’ designs.

Schools and other public water systems are also required to test quarterly for PFAS, Faessler said, so the odds a breakthrough would go unnoticed is unlikely.

Nevertheless, breakthroughs and the upkeep of carbon filtration systems are a couple of the concerns that Sanford Water District Superintendent David Parent has with how people statewide are addressing PFAS contaminations.

Parent was introduced to PFAS relatively early when one of the water district’s wells first tested for PFAS in 2013, around the time the EPA began monitoring for the chemicals. The contamination subsided while the well was shut down after a few years, but came back at higher levels almost a decade later.

Three wells in Sanford Water District have tested for elevated PFAS levels in the past year, with the initial well of concern exceeding the state’s limit at roughly 30 ppt, even though the district hadn’t drawn from it over the years because of its manganese content.

“We weren’t putting the water in the system anyway, but then we got this hit of PFAS that was fairly high,” Parent told The Monitor. “We thought, ‘Oh boy, what is this?’”

Since then, Parent has been navigating the solutions available to him and the district, which comes at a much larger cost and scale than those of public water systems such as schools.

As he’s seen granular activated carbon become the favored solution, Parent said he’s grown concerned that the long-term care of the systems isn’t being planned for — especially for residences, where homeowners may not be prepared for the cost of replacing the filters and the complexities of disposing of their PFAS-filled contents, which are finding their way into Maine landfills and incinerators.

“The maintenance of these systems is just very, very important,” Parent said. “For both residential and municipal systems, it’s a very expensive part of maintaining that treatment.”

Operation and maintenance costs for carbon filters contributed to one school district’s decision to pursue a different type of system, one with higher upfront costs but lower maintenance costs.

Maine School Administrative District 6, encompassing Buxton, Standish and parts of both York and Cumberland counties, was one of the first school districts in the state to test for PFAS after the legislature’s 2021 law passed.

Adam Thibodeau, the facilities director, said he wanted to be sure the district would have its water tested before labs were backed up with samples from other public water systems rushing to test before the Dec. 31, 2022 deadline.

Before Raymond Elementary got its results a few months later, it was MSAD 6 and Bonny Eagle Middle School that had some of the highest PFAS levels in Maine, between 600 and 800 ppt. The middle school and three other schools in the district tested above the state’s limit, with a fourth just below it.

Again, Thibodeau didn’t want to waste time, so the district authorized a study to analyze each school’s PFAS situation, and the strengths and weaknesses of each filtration system. The district not only looked for the most effective system, but one that would cost the least to maintain because operation and maintenance costs are excluded from state grants.

It eventually chose FLUORO-SORB, a proprietary filtration system that uses a clay-based media to absorb PFAS compounds, not adhere to them like carbon filters.

Altogether, planning and installation costs for all five schools’ filtration systems totaled around $700,000, far more than the other districts, though MSAD 6 is one of the largest in the state.

With $1 million provided by the Drinking Water Program, the district has about $300,000 left, Thibodeau said, which will help with Buxton Center Elementary School’s system costs — the last on the district’s list.

The price may be high now but each system’s annual cost will be limited to between $8,000 to $20,000 for as long as the systems operate, lower than the cost of most carbon systems, according to Thibodeau.

“I plan to be here a while,” Thibodeau said. “I’m picking the best solution over time, and what that study told me is that carbon is not the way to go.”

The FLUORO-SORB systems have been in place at two of the schools for almost a year, and Thibodeau said the district hasn’t had any problems. With a carbon system, the schools’ relatively high PFAS levels may have clogged up the filters by now, requiring replacement and disposal.

Faessler, who’s worked with other public water systems on installing PFAS filtration equipment, is less concerned about the maintenance requirements of carbon filtration systems — at least for the schools Haley Ward has consulted for.

“Most schools have a maintenance person (who is) trained or at least knowledgeable on how to operate the systems,” Faessler said. “But we’re available as well, and they know that we’re happy to answer any questions as they come up.”

Where Faessler and Parent’s PFAS-related worries overlap involves how the state plans to fund future PFAS mitigation projects. They suspect those fiscal needs will grow as the EPA begins enforcing its new limits for public water systems in 2029 or as more homeowners test their wells and find high PFAS levels.

Parent, specifically, questioned whether the state’s regulatory approach for public water systems like his was the most effective.

Even though the district had relatively low PFAS levels (around 10-30 ppt) compared to Raymond Elementary, Sanford acquired grant funding for its more expensive filtration systems, which could cost up to $16 million. He thinks that money may have been better spent elsewhere, for private wells with high levels or future PFAS problems in other water systems.

“I think Maine’s timing was good,” Parent said of its legislation. “But it bothers me a little bit” that Sanford Water District and its low PFAS levels receive lots of support, while the state is “buying people a system to start out with, but they’re not funding the maintenance of those systems.”

There’s also the $250-$500 price of PFAS tests themselves, which aren’t always covered by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and its program to help homeowners affected by the state’s spreading of sludge.

More than half of Mainers get their water from a private well, and the state mostly relies on homeowners to have their wells tested.

Funding also was the overarching concern from other officials The Monitor spoke with. Since the state is mandating compliance with this standard from public entities like school systems, they should pay for ongoing costs.

Faessler, for example, had public funding questions similar to Parent’s. From her perspective, securing that funding is as pertinent as the process of removing PFAS from the sources leaking the chemicals into the environment.

When funding becomes scarce, the state will prioritize disadvantaged communities and public water systems with the highest PFAS levels, Hammes of DHHS said.

That was one of Faessler’s primary concerns: how Mainers already stretched thin are going to afford these systems and their upkeep, especially when the funding runs out.

“Who is going to help pay for some of these installation systems?” Faessler asked.

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This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.