Residents and officials expressed frustration with the speed of chemical clean-up at the former NAS-JRB Willow Grove at a meeting Wednesday.

In theory, the quarterly meetings held by the military to update the public on cleanup operations at the former NAS-JRB Willow Grove are supposed to foster good relations with the community.

Maybe next time.

The latest meeting held Wednesday at the Horsham Township Library followed a similar trend from others in the recent past as residents, municipal leaders and elected officials peppered military representatives with questions and criticisms regarding ongoing PFAS chemical contamination at the former base, as well as the still active Horsham Air Guard Station.

“I'm shocked. And frustrated,” said an exasperated state Rep. Todd Stephens, R-151, of Horsham, at one point in the meeting.

Stephens was joined by Horsham council President Greg Nesbitt, resident and activist Hope Grosse, and other audience members in criticizing the pace of the response. The PFAS issue blew open in 2014 when the chemicals were discovered in unsafe amounts in local drinking water wells, after they were used for decades in firefighting foams. The scope of the problem has only grown in years since, eventually impacting about 15 public and more than 200 drinking water wells in the area, affecting the drinking water of some 70,000 people.

Military representatives at the meeting detailed some steps they've taken toward trying to get a handle on the widespread environmental contamination. But during question and answer sessions, members of the public clearly weren't satisfied.

“One of the uniform complaints of anybody in administration from any of the municipalities surrounded by the bases is the timing and pace of all of this. And we're frustrated, obviously,” Nesbitt said. “Everybody in this room wants to see progress.”

Nesbitt said he had spent time over the past few days reviewing materials from past meetings in order to determine which goals or reports had been accomplished, and which were delayed or simply removed. He urged Navy and Air National Guard representatives to do a better job creating continuity between presentations, and also to better coordinate on clean-up efforts.

Members of the public also grew frustrated after it took their inquiries to obtain significant information. In one instance, military personnel detailed how they had updated a treatment system at a stormwater outfall on the north side of the guard station, which they said is now removing PFAS chemicals down to about 7 parts per trillion (ppt), or just one-tenth of a 70 ppt health limit advised by the Environmental Protection Agency.

But Chris Crockett, chief environmental officer with private water utility Aqua Pennsylvania, chimed in to point out that his company has sampled water beyond the filter and found it still contains much higher amounts of PFAS before entering into the nearby Park Creek.

“Every time my people go there to sample at the fence line ... it's not 7 ppt in the water, it is over 1,000 parts per trillion,” Crockett said. “It's 5,000 parts per trillion when the system isn't on.”

Keith Freihofer, environmental restoration program manager with the Air National Guard, didn't dispute the numbers and said the military believes there is contaminated groundwater infiltrating back into the waterway after the filter.

At the heart of concerns about contaminated water continuing to leave the base was whether anything is being done to control or remove the “plume” of contaminated groundwater underneath the base. Detailed mapping of the plume has not been released to date, but military officials have identified several hotspots in groundwater that include up to 329,500 ppt of the chemicals.

William Lin, environmental coordinator with the Navy, said his department is in the process of removing large quantities of contaminated soil, one near an airplane hangar and another near an old fire station, that it believes may be contributing to the contaminated groundwater. To date, about 3,000 cubic yards have been excavated, with more planned into January.

However, Navy officials said the effort is largely guesswork, as no official cleanup regulations or standards exist. Instead, they're removing soil that was found to be in the worst 5 percent of 300 soil samples taken at the base.

Navy officials said they had also closed stormwater outfalls at the north end of the former base and enlarged a retention pond to hold more stormwater. However, they admitted they don't ultimately know where that water ends up. They've also conducted camera investigation of about two miles of stormwater piping in an attempt to identify any areas where contaminated groundwater might be leaking in, and plan to release a report by the end of December.

But actual cleanup of contaminated groundwater appears to be a distant prospect. Lin said the base is just getting started with two research efforts to try and find an ideal cleanup solution: one driven by the Navy, and another by the Department of Defense.

The Navy's effort will be a pilot program to extract contaminated groundwater and try different technologies to clean it. The proposal was submitted to the EPA and Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection in November for review, Lin said.

“There are different technologies that may be looked at to see what works best,” Lin said.

Lin said the site has also been selected to be studied by the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program, a DOD program that coordinates with the EPA and Department of Energy. The military is spending about $50 million on PFAS research, Lin said, with $1.7 million going toward this specific effort.

Contaminated soil and groundwater has been sent to the program so that researchers can test the effectiveness of several clean-up concepts. Projects that show promising results will be further funded next year, Lin said.

“It's proof of concept, to see if these technologies can work,” Lin said.

That still left residents like Hope Grosse, who grew up across from the former Naval Air Warfare Center Warminster, dismayed that the plume is currently largely uncontrolled, with levels as high as 1,000 ppt still being documented leaving the base.

“It's fearful for a community member,” Grosse said. “I urge you guys to get on this as quick as possible.”

On the Air Guard property, which sits on the former footprint of Willow Grove, officials said in addition to attempts to decrease PFAS in stormwater outfalls, they are largely engaged with continued sampling and investigation. Former Horsham manager Mike McGee, now executive director of an authority tasked with overseeing redevelopment of the base, expressed some frustration that drinking water wells on the base remain largely inactive.

The wells had been shown to contain high levels of the chemicals and were taken offline several years ago. They now have temporary filters, but responding to a question from McGee, officials said they cannot be used for drinking water until a permanent filter is constructed a year from now. Use and filtration of the wells is thought to be one way to begin removing contaminated groundwater.

“OK ...” McGee responded. “Actually, not OK.”

Representatives of the EPA and PADEP also took some heat at the meeting, with local officials imploring them to take a more active approach in overseeing the situation and coordinating efforts. Stephens in particular took issue when he learned the EPA is not actively sampling water leaving the base, and instead reling on data provided in military reports.

“If this was a private polluter, you can bet the environmental regulators would be crawling up one side of them and down the other to figure out what's going on,” Stephens said.

Sarah Kloss, the EPA's project manager for the site, defended the agency's work.

“I think we're all trying to at least remediate this site the best we can,” Kloss said. “We're working our hardest to do as much work as we can with the staff levels that we have.”