By Paula Gardner and Garret Ellison, MLive.com

July 10, 2018

Martha Gottlieb's hands couldn't grip a glass after she moved into her new home. She started to suspect her water when Sunny, her boxer mix, refused to drink from her bowl.

Donna Tingley relocated to a northern Michigan lakefront home for the fishing, but she's no longer willing to eat her catch after seeing the thick, toxic white foam that now pollutes the shoreline. The lake is no fun anymore, she said, and she wants to sell her house.

Seth and Tobyn McNaughton worry about how the chemicals they unknowingly drank in their water will affect their health - and, given the high quantity of pollution, whether they'll hurt their 2-year-old son, Jack.

Martha Gottlieb stands with her husband Jeff Gottlieb in their kitchen on June 6, 2018 in Oscoda, where they've installed a water filtration system because of the PFAS contamination. Jake May | MLive.com)

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known collectively as PFAS or PFCs, are contaminating water supplies and the environment across both peninsulas of Michigan.

The toxic compounds are found in our rivers, our lakes, our soil, our groundwater, our drinking water, our fish, our food, our bodies and our Great Lakes. They are, as one scientist who helped manufacture them noted, the "most insidious pollutant since PCBs."

"They call them 'zombie chemicals,'" said Cathy Wusterbarth, a former lifeguard on a contaminated lake who wonders if past bouts with breast cancer and rheumatoid arthritis are linked to the PFAS that's been spreading through the local groundwater for decades.

"You don't see them. You don't smell them. They just slowly affect you," Wusterbarth said.

To date, more than 30 sites in 15 communities across Michigan have confirmed PFAS contamination in the soil, groundwater or surface water. Uncertainty shrouds the sites as residents worry about their health and property, and question whether their government is doing enough to protect them.

Public health experts link exposure to the chemicals with increased risk for cancer, liver damage and other serious ailments, but the science around the impact of exposures is evolving. In the vacuum of certainty, chemical manufacturers like 3M and DuPont effectively have sown doubt about their effects while simultaneously paying out hundreds of millions to settle lawsuits.

The military, a major source of PFAS pollution in Michigan and beyond, has been slow to respond in places where its use of firefighting foam has left a legacy of contamination.

Meanwhile, poison plumes continue to spread.

Interactive map: Michigan's PFAS contamination sites

Click the plots to get more details. Check/uncheck the boxes to see specific contamination types

Nationally, the chemicals are becoming a larger issue. Some federal officials urge more protections - yet critics say both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Defense have failed to halt the spread of poison and clean up existing contamination.

Some watch the unfolding problem and wonder whether it will rival the infamous polybrominated biphenyl, or PBB, crisis that touched virtually all of Michigan's 9 million residents in in the 1970s.

For many in Michigan, the state's PFAS nightmare is only beginning.

"These chemicals have been released into the environment without the kinds of research that would provide assurances of minimal harm," said Rita Loch-Caruso, professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan.

"Now we have widespread contamination and it's going to be hard to clean up and control."

'Forever chemicals' in drinking water

Sometimes called "forever chemicals" because of their durability, PFAS are the latest industrial wonder compounds to become global pollutants. Under the umbrella acronym PFAS, individual chemicals like PFOS, PFOA, PFHxS, PFNA and many others are generating escalating concern in Michigan and beyond as testing finds them in ever more locations.

Differences in filtered and unfiltered water from the kitchen sink tap at Oscoda resident Dan OConnor's residence on June 6, 2018 in Oscoda. From left, the first glass is a twice-filtered glass of tap water, the center is once-filtered and the final glass is unfiltered from the tap. (Jake May | MLive.com)

The chemicals repel water, oil and resist heat -- making them valuable in products like Teflon, Scotchgard and aqueous film forming foam, or AFFF, a fire suppressant developed by the U.S. military and used at bases, airports and fire departments.

The properties that make PFAS valuable also make them dangerous. Scientists call them "incredibly complex," noting that they accumulate in the human body and break down slowly in the environment. Once released into the environment, they also move rapidly in water, flowing long distances underground into wells and public water sources.

Michigan municipal water systems are finding PFAS, some of which get their water from the Great Lakes. Systems that draw from Lake Huron and Lake St. Clair in suburban Detroit are finding low levels. Lake Michigan, which provides drinking water for millions in metropolitan areas like Chicago, Milwaukee and Grand Rapids, is fed by tributaries that include the Kalamazoo River, St. Joseph River and Muskegon River -- all of which have tested positive for PFAS.

Water supply results from mandatory nationwide testing documented PFAS in Plainfield Township north of Grand Rapids in 2013 and in Ann Arbor in 2014. More Michigan water systems have tested positive since then; so far, all are below the federal lifetime health advisory for consumption, which is 70 parts per trillion (ppt). However, new risk levels released by the CDC in June suggest that number is seven to 10 times higher than it should be.

The water system discoveries coupled with escalating public concern helped push the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to embark on a major screening initiative that's expected to total more than 15,000 individual PFAS water tests over two years.

"I think in the beginning, no one understood that it was as pervasive as it is," said Carol Isaacs, a former assistant attorney general who runs the Michigan PFAS Action and Response Team, or MPART, and reports to Gov. Rick Snyder's chief of staff Mike Zimmer.

Isaacs was appointed in November 2017 amid snowballing attention to the drinking water pollution discovered in spring 2017 in the northern suburbs of Grand Rapids, where shoemaker Wolverine World Wide dumped tannery waste laced with PFAS for decades.

Isaacs and other environmental officials won't call the move to establish MPART a "crisis" response, but the scale of the effort conveys a public health emergency. No one knows yet how many high concentration areas exist in Michigan. Or how many people are consuming PFAS in dangerous quantities. Or even where and how it's spreading into natural resources.

But the fact the state is even asking those questions now marks a dramatic change.

In 2012, upper management at the DEQ received a report urging a comprehensive effort to test for PFAS around the state and halt exposure through water filtration efforts. The report landed on the desk of Dan Wyant, the DEQ director who resigned in the wake of Flint's water crisis.

Wyant says he passed the report onto division directors at the DEQ, but the actions recommended by the authors, both PFAS specialists, largely were ignored until last fall.

Although the DEQ Water Resources Division conducted limited PFAS sampling in 2013 that helped generate some local fish advisories, the results were missed or didn't filter down in other DEQ divisions. One example: despite results showing PFAS in the Rogue River in Rockford, local remediation division supervisors didn't know Wolverine had used PFAS until citizen activists presented them with easily obtainable evidence last year.



Cathy Wusterbarth, leader of NOW, tears up as she thinks about what has happened in her community at her home on June 7, 2018 in Oscoda. "The first test they did on PFAS in 2011," she said. "They've been studying it for seven years, and they're aware of it. We should have had action on it a very long time ago." (Jake May | MLive.com) Cathy Wusterbarth, leader of NOW, tears up as she thinks about what has happened in her community at her home on June 7, 2018 in Oscoda. "The first test they did on PFAS in 2011," she said. "They've been studying it for seven years, and they're aware of it. We should have had action on it a very long time ago." (Jake May | MLive.com)

Direct questions about why MPART was not created before fall 2017 and when the governor's office began to consider PFAS a priority were not addressed by Ari Adler, director of communications for Gov. Snyder, when questioned by MLive.

"Once again, Michigan is on the forefront of addressing an issue that is impacting states around the nation because Gov. Snyder and his administration are focused on being proactive when it comes to public health," said Adler, via email.

Isaacs and DEQ Director Heidi Grether were in Washington D.C. to talk PFAS in May, when EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced that PFOS and PFOA may be added to the list of hazardous substances regulated under federal toxic cleanup law. The EPA is also considering an MCL, or maximum contaminant level for PFOS and PFOA, which would set a hard limit on the chemicals in municipal drinking water under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.

If EPA does pass enforceable drinking water standards for PFAS, regulators in other states worry that it could be many years before they take effect. Critics say the EPA should have taken those steps years ago, when the agency pressured 3M to stop making PFOS and PFOA in the late 1990s, or when the EPA science advisory board labeled PFOA a "likely human carcinogen" in 2006.

Without enforceable federal standards for drinking water or cleanup, states are left on their own. In January, Michigan set 70-ppt as a limit on groundwater people use for drinking water.

"The EPA has been neglecting this problem for probably more than a decade," said Mark Henry, a retired environmental engineer at DEQ.

Henry was heavily involved with the initial discovery and risk assessment of PFAS compounds in Michigan after they turned up at the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Oscoda -- Michigan's first known PFAS site.

Without anything stronger than an unenforceable advisory, Henry said, the Pentagon won't provide safe water to Oscoda homes that may have very high levels of PFAS compounds coming from their tap because there's no regulatory criteria being exceeded.

Environmental time bombs

Meanwhile, emergency responders are one serious plane crash, gasoline tanker truck fire or equipment malfunction away from creating another PFAS plume.

The PFAS-laden AFFF foam is an environmental time bomb waiting to go off at airports, bases and in municipal fire departments large and small.





Records obtained by MLive through the Freedom of Information Act show large quantities of foam remain on the shelves of at least 353 Michigan fire departments, much of it made before manufacturers swapped out the chemicals in 2002 for newer PFAS compounds that aren't supposed to last so long in the environment.

The city of Parchment fire department has 35 gallons of AFFF manufactured in the 1970s and '80s sitting on shelves, according to preliminary results of a statewide survey of foam inventories sent out earlier this year by the Michigan fire marshal's office. The Madison Township fire department near Adrian has 170 gallons from the 1980s and 90s.

The city of Marysville has 2,375 gallons from 1998 in stock.

State fire marshal Kevin Sehlmeyer said the state survey showed at least 24,000 gallons of the foam containing PFAS is still waiting to be used in Michigan. Some departments reported getting foam donations from closed manufacturers.

Sites where foam was used are being sent to MPART for investigation.

"The foam has a shelf life of 10 to 25 years," said Sehlmeyer, who was surprised by how much of the foam some smaller departments around the state had.

Departments still use the foam in emergencies. Firefighters foamed a gasoline tanker truck that crashed at the intersection of M-60 and Pine Lake Street near Niles in April 2016. That created a plume with contaminant concentrations of 394,800 parts-per-trillion at the crash site.

Accidents happen, too. Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Macomb County reported an "inadvertent discharge" of about 20 gallons of AFFF foam at a U.S. Coast Guard maintenance hangar on June 7. The base is believed to be a source of PFAS in Lake St. Clair. Earlier this year, several municipalities around the lake, including New Baltimore and Mount Clemens, found low PFAS levels in the raw drinking water they draw from the lake.

In Battle Creek, a city firefighter flipped the wrong switch on a crash response truck in 2014 and accidentally sprayed 1,500 gallons of AFFF foam and water around a gravel road on the Air National Guard base. Topsoil was removed to try and prevent the chemicals from seeping into the groundwater. The spot is now one of 13 areas of AFFF investigation there today.

The state doesn't want departments to train with the foam anymore and wants to be notified immediately if it's used in an emergency so there's no delay in cleanup.

"For certain types of fires, it's the best way to put it out as fast as you can," Sehlmeyer said. But, if used, "we want to get it cleaned up as soon as possible."

AFFF use at military bases has become a global concern. As of last August, the Pentagon tallied more than 400 active or closed bases with some level of PFAS contamination. The spread of bases stretches from Okinawa to New Hampshire across most service branches.

In Michigan, Wurtsmith was among the first U.S. bases anywhere to be studied for PFAS contamination, dating back to sampling conducted in 1998 and 1999 by Oregon State University researchers. The DEQ pulled its first samples from the base in 2010 and the state issued a "Do Not Eat" fish advisory two years later. In 2016, state and local health officials told nearby private well owners to find a new drinking water source.

Since then, PFAS-contaminated drinking water has been discovered at or near the closed K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base near Marquette, Alpena National Guard Training Center, the Camp Grayling joint maneuvers base and both Battle Creek and Selfridge Air National Guard bases.

At Wurtsmith, firefighters sprayed the "A-Triple-F" during numerous training fires, a 1988 crash that killed six airmen, local structure fires and a 100-acre forest fire in 1979. They sprayed foam when airplanes leaked fuel just to suppress harmful vapors.

"They said the stuff was so safe you could drink it," said Stephen Moldenhauer, a firefighter at the base from 1984 to 1988. "We used to wash our cars with it. I took home the empty foam cans to my kids for piggy banks."

Moldenhauer brought home foam-drenched gear on a regular basis. He wonders whether AFFF exposure contributed to his heart attack at age 45 and tumor-like growths in his legs. He wonders whether PFAS exposure through drinking water or other means have contributed to his wife's seven miscarriages and other reproductive problems in his family.

In order to get his military health benefits to treat the problems as an environmental exposure, the Department of Veterans Affairs is "going to tell me to prove it," he said.

"How do I prove it?"

Drinking PFAS

Dan and Marylin O'Connor retired to a long-time family home in Oscoda in 2009. At some point, two cans of Scotchgard ended up on the shelf in their hallway. Today, Dan calls them "contamination in a can."

"I think the thing to do is spend more money on plume identification modeling, which the MDEQ is doing, and focused cleanup stations where the plumes are," said Oscoda resident Dan O'Connor, left, sitting with his wife Marilyn Mike O'Connor at their home on June 6, 2018. "This is something the government can do. We just need to make sure we get Oscoda visible on the radar of the government entities that divide up the money, the funds." (Jake May | MLive.com)

The O'Connors drink bottled or tap water filtered at their kitchen sink at their lakefront home. The PFAS level in their well is low, but they aren't taking any chances. Marylin, who goes by "Mike," takes kitchen water into the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash her face.

The couple suspects that they were unknowingly drinking contaminated water for years.

Dan thought about getting his blood tested, but didn't bother after his doctor told him the results would be hard to interpret. Now, he just watches for symptoms.

"I've been up here all my life, so I keep thinking it's not that bad," Mike said. "But in the last couple of years... things are happening to my body and I don't know what's going on."

The couple are not alone. Many are asking the same questions across Michigan.

Because of how contamination travels underground, it's hard to know how, or if, PFAS levels will change day to day, so well users in pollution zones are getting choices: a kitchen sink filter, a water cooler or a cash payment to join a municipal system -- if that's an option.

The state is footing that bill in some cases, hoping to recover costs from polluters. The DEQ could not provide an exact number of homes which have gotten alternative water.

In contaminated areas, the testing zones keep expanding.

More than 1,600 homes in 20 square miles across the city of Rockford, Plainfield and Algoma townships have been tested as part of the Wolverine investigation. More than 300 have some level of PFOS or PFOA in the well and 116 are above the EPA 70-ppt safety level. One reached as high as 58,930-ppt for PFOA and PFAS combined.

In Grayling, filters have been provided to about 175 homes near the Grayling Army Airfield and another 35 homes around Lake Margrethe. The state is telling residents that it needs to decide if more homes need the filters and notes that no long-term safe water solution has been determined yet because the city's municipal supply is also contaminated.

The military, meanwhile, is following a linear, drawn-out investigation process in Grayling and other bases that's likely to delay any actual cleanup by years.

As time goes by, affected residents continually learn more about contaminants that few had ever heard of before last year.

More attention is fueling more research. Scientists are increasing study of not just PFOS and PFOA, but other PFAS compounds to better-understand their effect on humans.

Some living near PFAS contamination wish more emphasis would be placed on individual well testing, instead of relying on data from monitoring wells. Others outside the official testing zone wonder when, or if, moving plumes are headed their way, or passed by long ago.

All wish they could pinpoint what PFAS may be doing to their bodies.

Waves separate onto Lake Huron as Oscoda fisherman Gene Kirvan drives his boat about five miles from shore to fish early on June 7, 2018 near Oscoda. Kirvan, president of the Lake Huron Sport Fishing/Ausable River Steelheaders, expects a huge negative effect on tourism. We hear what a hazard it is. The contaminants are 1,500 times above the safe level. There should be some advisory out there warning people," he said. "I mean, my God, would you want your kids swimming in toxic foam? (Jake May | MLive.com)

Gottlieb grew up visiting a family home on Lake Huron. She lives there now with her husband, Jeff, and Sunny, the boxer who wouldn't drink the unfiltered water.

She recalls her mother struggling to use her hands to open a bottle. After she moved in, "my hands started doing the same thing."

Sandy Wynn-Stelt lives directly across from Wolverine's House Street tannery sludge dump in Belmont. Her husband, Joel, died of liver cancer in 2016.

Liver disease is one of the known PFAS health concerns.

"You live in a country where you assume we have regulations that are taking care of this. You assume that your air, water and food are safe," she said. "Once this happened, it made me step back and realize that it's kind of a fantasy; that people are watching out and making sure everything is safe. I kind of took off the old rose-colored glasses."

Frustration builds

In Oscoda, where PFAS first turned up in tests back in 1999, cleanup now shows no sign of completion. Twenty-seven chemicals pollute groundwater on the closed base, according to the EPA. Contaminants at Wurtsmith include lead, mercury and benzene, in addition to the PFAS plumes moving from the base into nearby waterways and Lake Huron.

Protestors rally for clean water outside a Wurtsmith Air Force Base Restoration Advisory Board meeting on June 6, 2018 in Oscoda. Members of the NOW (Need Our Water) group, and other local residents, want the Air Force to take responsibility for high levels of PFAS contamination leaching from the base. (Jake May | MLive.com)

"I'm pretty frustrated," said Aaron Weed, Oscoda Township supervisor. "We've already dealt with over 30 years of contamination ... now PFAS has extended it."

Weed, an Air Force veteran, moved to Oscoda in 2010, and was elected to his first term in 2012. That's around the time he first heard about the PFAS contamination in Clark's Marsh at the south end of the runway. The water feeds into the Au Sable River, and it's a bird-watcher destination.

"The Air Force played it off as no big deal," he recalled. "They said there were low levels, nothing to worry about."

That "no big deal" included a 2013 PFAS reading of 400 times the current surface water standard.

Oscoda residents say they're furious at the Air Force's slow pace. They've been fighting for a resolution for years.

"The Air Force and the state of Michigan should be embarrassed and ashamed of themselves," Tingley said. "I think it's a joke."

The focus for the work on the long-closed base is protecting human drinking water, following federal guidelines. Yet residents and officials see evidence the contaminant has spread further, and they express frustration that the Department of Defense won't pursue a solution unless potable water is compromised.

They also want more accountability to the community: Residents had to push for regular meetings with the unit of the Air Force charged with fixing contamination on closed bases and state officials monitoring them. Now those meetings can get tense as the DOD officials warn that the closed base is just one of 40 around the U.S. vying for $50 million in total funding.

Meanwhile, the state is challenging the federal officials through dispute resolution.

In December, the state initiated a formal dispute with the Air Force over the pace and adequacy of cleanup efforts in Oscoda. State leaders want the Air Force to install more groundwater treatment systems to capture plumes entering Van Etten Lake and the Au Sable River. The Air Force also denies responsibility for several contamination areas off the base.

"When you look at our military and the pace at which they move, it's not good," Isaacs said.

A sign warns people not to eat the fish before entering Clark's Marsh on June 6, 2018 in Oscoda. High PFAS levels have been detected in Van Etten Lake, Clark's Marsh and the Au Sable River. (Jake May | MLive.com)

Some residents look back to the early warning signs from Clark's Marsh and wonder why the concern didn't escalate faster. It was several years later when state health officials looked at PFAS readings taken in 2015 from wells near the base and told people living downstream not to use their water for drinking or cooking. PFAS was in a moving plume, and not "fully understood or controlled," according to DEQ.

In March 2016, health officials told residents east of Van Etten Lake not to worry about contaminants, O'Connor recalled. Six months later, he said, the Oscoda community learned the state had misread the spread of contamination.

"The plume had gone underneath the lake," O'Connor said. "And they found contamination on the opposite shore and in Lake Huron."

The spreading PFAS isn't just moving with that plume. It's been discovered south of the closed base, in wells and, just this spring, in a high school athletic field drinking fountain. It's in the Au Sable River, where it influences further "do not eat" fish advisories.

Oscoda residents still don't know how far PFAS will spread in their community.

Tingley said she's tired of hearing about ongoing tests without solutions. "It's ridiculous," she said.

An uncertain future

The Air Force will start operating a granular activated carbon filtration system for PFAS on one of its three existing "pump and treat" stations on the base by August. That should cut PFAS dumping into nearby Van Etten Creek. By 2019, the Air Force said it hopes to install another system. In the meantime, unfiltered contaminants will continue to flow.





The effect on the environment upsets Oscoda residents, who see the natural beauty of the region tainted by chemicals.

But the reach goes beyond that geography. Some wonder if this is how cleanups will go at other contaminated military bases in the state, and how many other wells and water systems will be affected. After watching it play out for years in one city, they worry about how far this will reach in Michigan.

"I don't think they understand the huge ramifications on millions of people," Weed said. "There's all this contamination that's been let to flow."

Michigan officials say they're now pushing the EPA for guidelines while setting up a science board to advise them on statewide decisions involving PFAS. That coincides with a testing push that started this spring.

"We've been moving at light-speed on this issue," Isaacs said, describing initiatives started since winter.

Michigan is poised to test all 1,380 public water systems this year, Isaacs said, because they account for the drinking water for 75 percent of the state. Testing also will be done on Michigan's 2 million private wells.

"We don't know what's in those individual wells," Isaacs said. "That's what's bothering us."

It's also going to test the water in 461 schools. Locations of additional potential sites to test include 27 airports, 70 active landfills and 355 industrial operations involved in plating. In some cases, the state will pursue a polluter to force a cleanup.

Then there are the PFAS clusters on the lakes and rivers where the chemical concentrates and turns into thick, white foam on windy days with wavy surfaces. The reaction is prompting the state to launch a program to remove it.

Isaacs won't speculate about how many more sites will be added to the list of contaminated areas in Michigan by the end of this year.

At least three additional sites have been identified with PFAS contamination, but haven't made it onto the state's official list. Besides Selfridge, they include the Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids and Battle Creek Air National Guard Base at Kellogg Airport.

"This is an ongoing process," Isaacs said, "and I just don't know."