The state of Michigan now knows all too well what can happen when an entire city's drinking water supply becomes contaminated.

That's something many people in Ann Arbor have worried for years could happen here as an underground dioxane plume continues to spread further into the city, inching closer to the Huron River, Ann Arbor's primary drinking water source.

As the Flint water crisis continues, Ann Arbor leaders and residents are once again speaking out about the dioxane plume here, expressing hopes that state officials who now have a mess on their hands in Flint will start to take Ann Arbor's own water concerns more seriously.

The issue came up this past week at both the Ann Arbor City Council and Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners meetings.

Local officials have been trying for years to get the governor's office and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to follow through and update the state's cleanup standards for dioxane and other hazardous substances, following the latest science from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA published new findings in 2010 showing cleaning up dioxane to 3.5 parts per billion in drinking water poses a 1 in 100,000 cancer risk.

The DEQ for the last several years has enforced a cleanup standard of 85 parts per billion, which was intended to result in the same 1 in 100,000 cancer risk.

County Commissioner Yousef Rabhi, D-Ann Arbor, said he got a sense of the magnitude of the problem while serving on the Coalition for Action on Remediation of Dioxane. Also known as CARD, it's a partnership of local governments and citizens that has worked to develop policies and strategies to address the groundwater contamination from the industrial solvent 1,4-dioxane, released by Gelman Sciences decades ago on Wagner Road, just west of Ann Arbor in Scio Township.

"We went up to Lansing, we met with the DEQ, and, boy, it is hard to describe how recalcitrant they were to work with us," Rabhi said at Wednesday night's county board meeting. "And I really hope that things have changed with the Flint water crisis unfolding. I hope the DEQ's leadership is different."

Multiple DEQ officials, including director Dan Wyant, have resigned after what's happened in Flint. Two more DEQ employees were suspended Friday.

DEQ spokesman Bob Wagner said the DEQ is close to finishing work it started in 2013 on a new set of rules for dioxane and 300-plus other substances.

"It's a very complex, highly technical process with respect to developing generic cleanup criteria that sets thresholds for when public health or the environment would be at risk with respect to specific chemicals or hazardous substances," he said.

"We're very close to being finished with producing that package," he said, adding it still will take six to nine months to go through an administrative rules process, which will include a chance for public input and a public hearing.

Meanwhile, Ann Arbor's dioxane plume continues to spread, according to Ann Arbor officials and others tracking it through monitoring wells.

Rabhi said he believes the DEQ's staff on the ground are genuine in wanting to help address the situation.

"I think it's the upper echelons of that bureaucratic setup who have really continued to fail the people of Michigan," he said. "And I hope with some change there that we'll see some action on the front of our own problem here."

The dioxane plume was first discovered in Ann Arbor in the 1980s. Gelman Sciences, which later became Pall Life Sciences, used 1,4-dioxane in its processes for the manufacture of medical filters on Wagner Road many years ago and left the groundwater in the area heavily polluted.

That pollution continues to spread east into Ann Arbor and has caused the city to shut off a well station on the city's west side, while a groundwater use prohibition zone remains in effect for a large segment of the city.

Pall shut down operations at the site in 2013, but it's still responsible for cleanup. The company was acquired by Danaher Corp. for $13.8 billion last year.

Remediation efforts are ongoing, but local officials and environmental activists want higher cleanup standards to stop the spreading plume.

Pall couldn't be reached for comment.

A spokesman for Gov. Rick Snyder referred questions to the DEQ.

DEQ officials have stressed there's no imminent risk to public health from the Pall-Gelman plume, and if it ever hits the Huron River, they project it would be downstream of Ann Arbor's drinking water intake pipe in Barton Pond.

But not everyone is willing to take that chance, and Ann Arbor officials and many residents want the plume cleaned up more aggressively.

Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor addressed the issue in a communication to residents earlier this month. He emphasized that dioxane from the Pall-Gelman plume has never been detected in Ann Arbor's drinking water.

"We need to do absolutely everything we can to keep it that way," he wrote. "Right now, the state standard of 85/ppb is far weaker than what the federal government says is safe. We continue to push the Department of Environmental Quality to adopt the federal standard of 3.5/ppb."



Taylor said the DEQ's director more than a year ago assured him that the state's review of the dioxane standards would be released for public comment in spring of 2015, but it still hasn't arrived now in 2016.

"In a follow-on conversation, the director expressed regret for the delay and provided his further assurance that the new state standard would be released for public comment in late winter 2016," Taylor said. "I have recently been assured by the DEQ that the new standard will be released in this timeframe. I expect that the new standard will be substantially more restrictive than the present standard, but do not know whether it will be as strict as the federal standard. "



Once the new standard is in place, Taylor said, "we will be able to re-incentivize the polluter to accelerate and extend cleanup."

State Reps. Adam Zemke and Jeff Irwin, both Democrats who represent Ann Arbor in Lansing, are watching the issue.

"What I've been hearing is pretty much the same thing consistently the last two years we've been discussing the subject, and that is that the standard is totally out of whack with what the reality is, and we do need to change the standard," Zemke said, expressing hopes for real action this year. "I don't think the science has changed in the last two years, but I'm hopeful that people's opinions have changed."

Irwin said his office has been very involved over the last few years with the DEQ on revising the cleanup standards.

"We're trying to get the criteria number for dioxane moved down from 85 parts per billion to somewhere in the single digits," he said.

"We had commitments from the governor and from the department that they were working on this and they were going to bring the criteria in line with federal toxicity standards, which would bring it down by a factor of 10," he said. "This Flint situation could either propel or delay that kind of action, and that's why we're trying to confirm with the department that we're still on track to get that changed this year."

Irwin said he has a meeting coming up with the DEQ to confirm the process going forward. He said much progress has been made in the last few years.

"For the last few years, my office has participated in the workgroups to develop new cleanup criteria," he said. "Matt Naud from the city has also participated."

Naud, the city of Ann Arbor's environmental coordinator, has agreed with the DEQ's assessment that there's no imminent threat to the city's drinking water. But he said in 2014 there still was a considerable amount of dioxane in the ground that eventually would pass through the city and hit the river.

It's just a matter of where.

The current standards would allow dioxane in concentrations up to 2,800 parts per billion to hit the Huron River and become diluted, as long as it's downstream of Barton Pond and nobody is using it as a drinking water source.

Based on the newest data, Irwin said, Michigan's cleanup standard for dioxane is no longer compliant with the law.

"I have made that point to MDEQ in writing, in person at public hearings and in private meetings," he said. "MDEQ knows that our law requires using best available science and that our standard does not. That fact is what kicked off this process to promulgate new cleanup standards."

He added, "However, because there are 309 chemicals in the Part 201 standards, there has been over a year of negotiations and wrangling with industry stakeholders who are mostly focused on other pollutants, excepting Pall, of course."

At the end of 2014, the DEQ received a set of recommendations from a stakeholder advisory group, which included representatives from academia, environmentalists, business and local governments. The DEQ agreed with those recommendations and since last January has been comprehensively rewriting text rules, as well as redoing equations and adjusting inputs to do a comprehensive update, Wagner said.

"You end up with big equations with hundreds of inputs, then the math has to be done," he explained of the process for setting new cleanup standards.

County Commissioner Kent Martinez-Kratz, D-Chelsea, the county board's liaison to dioxane remediation group CARD, said there are talks of potentially petitioning the EPA for designation of the plume as a federal superfund site to get the EPA involved, since, in his opinion, the state "for six years has kind of dragged its feet."

"It's a long drawn-out process," he said. "I'm not sure they're going to move forward, but they're having a meeting to discuss that option."

Ann Arbor resident Kai Petainen raised the dioxane issue at Tuesday night's City Council meeting, urging city officials to keep pressure on the state to do something about the plume in Ann Arbor following the Flint water crisis. He said it seems the governor has ignored the dioxane in Ann Arbor as he ignored Flint.

"He has consistently ignored the environment as he aimed for profits. But in the process, he forgot about his true customer. His customers should not have been the businesses, but the people of this great state," Petainen said.

"Today Snyder promised to work harder on these kinds of issues. Hold him to it. If he's not recalled or fired, or whatever it is, hold him to that."

Irwin said there's been a group of local officials who have actively lobbied the DEQ on behalf of citizens regarding the dioxane issue, including Mayor Christopher Taylor, former Mayor John Hieftje, City Council Members Sabra Briere and Chuck Warpehoski, County Commissioner Yousef Rabhi, County Water Resources Commissioner Evan Pratt, and Ann Arbor Township Supervisor Mike Moran.

Ryan Stanton covers the city beat for The Ann Arbor News. Reach him at ryanstanton@mlive.com.