Rivanna River Basin Commission Annual Conference   9/28/2023

Good morning, everyone.

If you all would find a seat, and those of you out in the hall, please wander in so we can get to begin our conference this morning.

I welcome you all.

My name is Ann Mallek.

I'm the chair currently of the Rivanna River Basin Commission, and we are very glad to welcome you to our eighth annual fall conference.

Every conference has a unique flavor.

Today, our learning will focus on PFAS, how we find it, how much is there,

and what solutions are needed.

Let me tell you a little bit about the RRBC.

We are a regional organization and we provide guidance for the stewardship and enhancement of water and natural resources of the Rivanna River and its watershed.

Our members are all the jurisdictions surrounding the city of Charlottesville, counties of Albemarle, Fluvanna, and Greene, and representatives from all those counties are here in our audience today, elected officials.

We also have members of our local soil and water conservation districts and citizen appointees recommended by the members of those local governments.

The RRBC promotes activities that foster resource stewardship for the environmental and economic health of the basin and provide a forum for communication, coordination, and education among the jurisdictions and suggesting appropriate solutions to identify problems.

And I want to focus on a couple of recent accomplishments.

Encouraging the Department of Environmental Quality to take the next steps to develop an implementation plan for the North Fork-Rivanna River, which is facing benthic and bacteria impairments.

An implementation plan is the next step to bring the community and funding resources together to address the impairments and return the water resources to the state's water quality standards.

Holding this annual conference alongside the community, last year's solar policy and environmental justice were the topics of consideration.

We hold board and stakeholder advisory group meetings to discuss problems affecting the basin and explore appropriate solutions.

And our goal of information sharing on the RRBC website is the go-to source for a long history of environmental issues and resources for people finding solutions.

Stormwater best management practices, funding opportunities and events to support the watershed.

Way back beyond the whip was where that information began.

Just for housekeeping, light refreshments are available during the break at 10.40.

And there's going to be lunch from the pizza brick oven truck on wheels right outside.

And it'll be in the middle parking lot to the north of the building.

And the rest is on the lobby right outside.

All right.

We have very extensive bios for all of our speakers in your agendas.

So I'm going to read only an annotated amount so that we can get on with our presentations.

My first speaker to introduce and a very familiar face to members of the Local Government Advisory Committee for the EPA, Zachary Schaffer is Senior Advisor and EPA's Assistant Administrator for the Office of Water.

Office of Water works to ensure that drinking water is safe, wastewater is safely returned to the environment, and surface waters are properly managed and protected.

Prior to joining EPA, Zach worked in the private sector as well, also at the White House Council on Environmental Quality during the Obama administration and holds degrees in economics, international affairs and history and energy and environmental policy.

Zach, where are you?

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me.

Go right ahead.

OK, great.

Well, thank you very much for having me.

Thank you for that introduction.

It's great to be with you.

And it's great to get out to the communities who are really working to understand how this is impacting them, where it's impacting them, how it's impacting your ecosystems, your communities, your infrastructure, and more.

So I'm very glad to be here.

I'm going to attempt to share my screen.

Oh, it looks like the conference left.

OK.

Now I can.

All right, hopefully everybody just sees a title slide of

this presentation.

But again, we'll thank you again.

I was actually from a senior advisor to our assistant administrator for water, Veronica Fox.

And in that capacity, I support EPA's Office of Water programs on a range of issues from infrastructure to climate change to manufacturing and workforce development, but also PFAS.

But Assistant Administrator Fox is also the co-chair of our agency's PFAS Council, which spans all of the offices.

and regions across the agency.

And so in her capacity as that co-chair, I support a range of priorities, not just within the Office of Water, but across the agency.

So I'm glad to be able to speak to broader agency actions and plans under the PFAS roadmap, which I'll introduce here in a second.

So today I'm excited to share with you the contents of our roadmap, EPA's commitments to action from 2021 to 2024 and key actions that EPA has taken since the roadmap was released in October, 2021.

Before I do that, I first wanted to give some background on per and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS.

Then I'd like to share with you the principles and goals that guided the strategic roadmaps development and that underpin its actions.

Next, I'll share key areas of progress that EPA has made in implementing the PFAS roadmap and the key upcoming actions EPA plans to take.

I'll also just get into a little bit of detail since I think it's valuable for this audience, sharing the highlights of actions included in the roadmap for specific offices, anticipated timelines, recent progress, and I'll cover the transformational investments made in the bipartisan infrastructure a lot toward addressing PFAS and other emerging contaminants.

So in April 2021, EPA Administrator Michael Regan established the EPA Council on PFAS and charged it to develop a bold, strategic, whole-of-EPA approach to protect public health and the environment from the impacts of PFAS.

The council is comprised of senior technical and policy leaders from across EPA's program offices and regional offices.

It's co-chaired by, again, my boss, Assistant Administrator for Water, Radhika Fox, and EPA's Regional Administrator for Region 1, New England,

David Cash.

The council met Administrator Regan's call through the PFAS strategic roadmap released in October 2021, and the roadmap does several things.

It includes clear timelines for concrete actions from 2021 to 2024.

It fills a critical gap in federal leadership, setting a basic floor of federal protection across the country.

It supports states ongoing efforts to tackle PFAS by building critical science, methods, tools, and technologies.

And it builds on EPA's commitment to restore scientific integrity by making science the foundation of all of our work.

I'll return to specific amendments in our PFAS roadmap in a few minutes.

I hope this isn't going too deep into the weeds.

I know that the whole day here is focused on PFAS, so this may be review or end up being reviewed again later, but just to make sure we're all on the same page about what we're talking about here.

I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or as I'll refer to them, PFAS, and why we're concerned.

So PFAS captures a large group of synthetic chemicals made by people that consist of chains of carbon atoms surrounded by fluorine atoms.

There are thousands of different PFAS with a variety of chemical structures, and some of these chemicals have been more widely used and studied than others.

As examples, this slide shows the chemical structures of two of the most widely used and studied chemicals in the PFAS group, specifically PFOA and PFOS.

PFAS have been used in homes, businesses, and industries since the 1940s.

They have been and are used by many industries and found in many consumer products due to their useful properties including stain and water resistance and their beneficial role in firefighting foam used to extinguish fuel fires.

Due to their widespread use, PFAS have been found in soil, water, fish, and air across the country and around the world.

And surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that most people in the United States have been exposed to PFAS, including measurable levels of certain PFAS in human blood.

Most known exposures to PFAS are relatively low, but some can be high, particularly when people are exposed to a concentrated source over long periods of time.

PFAS are a concern to human health due to their known or suspected toxicity and their health effects are better known for some PFAS such as PFOA and PFOS but much less well known for others and I'll describe a bit later some of the work EPA is doing to improve our scientific understanding.

And finally, scientific research has shown that PFAS can resist decomposition in the environment and in the human body due to their unique properties.

So that takes us to slide five, which is our PFAS lifecycle.

And this is something that's really guided our approach to addressing PFAS.

This diagram shows some of the ways in which PFAS are used and can enter the environment.

And I know some of the text is a little bit small, but the picture here helps to illustrate a few major ways PFAS can enter the environment and potentially impact human health.

These ways include discharge of PFAS pollution from manufacturing facilities, discharges of PFAS containing firefighting foam, PFAS entering wastewater treatment facilities from upstream sources, and PFAS applied to agricultural fields as a component of biosolids, and biosolids are the solid organic matter left over from the wastewater treatment process.

Through these significant and diverse pathways, PFAS contamination presents unique challenges.

EPA's approach toward PFAS takes this uniqueness into account and it's centered around the following principles.

First, consider the life cycle of PFAS, including those unique properties, the ubiquity of their uses, and the multiple pathways for exposure.

Second, get upstream of the problem.

We are bringing a deeper focus to preventing PFAS from entering the environment in the first place, a foundational step to reducing the exposure and potential risks of future PFAS contamination.

Third, hold PFAS polluters accountable for their actions and for PFAS remediation efforts.

Fourth, ensure science-based decision-making.

EPA is investing in scientific research to fill our gaps in understanding the PFAS.

And fifth, prioritize the protection of disadvantaged communities.

And we commit that when taking actions on PFAS to ensuring that disadvantaged communities have equitable access to solutions.

The actions described in our strategic, sorry, the risks posed by PFAS demand that EPA attack the PFAS problem on multiple fronts at the same time.

And the actions described in our strategic roadmap each represent important and meaningful steps to safeguard communities from PFAS contamination.

And we believe these actions will build upon one another and lead to more enduring and protective solutions.

EPA's integrated approach to PFAS is focused on three goals.

First, research.

We're investing in research development and innovation to increase our understanding of PFAS exposures and toxicities of human health and ecological effects and actions we can take that incorporate the best available science.

Second, restrict.

We're pursuing a comprehensive approach to proactively prevent PFAS from entering air, land, and water at levels that can adversely impact human health and the environment.

And third, remediate.

EPA's broadening and accelerating the cleanup of PFAS contamination.

These are some of the highlights of accomplishments we've made since the roadmap was released in October of 2021.

And we committed to issuing a public report on our PFAS progress each year.

In November 2022, we released our first one-year progress report, summarizing the critical actions we've taken.

Since the roadmap's release in October 2021, EPA has taken the following actions, which we'll talk about in greater detail a little bit later in the presentation.

We've proposed a national primary drinking water regulation for 6 PFAS and through this proposed rule, EPA is taking a major step to protect public health from PFAS pollution, leveraging the latest science and complementing state efforts to limit PFAS by proposing to establish legally enforceable levels for 6 PFAS known to occur in drinking water.

We've proposed to designate 2 PFAS as hazardous substances under CERCLA or Superfund.

If finalized, this will be a critical step toward increasing transparency around releases of PFAS and holding polluters accountable for cleaning up their contamination.

We've taken action to restrict PFAS discharges to waterways and we issued recommendations to states on how they can restrict PFAS at their sources, collect important data on PFAS discharges and take action in the short term while EPA works to set nationwide technology-based limits for certain PFAS dischargers.

We've begun distributing $10 billion in funding to address emerging contaminants under the bipartisan infrastructure law.

And we're making transformational investments in cleaning up PFAS and other emerging contaminants in water, especially in small or disadvantaged communities.

We've laid the foundation for enhancing data on PFAS.

This includes three test orders under EPA's national PFAS testing strategy, requiring companies to conduct PFAS testing and nationwide sampling,

for 29 PFAS in drinking water which started in 2023 and for which we announced the first round of data just this August.

We've expanded the scientific understanding of PFAS and translated this science into EPA's efforts.

The agency has issued more than 30 scientific publications by EPA researchers and released EPA's PFAS thermal treatment database.

And this science forms the foundation of EPA's PFAS work, including actions to update EPA's contaminated site cleanup tables, develop new PFAS test methods and conduct toxicity assessments and issue draft national recommended water quality criteria to protect aquatic life.

We've proactively used enforcement tools to better identify and address PFAS releases.

EPA has made addressing exposure to PFAS one of its national enforcement and compliance initiatives, and we're seeking information to better understand PFAS contamination.

We've taken site-specific actions at a 3M facility in Cordova, Illinois, and a Comores facility in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and we remain committed to investigating PFAS releases and requiring appropriate follow-up action.

And we've released a set of PFAS analytic tools to publicly share data on PFAS in communities.

And finally, we've engaged with federal partners and the public.

EPA's PFAS work was informed by public webinars, stakeholder meetings, congressional testimony, and engagement with EPA's federal advisory committees, as well as a series of virtual listening sessions we held in each EPA region and for tribes in early 2023.

EPA is also coordinating with its federal agency partners across the Biden-Harris administration to harness the collective knowledge, experience, and capacity of the federal government to address PFAS.

So I'm going to spend a little time here going into a little bit deeper detail on some of the particular actions in the roadmap that our program offices are taking around certain areas.

First is just key roadmap actions around research and development.

As I highlighted earlier, science and research are the foundation of EPA's work on PFAS and EPA is working to improve our understanding of PFAS in three primary ways.

First, we're working to develop and validate methods to detect and measure PFAS in the environment.

Second, we're working to advance the science to assess

human health and environmental risks from PFAS.

And to do that, our scientists are developing human health toxicity assessments for additional PFAS, compiling and summarizing available and relevant scientific information, identifying PFAS sources, the ways that PFAS move in the environment, and the pathways by which people can be exposed to PFAS.

And we're characterizing how PFAS exposure may contribute to cumulative impacts on communities.

And then third, we're working to evaluate and develop technologies for reducing PFAS in the environment.

This work will inform decisions on drinking water and wastewater treatment, contaminated site cleanup and remediation, air emissions control, and end of life materials management.

The next area I'll cover is our work to ensure chemical safety.

EPA's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention is working on many actions to restrict PFAS, and most of these actions fall under two laws.

The Toxic Substances Control Act, or you may have heard TSCA, and the Toxics Release Inventory Program, which you might have heard of as TRI.

First of all, EPA is working to deepen our understanding of PFAS categories through the National PFAS Testing Strategy, which EPA released in October 2021.

The testing strategy is a major step toward the game-changing goal of breaking PFAS into distinct categories to direct research, amplify the impacts of regulatory action, and accelerate technology and policy solutions to restrict and remediate PFAS.

EPA has so far issued three test orders under the strategy and will be issuing additional orders in the coming months.

Second, EPA is working under its TSCA authorities to strengthen EPA oversight over both new and existing PFAS.

We're working to ensure a robust review process for new PFAS to ensure that chemicals are safe before they enter commerce.

In mid-May, EPA released a new proposed rule that would strengthen our review process for those new PFAS.

And in June, EPA announced a new framework to ensure that before new PFAS or new uses of PFAS are allowed to enter into commerce, EPA will undertake an extensive evaluation to ensure that they pose no harm to human health and the environment.

And we're working to review existing PFAS under TSCA to ensure that they are being used in ways that do not present concerns and to prevent resumed production of legacy PFAS or their use in new ways.

Third, the EPA is collecting data and improving reporting on how PFAS are used and released.

Under TSCA, we're working on a final rule to better characterize the sources and quantities of manufactured PFAS in the United States.

This final rule would collect significant new information on chemical quantities, byproducts, worker exposures, and disposal methods.

And under the toxics release inventory, or TRI, we're working to enhance PFAS reporting by proposing a rule to remove exemptions and exclusions from reporting.

Last December, EPA released a proposed rule to enhance that TRI PFAS reporting.

If finalized, this rule would enhance the data available to the public so that EPA and other federal, tribal, state, and local agencies can use that data to help best protect human health and the environment.

And finally, fourth, EPA is working to reduce the presence of PFAS in products purchased by the federal government.

In December 2021, President Biden signed an executive order that reestablished the federal government as a leader in sustainability.

A critical element of this executive order is to promote sustainable federal purchasing, which includes prioritizing the purchase of products without added PFAS, and EPA is taking a leadership role in this work.

Now, I know this section here will be of keen interest to this audience.

We have a lot of actions.

that we're undertaking through the Office of Water to protect drinking water and our lakes, rivers, and streams.

So first, we'll take a look at drinking water.

In March of this year, EPA took a key step to protect public health by proposing the first ever national drinking water standard for six PFAS, including or fulfilling a foundational commitment in the PFAS strategic roadmap.

Through this proposed rule, EPA is taking a major step to protect public health from PFAS pollution, leveraging the latest science

in complimenting state efforts to limit PFAS by proposing to establish legally enforceable levels for 6 PFAS known to occur in drinking water.

EPA accepted public comment on the proposed rule until May 30th.

We're now reviewing those approximately 120,000 comments and we plan to finalize the rule by the end of 2023.

EPA is also working to improve drinking water data through monitoring toxicity assessments and health advisories.

As many of you know, we're currently taking important steps to monitor drinking water in communities across the country through our fifth unregulated contaminant monitoring rule, or UCMR5.

This program is testing for 29 PFAS chemicals from 2023 to 2025 in thousands of drinking water systems nationwide.

You may recall that an earlier round of EPA monitoring under this program from 2013 to 2015

helped us to discover PFAS contamination and led to significant state and local actions to safeguard our drinking water.

With our latest rule, we're taking it a step further and we're testing for nearly five times more PFAS and significantly more water systems and using methods that can detect PFAS at much lower levels.

In August, EPA released the initial monitoring data on 29 PFAS as well as lithium under UCMR5.

The data collected under UCMR5 will ensure science-based decision-making and help EPA better understand national level exposure to these 29 PFAS and lithium, and whether they disproportionately impact communities with environmental justice concerns.

As I mentioned earlier, in June 2022, EPA released four health advisories, interim health advisories for PFOA and PFOS, and final health advisories for PFBS and for GenX chemicals.

Drinking water health advisories provide information on contaminants that can cause health effects and are known or anticipated to occur in drinking water.

They are non-enforceable and non-regulatory.

Now switching gears under the Clean Water Act, EPA is working to develop national technology-based discharge limits for industries that use PFAS using our effluent limitations guidelines program.

In January of this year, EPA released its final effluent limitations guidelines plan 15,

which outlines key steps to address PFAS discharges across a range of industrial categories.

Also under the Clean Water Act, we're working to address PFAS in permitting through analytical methods, through water quality criteria, and through fish advisories.

We're working to leverage the Clean Water Act's primary permitting program known as the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System or NPDES to improve monitoring and to reduce PFAS discharges to waterways.

and to that end in December, 2022, EPA released new guidance to states describing how to leverage permits and pretreatment programs to increase monitoring, including at known or suspected dischargers of PFAS.

This guidance will enable states to take appropriate steps to restrict PFAS at their source, collect important data on PFAS discharges and enable communities to work more closely with their state permitting authorities to take action where discharges may occur.

We're also working on improved analytical methods to measure more PFAS in more places.

In April 2022, EPA released draft aquatic life water quality criteria for public comment for PFOA and PFOS, which reflect the latest peer-reviewed scientific knowledge regarding the effects of these chemicals on freshwater aquatic organisms, and we look forward to finalizing these criteria in the coming weeks.

We are also working to enhance the data availability on PFAS in fish tissue to help states and tribes to set PFAS fish advisories.

And finally, as I referenced earlier, we're working to evaluate the risks of PFAS in biosolids.

We will be finalizing a risk assessment for PFOA and PFOS that will serve as the basis for determining whether regulation of these two chemicals in biosolids is appropriate.

So shifting gears again to discuss remediation and efforts around air emissions.

This slide covers two of our programs, our Office of Land and Emergency Management, which houses EPA's cleanup programs, and our Office of Air and Radiation, where our team of experts work to address air pollution.

First, we will talk about a specific action that I highlighted earlier under CERCLA, which is the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, or more commonly known as Superfund.

In September 2022, EPA published a proposed rule to designate PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances under CERCLA or Superfund.

If finalized, this rule would require facilities across the country to report PFOA and PFOS releases that meet or exceed the reportable quantity for these substances.

It would enhance the ability of federal, tribal nations, states, and local authorities to obtain information regarding the location and extent of releases.

It would enhance the ability of EPA and other agencies to respond to releases or threats of releases of these substances.

And it would help establish national consistency in the evaluation and cleanup of PFOA and PFOS and encourage better waste management practices.

We're currently reviewing public comments on the proposed rule, and we are working to publish a final rule in early 2024.

At the same time, EPA continues to work closely with stakeholders to better understand and address equity concerns.

And in early 2023, EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance held public listening sessions to inform the development of a Circle of PFAS enforcement discretion and settlement policy.

There are a few additional items that I could cover, but I want to leave time for questions.

I'm happy to come back to additional actions noted here, additional areas, including our resource RCRA and Clean Air Act authorities.

But I'd like to move on to the bipartisan infrastructure law and what we're doing to leverage funding available to address PFAS, particularly in drinking water and clean water.

The bill was signed by President Biden in November 2021 and it provides the single largest investment in clean water that the federal government has ever made.

The bill would build on the research restrictions and remediation called for in the PFAS roadmap by providing $10 billion for communities impacted by PFAS and other emerging contaminants.

It provides these funds without a requirement for state matching funds, and all funds are provided either as grants or principal forgiveness loans.

Of the $10 billion, $4 billion will flow through our Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, $1 billion will flow through the Clean Water State Revolving Fund,

And $5 billion will provide grants to address emerging contaminants in small and disadvantaged communities through a new grant program but similar in structure to the SRS and that it will provide by formula grants to states and then communities and water systems can apply to their state programs for those funds.

In February of 2023, the availability of $2 billion from this program to address emerging contaminants was announced.

And that included the allotment formulas by which these funds will be distributed to states and territories.

We're committed to maximizing the impact of these funds in addressing urgent water challenges facing communities.

We're thrilled that these funds will enable communities to invest in PFAS treatment solutions while EPA continues to take action to research, restrict, and remediate PFAS consistent with our strategic roadmap.

You can find more information on EPA's efforts to address PFAS at our website, epa.gov slash PFAS.

On that site, you can find links to each of the major actions EPA is taking under the roadmap and where appropriate links to the formal comment opportunities for each action through an online docket.

We'll be having a joint Q&A session with all of our speakers at the end of the agenda at 12.

But Mr. Shaffer is unable to join for that portion.

So thank you.

Do you have any timetable on the biosolids sewage sludge rules as far as when they'll be released?

Because many localities or many states do not allow localities to make decisions about receiving this material often from out of state.

So we're taking a number of steps regarding biosolids, including working closely with our peer agencies like USDA, FDA,

and other agencies who have equities in the agricultural components of this issue as well.

The biosolids risk assessment for PFOA and PFOS will be released in draft for comment around the middle of next year, and we plan to finalize it by the end of 2024.

Yes, thank you very much.

I would like to know regarding air pollution, what are the proposals regarding air pollution?

How are you

Yes, this is still an emerging area of work for EPA as well.

Our Office of Airdorm Mediation is taking steps toward restricting PFAS by building the technical foundation for potential Clean Air Act regulation.

We're working to identify sources to develop monitoring approaches and information on mitigation technologies and working to increase our understanding of the fate and transport of PFAS air emissions.

And that work will support future decisions on whether to designate PFAS as a hazardous air pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

And in July, EPA proposed updates to its air emissions reporting requirements, and we're seeking public comment on an option for including PFAS reporting requirements in a final action.

So that's where we are with our air emissions work right now.

Thank you.

I was just wondering, what do you think we're missing by focusing on 6 PFAS for regulation?

So, you know,

First and foremost, we have to use the statutory authorities that the Safe Drinking Water Act gives us to establish drinking water regulations.

And that requires a very robust scientific foundation on which to establish these rules.

And so our understanding of PFAS has been evolving and developing for some time.

And these six PFAS in particular, some of the most studied PFAS.

So in terms of having that scientific foundation to take the steps we need to regulate certain PFAS leaves us to these for which we have toxicity assessments or reference doses and additional information on the hazards that they pose to human health and the environment.

as well as the ability to detect and treat and remove those PFAS from drinking water and commercially available technologies to do so.

So we know that six PFAS doesn't sound like a lot when there are thousands in the category, but

These are six of the most widely used as well as widely studied PFAS.

We also know that when we tackle certain PFAS we also capture others so the treatment solutions that capture these PFAS will we know will also capture others even if they're not yet you know pulled into the regulation but one of the things that we do and we've been very clear about this including in

The roadmap is that this drinking water regulation starts with these six, but we would hope to expand its coverage as more information becomes available to add additional PFAS to this regulation.

But we do think that this is a significant step forward to protect public health and the environment.

We know that by even just regulating these six PFAS, if this regulation is finalized,

will prevent thousands of preventable deaths and tens of thousands of preventable illnesses over its life cycle.

Thank you.

Believe me, I'm on your side.

My question is under your small and disadvantaged government grant program, has EPA already promulgated regulations about that?

So the Small Disadvantaged Communities grant program, while new, leverages a lot of existing structures within the agency.

We didn't need to develop any new regulations or rulemaking.

We put out a guidance document that governs how that program will be implemented earlier this summer and I will

Make sure to grab that and send it to the conference so that they can send it around.

But again, if you go to epa.gov slash PFAS or epa.gov slash infrastructure, you can pretty quickly get to the information about that program.

So small or disadvantaged, small is defined very clearly as serving under 10,000 people.

a water system serving under 10,000 people.

And then disadvantaged uses the definition that the state, so under the Safe Drinking Water Act, states must set a affordability criteria.

So effectively their own disadvantaged community definition.

And so it would be whatever the disadvantaged community definition is.

All right, thank you.

Just to wrap up, I'm very glad about the focus on the future manufacturer and the legacy PFAS.

This definitely got ahead of us, got away from us because of a lack in checking things out first.

And so does the agency have authority already or will it take congressional action to be able to bring in more of a precautionary principle into our approval processes?

So we don't allow things like this to get out of the box.

Sure.

So we're taking as aggressive steps as we can toward that end as we can.

And our Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, as I shared, has released its strategy earlier this summer for reviewing and evaluating new and existing PFAS chemicals for the risks that they pose to the human health environment before entering commerce.

We are constrained by the authorities that Congress gives us.

As the executive branch, we must implement the law as Congress writes it.

But we are using all of the tools we have under TSCA and TRI to achieve those goals.

And then to the extent that there are different or additional statutory authorities in the future, we will follow that direction from Congress and implement.

for your thoughtful answers to the questions and your presentation and for joining us today.

Before we move on to our next speaker, I'm just going to explain the Q&A technology that we'll be using for the remainder of the schedule.

So we will be using Slido technology, which I will go ahead and share the screen now.

So you can scan the QR code with any device, your phone or tablet, or you can join from your laptop and type in slido.com and then enter that seven digit code to join as a participant.

And you can enter any questions that you have throughout the event anonymously through this technology.

And we will just go ahead and do a sample poll for everybody to just get acquainted with the technology.

Simple question.

Oh, we're pretty split.

Okay, I'm glad everybody's able to log in.

Isabella.

So we have two speakers now representing the Virginia Department of Health, Bob Edelman and Dwayne Rodecap.

Dwayne Rodecap is the director of the Office of Drinking Water with over 30 years of experience with environmental programs in Virginia.

And he began his career right here at Rivanna Water and Sewer.

We're very proud of him.

Has also worked with the VDA, Virginia Department of Health and Environmental Health Specialists, and also was a consultant with the Thomas Jefferson Health District.

In 2000, he started working with the Office of Environmental Health Services in many, many roles, and mentors environmental health program managers, and works through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Environmental Public Health Leadership Institute.

Has environmental sciences degree,

and has really worked for years to keep us safe in Virginia.

Robert Edelman is the Director of the Division of Technical Services with VDH, Office of Drinking Water.

He's been with that office for over 20 years after working in many other communities in Virginia.

He's overseeing the PFAS monitoring and other activities at VDH ODW and currently chairs the Lead and Copper Rule Committee.

as responsibility for the Virginia Water Works regulations, developing and updating policy, and the permitting and sanitary survey programs, data management, source water protection, and more.

And GIS, that's right.

For 14 years, he practiced environmental engineering and holds master's degrees in chemical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass.

So do I need to do anything exciting on changing the slides?

The clickers, unless I'm not using the clicker correctly.

It worked just a little bit ago.

Yes.

While we're trying to get those slides, oh, there they go.

Is it working now?

Yep, perfect.

All right, thank you, appreciate that.

So again, I'm Duane Rodecap, Director for the Office of Drinking Water.

This is Bob Adelman, who's our Director of Technical Services.

We're gonna give you a quick update on what's going on in the Virginia drinking water program.

And with respect to PFAS, to give you a sort of understanding, you got the federal view for EPA.

And so how that breaks down to the state is that we have primacy.

So EPA sets the national rule and then through cooperative federalism and some grants from EPA here in Virginia, we implement a program for drinking water.

and that drinking water program consists of six field offices located throughout Virginia.

We have about 115 people that are working with the Office of Drinking Water.

We collect about 110,000 drinking water samples per year and we evaluate those and we're monitoring and we're sort of the quality assurance, quality control, if you will, monitoring program for the public drinking water systems.

Public drinking water systems can be really small.

So the rule is that you're at the threshold of being a public water system if you're serving at least 25 people 60 days out of the year.

So we have a lot of small businesses in rural counties, gas stations, and that sort of ilk.

And then we also regulate large population centers like you'll see in Northern Virginia, Richmond, Fairfax, Roanoke,

and those types of areas.

So we have a very broad base of regulated communities in Virginia, a little over 2,800 of them.

So with respect to PFAS, I'll just sort of augment a little bit what you heard from EPA, there's short chain and long chain.

And so the long chain, PFOA, PFAS, that sort of ended in the 2000s, the manufacturers stopped making that

those products in the 2000s and replaced them with some shorter chain, different chain kinds of products.

And so as you heard, there's probably on the order of, I've seen different numbers, six, 10, 12,000 or more chemicals in this category.

And so depending on whether you're a short chain, long chain, it can have different kinds of impacts on the types of treatment that are available and how long and how well those types of treatment process will work.

If you go to the specific regulations, so you're going to hear a story and a timeline on sampling.

And at one time, the health advisory, the long-term health advisory for PFOA and PFOS was 70 parts per trillion.

And that's changed to what you see here on some of these slides.

Here's what's being proposed for regulation.

And there's a hazard index, which is new to drinking water.

And why is that important?

If you're looking at a health advisory, typically what you're talking about is if someone were to drink about two liters of water per day, about a half a gallon every day of the week, and for 70 years, what kinds of increased risk would you have if you were exposed to this particular chemical?

And so at one time, the science and what EPA was sharing from their toxicology reviews was 70 parts per trillion, but that has since changed and it's much more restrictive now.

And so what is this going to mean for Virginia is one of the things that we're looking at.

The hazard index is a little unique.

And what you do is you take the health advisory that you see down there at the bottom on the parts per trillion, 2010 and nine, and then you take what you're measuring and then you add those components up.

And then if you get one or greater, then you're exceeding the hazard index for those chemicals.

For PFOA and PFOS, we have a proposed 4.0 parts per trillion.

And that would be a running average.

So we would take quarterly samples and then average them.

And then if you're at four or greater, then that's where you would have to do something under the federal rule.

The state could have more restrictive rules, but under this cooperative federalism,

Typically the state here in Virginia, Commonwealth of Virginia, we follow what the national rule is.

If you look at EPA's rulemaking, as you heard, they're talking that they might have this rule available by the end of 2023.

I've put down in my slides by early 2024.

And if you looked at the cost benefit analysis, this is kind of what EPA was saying as far as their

Risks assessments on the cost and the benefit.

The discount rate is just something that they're trying to incorporate.

What are the costs for the delayed rulemaking when the rule comes into effect, inflation and sort of looking to the future costs and how would we discount that in today's costs?

So ultimately, EPA said, we think that there's going to be about 66,000 public water systems nationwide that would be impacted by this rule.

And they came up with an estimated cost and benefit on all of this and said, we think that the benefits outweigh the costs.

So Virginia takes that national rule and we have to have rules that at least are as stringent as what EPA has.

And typically we follow what EPA does because it can create some confusion and different kinds of cost risks for the regulated community in Virginia.

For example, if Virginia comes out with a rule and the community public water systems follow that rule,

but then EPA comes out later and their rule is either more restrictive or less restrictive then the utilities would have gone through some sort of expense that they either have to now go back and redo because the EPA rule is more restrictive than the state rule or vice versa the state rule was more restrictive than the EPA rule and so they spent a lot of extra money trying to meet a state rule that they didn't really have to meet because EPA came out with a different rule.

One of the reasons why we tend to follow the federal rule is trying to make sure that there's clear understanding of what the potential costs are.

So in Virginia, we did surveillance, we've got some financial assistance, and we've got training that goes around all of this PFAS.

Bob is our main point of contact on all of this sort of stuff.

And so we're gonna talk about quickly legislation, the current studies, and some of the PFAS funding that we have here in Virginia.

If you look at the legislation, we started back in 2020, and that's where we had the EPA 70 parts per trillion category for the health advisory.

And we, in Virginia, EPA had not moved forward on any regulatory action.

And so the general assembly gave us direction at the health department and said, hey, we want you guys to come up with some rules on PFAS.

We don't think, or we're not happy with

what's going on at the federal level.

And so several states, and one of them being Virginia, we started going down a path of implementing that state only rule where we would be more stringent in Virginia potentially than what EPA had because EPA had no rule around this.

What you saw on the PFAS strategy, that was from 2021.

And so some of this predates EPA's PFAS strategy that they were trying to roll out with.

Essentially, what the legislature told us to do at the Virginia Department of Health, Board of Health, was to come up with our own rules for Virginia.

We went down that path, and so you'll see that we did a notice of intended regulatory action.

We got some comments on that notice of intended regulatory action.

We were proceeding forward.

and then the General Assembly reevaluated its direction to the Virginia Department of Health and we got some new rules with an enactment clause and so that took effect in 2022.

And what essentially that rule said is is that if Virginia is going to implement its own rule in advance of EPA's rulemaking then Virginia needs to follow what EPA would have done.

And so that's essentially what that says.

Oh, OK. And so keep in mind, you might recall UCMR, that's the unregulated contaminant monitoring rule 3.

That was in 2013 through 2015.

Yes, thank you.

The unregulated contaminant monitoring rule was an opportunity for EPA to collect information about unregulated contaminants.

At the time, they collected PFAS samples from large Virginia water systems.

The interesting thing is we only had two hits.

during that round of sampling and those were not confirmed.

In other words, the water systems took another sample and they didn't find it again.

So that's kind of where history begins.

And so this graphical timeline shows kind of what's been going on.

And so Virginia Department of Health started phase one of the PFAS sampling back in 2021.

That's the result of the general assembly giving us a direction to do some sampling.

And then we produced some reports to the General Assembly.

You'll see the House Bill 586 report and the House Bill 1257 reports.

Those were back in 2021.

We started work on laying the groundwork for a Virginia PFAS regulation.

So there was a notice of intended regulatory action.

And then in 2022, House Bill 919 changed everything.

And I'll emphasize the requirement from the General Assembly became much higher.

In other words, VDH needs to follow the exact same procedure EPA needs to follow to establish a drinking water regulation.

And that is a hurdle that's too high for us, given the resources that we have available to us.

And on top of that, EPA proposed the PFAS regulation that you saw on Dwayne's slide.

And so as a result of that, we withdrew the notice of intended regulatory.

So the Noirer was withdrawn and we're currently in what we call the phase two PFAS study.

So that's kind of where we are in the timeline.

I hope that's helpful.

So back in 2020 we did have a we did establish a work group and and the work group was yeah it was established in 2020 the the recommendations came out in 2021 and so the the the recommendations included things like we need to get a better understanding of what the occurrence of PFAS is and and virginia drinking water it turns out we had practically no information

You might wonder why is that?

That's because there is no federal requirement for water systems to collect PFAS samples and report them to the state.

There was a UCMR3 that I mentioned, but that's all there ever was.

So there's more questions than answers.

And so we were asked to do monitoring of PFAS in drinking water.

We looked at the risk assessments and the toxicology and we said this doesn't make sense.

It's not good enough.

And so it turns out EPA has done that heavy lifting for those six contaminants where there's a proposed MCO.

And we needed more help with subject matter experts.

And a big part of it was how much does it cost to do the treatment?

Part of the decision making process is what's technologically and economically feasible.

And so we needed help with some of that.

And on top of that, we needed money to actually do some of the work, for example, the testing.

So those were recommendations that came out of the work group.

The legislation that

Dwayne mentioned, enabled Virginia Department of Health to do some very limited PFAS sampling.

We were limited to sampling at 50 public water systems.

And we were directed to sample both raw water and finished water.

And so that's why

We have some locations where we sampled source water intakes.

And we chose to focus on large water systems because we wanted to understand how many, how do I say this, the greatest impact of our sampling.

So if you sample at a large system, you'll know

What more people are drinking.

And so we were able to complete the sampling back in 2021.

And we'll advance to the next slide.

And we did find some PFAS.

And what you'll see in this slide is the size of the circle indicates the amount of detection.

And so for example, down in Roanoke, we detected the Gen X with the large yellow circle to the left.

You might recall Newport News has had some detection.

And you might recall that Northern Virginia has had some detections.

And so we have 45 water systems that were tested during that period of time.

Now, if you compare those results against the proposed MCLs that EPA has put together,

We have four detections of PFOA above the proposed MCL, six detections of PFOS, and one location where there's been detection of GenX.

So phase two sampling started in 2022.

And the goal was to collect 400 entry point samples from public water systems.

So much more ambitious trying to get a handle on the water quality that is going to water system customers.

Recall that some of the tests

that we did were on raw water so that's untreated water that's source water so it's not necessarily exactly what folks are drinking.

We're looking at using EPA method 533 that gives us 25 PFAS that are monitoring

We started sampling back in July last year.

We actually hired a contractor and we said this will be great.

They'll get the work done for us.

It didn't go so well.

The contractor collected about 45 samples and things kind of ground to a halt.

So there was actually two groups of samples.

And actually, we'll skip this.

So we had phase 2.1, which was samples that were collected last year.

And those were samples that were collected by the contractor.

The contractor was based around Roanoke, so you might notice a lot of their samples were in that part of the state.

And then phase 2.2 are samples that have been collected by our staff

across the state.

You might notice that there aren't too many samples around Richmond.

It turns out that the laboratory rejected a whole bunch of samples that were collected by our Richmond field office and so those were recollected just last week and so that's moving right along and so we have good coverage across the state.

And so of the sample results that we have, we have 245 sample results, about 16 of those had detections that were above two parts, I'm sorry, four parts per trillion.

Some of those are the PFOA and PFOS and some other of the

Regulated contaminants.

So it's around five and a half percent of the samples were above four parts per trillion.

So that's good news, I think.

So relatively few have levels that are gonna be a problem.

So we've completed the quality assurance and quality control of those samples.

We're working on getting those shared with the water system so they can see their results.

And we're putting together a sample summary that we intend to release in November this year.

There are some additional follow-up samples that need to be collected.

So that'll take a little while to

to collect those samples and get the results in.

You'll be interested to know the turnaround time has been typically four weeks, which is pretty slow for laboratory analysis.

The standard turnaround time is two weeks.

So laboratory capacity has been a problem.

and has been a challenge for us.

So a summary of last year's results.

So PFOA, none were over four parts.

PFOS, we had two detections, in other words, two locations.

and Gen X was one detection that was the same location as phase one that was Western Virginia Water Authority and none for the other contaminants, which is good news.

Oops.

Okay.

And so

And just to emphasize, the phase one results can be found on our website.

And they were contained in the reports that were reported to the General Assembly.

And later this year, we're gonna have a summary report of the phase two results, probably beginning of November.

So with the sampling, what we're really trying to figure out is who's going to have to spend money to meet the expected rule that's coming out.

In Virginia, when EPA implements its rule, we'll have up to three years to put that rule in place in Virginia.

And so

Once we have an idea of who has an issue that needs some additional treatment or some additional follow-up and engineering, what kind of resources might be available?

And as the person from EPA was saying, Zach was saying that EPA has pushed out a lot of money, unprecedented amounts of money to the states.

And so all the states are receiving money and in Virginia,

What we call that DWSRF is the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund.

So this is part of the grant funding that EPA gives to Virginia.

On average, Virginia gets somewhere around 17.9 to 18.1 million in the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund.

And that program is a loan program where Virginia can provide a water system, some financial assistance,

and provide low interest loans below market rates to try and get some repairs and infrastructure upgrades.

So the supplemental is new money.

So in addition to that 17.9 to 18.1 million historical average, they're kicking in a lot of extra money for the next few years.

And so we've got an additional 29 million that we can do for construction loans or low interest loans

or we can just give the money out as an interest free loan or just give the money as sort of a grant, if you will.

There's also a section for lead service line replacement and we've got a special section on emerging contaminants.

And so this money will roll through FY 26 and that just means from July of the year through June 30th of the next year.

We also have an emerging contaminants small and disadvantaged communities grant, excuse me, that's a total of $30 million.

And so we're working right now to give EPA a work plan on how we intend to spend that money.

It's gonna start with sampling, more sampling to try and identify the places that need the resources and the money based on the EPA rule.

And that kind of gives you an overview of the money.

And then some people ask, well, how do I access that money?

And so the typical application process, it starts with an application.

Obviously you say, we got an issue, we want some money.

And then we put it into a bucket and we evaluate that.

And then we send out your approved, or this is what we can offer from the state to help you out.

That usually starts applications

We accept them year round, but we evaluate them all at the same time and score them.

So it's kind of a ranked process.

And to give you some perspective, even though we've got a lot of extra money and we have a fair amount of money, we always never have enough money to help all those that want the money.

And in fact, last year we got over

Almost $1 billion in infrastructure requests for improvement at drinking water systems in Virginia.

And so we don't have nearly $1 billion in funding resources.

And so that just sort of gives you a perspective of some of the infrastructure needs in Virginia on our public water systems.

Because all of the questions will be compiled, if you want to just mention who the speaker or organization that it's directed towards in it, that would be helpful.

And then this is also open while the presentations are running, so if any questions come up as you're going, just feel free to pop them in there.

And I also wanted to mention for the final Q&A, we have the pleasure of having another

Person from DEQ, Jeffrey Steers, who is the Director of Communications with the DEQ to share more about DEQ's PFAS occurrence map and some of the data that they're collecting on that side.

Hello?

There we go.

So our next speaker is Michael McAvoy.

He's the executive director of the Western Virginia Water Authority.

We've heard about them already a little bit.

This is a regional water and wastewater utility provider serving 180,000 customers, almost double the size of RWSA.

They're in the Roanoke area.

He's a native of Florida and has degrees in environmental engineering and more than 30 years experience with electric and water utilities in Florida, Georgia, and Virginia.

He's worked as an appointee under three different governors.

That shows a lot of longevity to various environmental advisory agencies.

And we're very glad to have Mr. McAvoy to update us on what's happening in Roanoke.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'm going to share my screen here real quick.

And

Okay, great.

Let me get it in the, there we go.

Probably a little better.

So I have a case study for you today.

Again, my name is Mike McAvoy.

I'm the Executive Director of the Western Virginia Water Authority.

And we're gonna talk about our efforts to remediate

The HFPODA compound, more commonly known as GenX, this is one of the PFAS compounds, although it's not as common as the two PFOA and PFOS that the other speakers have mentioned today.

This has a limited application in manufacturing and has some other unique qualities, and I'll talk about that a little bit.

Again, I'll give you a little background about the authority and where we're at and how this compound has affected one of our water sources.

We're actually very blessed in our part of the state to have multiple water sources serving our customers.

And then also talk about the efforts to figure out where this had come from and what we're doing to remediate it.

So let me move on.

So again, a little background about us.

The authority was created in 2004 by the City of Roanoke and Roanoke County.

We're a regional water provider, water and wastewater provider created under the Authorities Act here in Virginia.

and we really created to provide a regional focus on water and wastewater assets in the Roanoke Valley.

Up until that time there had been some regional cooperation and collaboration but just as often there might have been arguments about water sources and wastewater treatment different things like that and our elected officials in the early 2000s decided that we had had to take a different approach so all those assets from the city of Roanoke and Roanoke County were

consolidated into one new authority.

We serve, again, about 180,000 citizens, as the chair mentioned, and that's through about 70,000 service connections.

Our membership has grown.

Besides the City of Roanoke and Roanoke County, Franklin County and Bostock County are now member localities.

And we also have contractual relationships with six other

localities and authorities.

That includes the City of Salem.

We treat all the wastewater for the City of Salem.

They run their own water system.

We jointly own a water treatment plant with the Bedford Regional Water Authority that takes water out of Smith Mountain Lake and serves some of our customers in Franklin County.

And so you can see over the time we've grown and really tried to stick to our mandate of being a regional provider of water service to this part of the state.

We are the largest utility in the western part of Virginia.

And again, I mentioned we're fortunate.

We have really good water resources in our part of the state and our water supply is primarily through two large surface water reservoirs.

The Carbons Cove, which is our largest reservoir, that's a 6.4 billion gallon surface water reservoir and it has a associated treatment plant with that.

And then the Spring Hollow Reservoir, which I'll talk about in detail here in a minute.

We also have a couple of those smaller reservoirs.

Again, we have a joint operation with Bedford Regional Water Authority on Smith Mountain Lake, and we also have considerable groundwater resources, so we're somewhat fortunate.

So, specifically about Spring Hollow, Spring Hollow is a 3.2 billion gallon water storage reservoir, and it's what's known as a side stream reservoir.

and what that means is we pump water out of the Roanoke River into the the impoundment there so it's not a typical I think maybe what you guys see in your part of the state run a river reservoir where the the dam is actually creating the the impoundment for on a river we actually pump from the Roanoke River into the

into the impoundment.

And that actually has some advantages for us and was helpful in this case as well.

What's also unique about Spring Hollow is we are located at the top of the Roanoke River watershed.

The Roanoke River starts in Roanoke, Montgomery, and Floyd counties.

There's a north and south fork that come together.

And I'll have a map for you a little bit later to show you that.

But they come together.

right near our intake on the Roanoke River.

And we have very little development above us.

There are only, there's less than five permitted entities discharging the Roanoke River.

All those are very small, less than 100,000 gallons a day, which may sound like a lot, but in terms of a discharge permit to a surface water, those are small.

It's mostly agricultural, very limited, even residential development above.

So typically a very pristine watershed, which made our situation very unique when we started investigating this.

And just another kind of fun fact, the Roanoke River watershed is actually the second largest watershed in Virginia after the James.

So it runs from, again, the upper part of the

Roanoke area all the way down through Smith Mountain Lake, Carr Reservoir, Roanoke Rapids, and eventually discharges out to Albemarle Sound in North Carolina.

So this reservoir supports an 18 million gallon per day water treatment plant that up until we started experiencing this issue typically produced about 8 million gallons a day of water for our customers.

and I'll talk about a little bit about more about our remediation efforts but since we were on this slide I just wanted to say that again one of the advantages of having a side stream reservoir is you can turn the pumps off to it and so when we realized there was a problem with the Roanoke River we stopped adding water to the reservoir and we also reduced production by about half and I'll talk about that a little bit more in detail.

So kind of what was going on?

Well, our friends from the health department mentioned that PFAS regulation is being developed.

And until recently, within the last couple of years, there just has not been a lot of data available about PFAS.

EPA is, the gentleman from EPA that spoke earlier,

you know, had the EPA roadmap on this.

This is EPA's really first significant effort to regulate these compounds.

They previously looked at PFOA and PFOS, and those were the most common compounds that would be detected in water supplies.

But that detection numbers were low.

There was just very little data on this whole class of compounds, even though it's been they've been in use since since the late 1940s.

So by

By drinking water standards and by the drinking water industry, this effort has been moving very quickly.

Typically, EPA does not regulate various chemical parameters without

quite a bit of research and typically these involve multiple universities doing multiple trials and everything like that.

But in this case, because the concern is significant, they've moved a lot quicker than they have.

And so that's really required a lot of effort by the regulated community, the drinking water utilities to kind of figure out what's going on here.

As Bob Edelman mentioned earlier in his presentation, there just wasn't a lot of data available on these compounds and when EPA signaled that they would probably start looking at these compounds as part of their unregulated contaminant rule number five sampling event, which is underway right now, we started looking at these compounds too and said,

and we realized we didn't have much data on them.

The EPA had just come out where they were proposing a new method, it hadn't been finalized yet at the time, that was more sensitive and would get you down to very small part per trillion levels.

If you're not familiar with part per trillion, to give you an idea of the scope you're talking about there, a part per trillion is equivalent to about one second in 32,000 years.

So we're talking about very small amounts in very, very, very small analytical techniques.

So it takes a lot of very expensive equipment and know-how to kind of measure down to those levels.

So anyway, we went ahead and tested our major water sources for these PFAS compounds ahead of the sampling.

And as Bob

confirmed the health department also did its own sampling a little later as a follow-up.

And we saw kind of what the health department saw that in most cases we did not have any of the PFAS compounds that are part of that test panel.

The current method 533, I believe we tested for

29 analytes and so at our carbon scope facility which is our primary primary source we did not have any

PPOS compounds present.

We didn't have any present in our Crystal Springs facility.

At our Spring Hollow facility, which is the one we're talking about here today, we were clear for all of those compounds except for the GenX compound.

HFPODA is the chemical name.

It's commonly referred to GenX.

That's the trade name for this compound and it's used in the

production of fluoro-parliment.

So I'll talk about that a little later.

So we had this one kind of perplexing result and it really didn't make a lot of sense to us.

So we did some re-sampling and again the health department confirmed our sampling and it was present in our reservoir.

So we started researching the chemical.

It's

Again, it's not a end product in of itself.

HFPODA is a manufacturing aid.

So companies that make fluoridated polymers, primarily plastics and other, there's some greases and lubricants and things like that that are made with this process, GenX.

This chemical is used in aid in that and typically is recovered

from the manufacturing process.

So this is not something like if you went out, many of the PFAS compounds are in clothing, they're in fast food wrappers, food packaging, things like that.

And if you go off and take a sample of those, you'll find those.

This compound typically is recovered in the manufacturing process and actually reused to some extent, I think about 85% is typically reused.

And it's just not something you'll find in the finished product.

It's generally been associated with manufacturing and there have been two really prominent cases of GenX in the environment that's been well studied.

And they're both associated with the Comoros company, which is a successor company to DuPont.

One being, I think the gentleman from EK had mentioned this, the Washington Works facility in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and another facility that they own and operate down in North Carolina in the Cape Fear River system.

So both of those are pretty well studied.

And certainly there's nothing like that upstream of Spring Hollow.

So again, we were a little surprised to see this compound.

The reason that it's used in this process, this was actually a replacement for PFOA.

PFOA has some well-documented health effects.

And again, this is one of the two compounds that the EPA is most worried about.

And PFOA can accumulate in the body.

It's bioaccumulative.

It has a number of negative effects on the body.

GenX, HFPODA, was actually considered a less toxic alternative.

It is not a cancer-causing compound, but recent research has shown that it does have negative effects on liver function, so it's certainly a concern, and it does not, again, bioaccumulate, so the Chemours company actually saw this change from PFOA to GenX as a positive.

However, I think we're learning now though that this chemical is very mobile in the environment.

It's a small chain PFAS compound as opposed to PFOA, which is a large chain compound.

It moves quite easily in the aquatic environment, tends to stay in the water column and is difficult to keep out of water.

At the time, there was no EPA guidance on this.

This was another thing that, again, there had been two fairly well documented cases of HFPODA contamination, again, in West Virginia and North Carolina, but there was guidance, there was really no guidance on this compound.

from EPA.

They were working on that and it's in some and we'll talk about in a second.

A couple of states though had undertaken some work and North Carolina had established a health advisor of 140 parts per trillion.

Michigan had established a health advisory of 300 parts per trillion.

And our sample results were in the upper 50s, low 60 parts per trillion range.

which even at that point was still below the health advisory for PFOA and PFOS of 70 parts per trillion.

So we were trying to figure out where it was coming from but the available information indicated that probably would not necessarily trigger actions that a health advisory typically would.

However, when EPA published their health advisory

A few months later, that health advisory set that number at 10 part per trillion.

So right away, we began coordinating with the Virginia Department of Health on public notifications, some increased sampling.

And we asked to help with some help on funding a treatment study at the Spring Hollow plant.

And they were very nice to help fund that.

We all started working with DEQ on investigating you know this is really allowed because it's publications health advisory allowed DEQ to become much more active with us on trying to track this source down.

Again,

You would not expect to see this compound in the upper part of the watershed because there's just not that kind of overall polymer manufacturing going on there up in the upper part of the watershed.

So DEQ has also been very helpful.

And we still, so we have formed a kind of advisory team between VDH and DEQ and that group still meets today every two weeks to continue the research and investigation of this compound.

Part of the effort we did is we started sampling the Roanoke River.

What you see here is a picture of what's called a passive sampler and essentially it's a membrane that allows water to pass through it and it's that membrane specifically to catch PFOS type compounds and using this technology we were able to confirm that

The GenX compound was indeed in the Roanoke River and essentially what had happened is we had pumped it into the Spring Hollow Reservoir and that's why it was present in the reservoir.

A lot of our grab samples just going out and sampling the river were non-detect and that's because the Roanoke River is fairly large.

These concentrations are small.

There's other interferences in sampling river water.

It's a little more difficult to do than clean drinking water.

And so these passive samplers are really helpful in allowing us to identify the source of this compound.

And it turns out the compound was being released by a company in Elliston, Virginia, which is actually in Montgomery County, Prochem.

They actually are a company that makes and services industrial wastewater treatment technology.

And what had happened was the Chemours facility in Washington, up in Parkersburg, the Washington Works facility,

had been using technologies provided by Prochem as part of their treatment for GenX and Prochem would service those treatment units in their facility in Elliston and GenX compound was being released in their wastewater and then eventually out to the Roanoke River where it was being pumped in the Spring Hollow Reservoir.

Both companies have

admitted that they had done that and they've stopped doing that so we're right now we're in a phase where we're remediating the reservoir but we're also monitoring the river and I have to report that with the cessation of the discharges of the river we're starting to see those numbers in the river decrease.

So here's a map of the area and I know it's probably difficult

Let me go back up there.

Sorry.

Let's see.

You probably see my cursor here.

So the the dark blue line running through the map is the main stem of the Roanoke River.

And you can kind of see the north and south forks where they come together.

The dark red line is the Montgomery County, Roanoke County line.

And the large kind of blue blob here is the Spring Hollow Reservoir.

This little purple pen right here is our intake on the Roanoke River.

And these are other pins or sample points that we were monitoring to try to figure out where this compound was coming from.

And eventually we tracked it back to the Pro-Chem facility here in Elliston.

So again, their wastewater was containing the compound and it was being released out into the Roanoke River and we were pumping it into the reservoir.

So on the remediation side, so that kind of was on the investigative side.

DEQ is still doing a number of activities.

They're still monitoring the river.

They're doing fish tissue collection and analysis to see if this compound was taken up in the local fish populations.

The health department is currently sampling about 20 wells near the ProChem facility.

There's not a lot of, again, not a lot of home sites or people just using wells up in that area, but they have a program that they just about a month ago started sampling those wells to see if the GenX compound has made it into the ground.

So we're waiting on those results.

So there's not really good ways to treat PFAS compounds in general.

In drinking water, you're not destroying any of these compounds.

Essentially, all you're doing is filtering them out and transferring them to another media.

So it's essentially a filtration process and you can use a couple of different technologies for that.

The most typical is granule activated carbon.

Some facilities use reverse osmosis and some are using some specialized ionic resin compounds.

This is another filtration process but instead of using activated carbon it uses some specially designed resins.

The common theme though for all those is those PFAS compounds are not being destroyed.

Essentially, they're just being removed from the drinking water and that creates a waste product that still has to be dealt with.

Fortunately for granulactic carbon, that product, that carbon can be

treated at very high temperatures that do destroy the PFAS compounds.

So for most drinking water utilities, granular activated carbon is going to be the choice of treatment and that material will be sent off site for thermal destruction and then new media brought in.

But you can kind of see this is a very

Expensive from an O&M standpoint because you're depending on the type of compound you have you'll be changing out the carbon quite frequently and then there's all the transportation costs to send it off site and have it destroyed and reformulated and brought back so there's a significant greenhouse gas component of this as well energy and greenhouse gas component here that is just being explored right now

So we selected activated carbon for two reasons.

One is we had an existing GAC system.

It's kind of a rendering of that here at the plant.

It was used for a different purpose for essentially polishing our finished water.

But we felt like we could adapt it to do GenX filtration treatment.

But we could only run about 4 million gallons a day through it and because the process relies somewhat on some contact time you have to just have so many minutes of the water in contact with the media to make that work.

It's not the best method for, I'll say, GenX treatment, but it is the most practical.

GenX, again, is a short chain molecule.

Those aren't as amenable to removal in activated carbon as the long chain ones are, but it does work.

And using this technology, we've been able to keep our finished water below the 10 part per trillion standard of the health advisor.

We've also, so I think I mentioned early on in my presentation that typically we'd run about eight million gallons a day out of this facility.

We've reduced it to four because of the available treatment technology and we've reconfigured our system to make up that other four million gallons from our department's code facility.

So when EPA issued their health advisories, a couple of different suggestions they had made were, you know, one just stop

using the water that's affected by PFAS compounds.

That's not very practical for most water utility.

Look at alternative sources.

So that's what we did.

We shifted production where we could and then look at treatment, which is the other choice we did there.

So we currently have a design build project underway, which will restore the plant capacity.

It'll fix some of the bottlenecks we have in the current GAC system.

It'll actually allow us also to load more

Carbon in each unit.

Right now we're limited to how much depth of media we can have in each unit because of the backwashing concerns.

So this project's about $12.5 million and it should allow us to essentially meet the 10 park per trillion health advisory value and operate at the capacity we typically would do there.

It has come at a price though.

The activated carbon is expensive.

And as you can imagine, when EPA published these regulations, all of a sudden there was many water utilities across the country that needed to start doing something.

And they hadn't previously been doing anything that drove the price of activated carbon up quite a bit.

So we've seen quite an increase in our plant operation and maintenance costs.

So one of the other things that we undertook was a pretty extensive customer outreach and this was in conjunction with the Health Department and they were very helpful at some of the suggestions we do there.

We are collecting weekly samples and posting them on our website.

We are able to get those, you know, Bob mentioned that there's a

Constraint in getting samples analyzed and turned back around.

Typically it's about four weeks and we've been able to get these done on about a weekly basis.

So we worked with our lab and again, it's an additional cost there, but we think this data is important for our customers.

We've done five separate communications directly to our customers, updating them on the investigative phase and what we're doing on remediation and those are available on our website to look at.

We have a dedicated telephone number and email address for customers to use just for this topic and

our director of public outreach is actually personally returning each of those calls and emails and we are looking at that data and most people I think are just mostly wanting to know what the other questions really are around what's happening what the health effects of this compound are what's being done to remediate it

So the questions, some people call in, they don't realize where their water source even is, so we start with that.

We look them up on the GIS and tell them whether they're in the Spring Hollow service area or not.

But I think most people have been pretty understanding and appreciate the amount of information we're making available.

And then again, with DEQ, we're continuing to monitor the Roanoke River, and again, I'm happy to report that the concentrations seem to be diminishing there.

and as I mentioned earlier we're also having coordination meetings with DEQ and BDH every two weeks and I think Jeff Spears is our speaker later in this morning and Jeff is the DEQ point person there on those meetings so Jeff's been incredibly helpful through this process.

And with that, I understand we're taking questions later in the program.

We are now at a very well-deserved break until 11.

We're gonna catch back a couple of minutes here.

So please mingle and meet and have some refreshments and use any facilities needed and continue to add your slider questions while you can, 427-8983 is the number.

Maybe Bella can stick that number back up there because that will be great fun later to hear these questions answered.

And I'm really excited with what we've learned already.

Anything else we need?

Time for a stretch.

Thank you everyone for taking your seats again.

We will get zooming along to the second half of our program.

I'm thrilled to introduce Dave Tungate, who is one of our local water experts.

He joined the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority as water manager in 2012.

He's now director of operations and environmental services, manages water, wastewater, and laboratory departments.

and he leads a group of 50 laboratory professionals who work round the clock to keep the municipal water and wastewater operational in the county and the city.

Thank you, Dave, also for being my friend and participant with the risk analysis at the EPA.

That was a really great day.

We all learned a lot about communications and how to deal with these high hazard events like when you find a detection in your water system.

Dave earned a bachelor's degree from Purdue University and a master's from University of Illinois.

And we grabbed him from South Bend.

So I'm very, very glad you're here.

Thank you, Ann.

So as Mike said, Mike McAvoy, who is a Western Virginia Water Authority,

Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority was established in 1972 with a joint action by the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County.

We provide wholesale drinking water and wastewater services to Albemarle County and the City of Charlottesville.

We have approximately 100 employees, an annual budget of $48 million and $325 million in a five-year CIP.

We provide drinking water and wastewater services to, we sell to two customers.

Those of us in the wholesale industry realized we sell to the city of Charlottesville and Albemarle County Service Authority and they deal with the retail customers.

So no retail provider sends us a check.

The city and the county send us their checks.

We provide about 10 million gallons of drinking water a day and about 10 million gallons of wastewater services to

the county and the city.

We have about 130,000 people.

Our board of directors, we are lucky to have Mike Gaffney, who's our chairman of our board of directors here in the audience, and Ann Mallek, who also serves on our board.

We have five water supply reservoirs, South Havana Reservoir, Sugar Hollow Reservoir, and Ragon Mountain Reservoir.

And these three reservoirs form what we call our urban system, which provide water to

the City of Charlottesville and then the urban ring around the City of Charlottesville.

We have a reservoir in Crozet, Beaver Creek Reservoir that supplies the Crozet area and we have Total Creek Reservoir in Scottsville that provides water source to the Scottsville area.

Our largest reservoir is 1.3 billion gallons and it's the Ragon Mountain Reservoir just west of us here.

So Mike has us beat

So our water supply resources, again, we're showing graphically what we talked about earlier.

In the upper left-hand corner, we have the Sugar Hollow Reservoir, which has a watershed mainly in the Shenandoah National Park.

Our largest watershed is the South Havana Reservoir, which has approximately 260 square miles.

We have a water treatment plant on the north fork of the Rivanna River, which is at the very northern part of the county.

It is on the North Rivanna River.

And then you can see our Ragon Mountain and then our Totea Creek Reservoir.

And much like Mike McAvoy was talking about, our Ragon Mountain Reservoir, which is our largest, is an offline reservoir.

So it's not filled with the watershed.

We transfer water currently from Sugar Hollow Reservoir into our Ragon Mountain Reservoir.

We have six water treatment plants in the county to provide water services.

Our largest water treatment plant is our South Ravana water treatment plant, which is approximately 12 million gallons a day.

We have a treatment plant on the grounds of UVA, our observatory treatment plant.

Our North Ravana plant

which is again on the north end of the county.

These three plants feed our urban area.

And then we have a plant in Scottsville, a plant in Crozet, and then we have a small groundwater system that serves the Redhill community.

And our Redhill facility is actually a groundwater treatment plant.

We talk about, our VDH friends, we talk about permitted capacity.

So in this table, we can see our South Urbana plant is permitted for 12 million gallons a day.

That's as much as we can produce through that facility, but we actually have our 2022 daily average production.

And so we can see in this case, our South Urbana plant, while it's able to produce 12 million gallons a day in 2022, our average production was only 7.98.

I like to describe this to folks as if your car can go 100 miles an hour, you don't drive it 100 miles an hour.

So we have a total urban water production capacity of a little over 21 million gallons, and our average total was a little over 9 million gallons for 2022.

We talk about this and in light of we had tropical stormophilia this weekend.

We were dry coming into that.

Much of our watersheds received two to two and a half inches of water over the course of Friday night into Sunday morning.

This is a picture of our South Urbana Reservoir, the water quality.

As you can see, the water is relatively clear and that that's not

All the story for the water treatment that has to happen.

But again, it can look like this.

And then after a storm, same picture, same place, it can look like that.

And again, the take home message here is that we have water professionals working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

And our customers, whether it be you guys visiting or that you live here, you don't notice the difference.

We notice it because it looks like that, but the finished water quality never changes.

And that's real important to us.

Our drinking water operators, the people that staff our facilities, are licensed through the state of Virginia.

They have to pass a series of education, hands-on requirements, and then a series of exams to become licensed water treatment plant operators.

The two main concerns in drinking water treatment, I'd like to show this picture, particularly to the middle schoolers, because I don't like the one on the right.

So on the left is giardia, right?

We'll talk about camping, beaver fever.

That stuff can be inactivated with chlorine, because that's one of our treatment chemicals that we use.

On the right, that's Cryptosporidium.

They're in tiny cysts.

And so to tell the complete story is that you have disinfection, you have chemicals that you disinfect the water with, and then you have filters.

and that's what the Cryptosporidium is trapped with, filters.

There was an incident in 1993, oops.

I do, as anyone will attest, we were talking earlier in the lobby, any chance that we have in the drinking water industry to talk to a community, to talk about what we do.

And again, it's important to the community, but we don't often get a chance to talk about this stuff.

Okay.

Okay.

Today we're going to share some PFAS results that we've had here in the Rivanna system by our treatment plants.

So we're going to share six complete sets of data we've been testing.

We've been testing for PFAS starting in 2014 with the UCMR3.

And that topic, the unregulated contaminant monitoring rule has come up a couple of times here.

We are most, the most recent sampling event is UCMR5.

That's started in 2023 and goes till 2025.

Rivanna Water and Stew Authority, our first set of samples were collected in May of 2023.

So we'll see that data up here.

Typically the process for the EPA to establish a maximum contaminant level, right?

That's the level in drinking water that you can't go over.

It involves a chemical candidate list.

So there's a list of chemicals that are established by the EPA and then the regulators decide which of those chemicals that you want to regulate.

And then they'll say, well, hey, we have a contaminant candidate list.

Let's get an unregulated contaminant monitoring list together.

And that's usually no more than 30 chemicals.

Then they ask, in the past, it was only larger water utilities.

Why?

Because it's a rather significant financial obligation to collect these samples.

And so they were asking the large water system to collect these samples.

And what it just does is it gives everyone some relative exposure.

Hey, is it really out there?

Who has it?

Who doesn't have it?

So, UCMR3, which was for us in 2014, did have PFAS in it.

In UCMR4, which was from 2018 to 2020, did not have PFAS.

It had alcohols, it had disinfection byproducts, it had some metals.

UCMR3 had PFAS, UCMR4 did not, and now UCMR5 has PFAS again.

And we're looking for 29 PFAS derivatives and then lithium.

Are we getting there?

So as we talk about PFAS sampling and

how PFAS is very much present in our environment, whether it's food wrappers, straws, clothing, cars, upholstery, carpets.

When we collect a UCMR5 sample now, the samples actually collected and then there's a field trip blank and a lab trip blank.

So we get a cooler, it has 10, 15 bottles in it.

And then there's a set of bottles identical that were created at the laboratory.

And those bottles don't get touched by the sampler.

They stay with the cooler all the time.

That's to determine if there was a cross-contamination in transportation or in sample collection.

Perfect.

And then they have what's called a field trip blank.

So we take PFAS-free water and make it

make these other triplanks at those sample location to be sure there wasn't a sampling error by our samplers who have to not be wearing Gore-Tex clothes, no makeups, no cosmetics, no sunscreen, have to wear nitrile gloves when they collect those samples.

Again, to ensure that the sample is collected is representative of the water it's tested.

So, okay, we've,

Talked about Jardine and Crypto, and again, our drinking water requirements.

So at the 10th of the month, the previous month's information is due to VDH.

And we have to submit the daily volume of water that we pump, the chemicals that we use at each of our facilities, how much we've added, filter water, turbidity, temperatures.

We submit a whole set of data.

and what we call our monthly operating report.

And really what this means is just to educate everyone that we're just not out there flying blind, doing what we think we need to do.

We submit this stuff, the data is submitted to VDH and they review it to determine that yes, you are doing what you're supposed to be doing and using the chemicals.

Emerging Contaminants, part of our talk today, we've been talking about PFAS, which is one of the emerging contaminants, but from a water utilities perspective, we have a lot of other things on our mind, along with the VDH and EPA.

We are looking for PFAS now, we're at dioxane, we've been looking for glyphosate, submission to the issue of nanoparticles with microplastics, which was something that we had all talked about a couple of years ago, which are just microscopic plastic particles that you find in single-use plastic containers.

Endocrine disruptors was a big thing 10 years ago, pharmaceutical byproducts, personal care products, and again, sinotoxins generated from blue-green algae.

So PFAS is just one part of the emerging contaminants that we're keeping our eye on that we're dealing with.

Repeat again some of the

Other presenters have talked about PFOS.

We all know what it is, but we'd like to say to the general public is things that make products more water resistant, stain resistant, and friction resistant.

And pretty much of any of that's out there, it's a PFOS chemical.

So the EPA proposed standard was to propose two maximum contaminant levels for PFOA and PFOS.

and a hazard index for four other PFAS chemicals.

The EPA, as of September, the EPA has two approved tests for PFAS in drinking water, methods 533 and 537.1.

and these can only detect 29 PFAS chemicals.

There are, depending on what you read, 6,000 or 9,000 individual PFAS chemicals, but there's only two methods right now for drinking water analysis and they come up for 29 of those chemicals.

Ironically enough independently, I think this is the third time you've all seen this slide.

What I like to talk about is one part per trillion.

We talk about how we collect the samples and how we have protective, we have nitrile gloves that collect the samples we don't wear.

We're not allowed to have sunscreen on and other preventative measures that we take to collect the samples.

But again,

Parper Trillion is one inch in 16 million miles, one penny in $10 billion, or one second in 32,000 years.

Very, very small amounts.

So actually, in this room in July of 2012, this community decided to put in to install granular activated carbon contactors for disinfection byproduct treatment.

At the time, we made a decision

to treat disinfection byproducts.

Also knowing that the granular activated carbon contactors would provide additional benefits for emerging contaminants.

And in 2012, we weren't talking about PFAS, but we knew that it was

The granular activated carbon provided some resiliency for this community and so we are reaping the benefits of that now where we have these granular activated carbon contactors.

What you see here is one of our drinking water operators collecting a sample at the bottom of one of our granular activated contactors.

at our South Urbana plant.

And just, I also like to include this too for perspective.

He's about six foot tall.

These contactors hold 40,000 pounds of GAC each, and they're about 26 feet tall and 20 feet in diameter.

So in 2012, we started a project where we added these granular activated carbon contactors at all of our facilities, all of our surface water plants.

So at any given moment, if we add up all the pounds of GAC, we have 550,000 pounds of GAC in service at any given moment.

The operating costs for us, we spend about a million dollars a year replacing granular activated carbon.

It's expensive, it's not cheap to do, but it provides us some protection from PFAS and then also

The primary goal was for disinfection byproducts.

If you looked at our list before, our Redhill facility is not listed here.

We have a project under design now to add a contractor to our Redhill community.

That facility serves nine homes in the Redhill School on the south end of town.

In the drinking water industry, we talk about powder activated carbon and granular activated carbon.

The vessels that you saw here were granular activated carbon.

I like to describe them as black grape nuts to get a perspective of the size.

And that's what's on the right hand side here.

On the left hand side is powder activated carbon and it really

is the consistency of flour.

It's a fine particle and the difference is powder activated carbon is fed at the treatment plant and is used once.

It settles out in the plant residuals, it passes through and it's a one-time use.

It costs about a dollar a pound.

The granular activated carbon sits in those big vessels.

We can use them about a year, year and a half before we have to change it out and it's about a dollar and a half a pound.

The advantage of the powder-activated carbon, it's just less expensive.

Disadvantage is it's a one-time pass-through.

The advantage of the graying or activated carbon is it lasts longer, but it required $25 million of capital improvement to build those vessels and the pumps to make that happen.

We're sharing some of our results here for our North Ravana treatment plant and we had a detection in May of 2023 as part of our UCMR5 where we detected PFOA at 25 and PFOS at six and a half so on the left is a summary of

the sample events and the results.

So I'm standing in the way maybe.

We started sampling in 2018 at North Rivanna.

The first set of samples were BDL, which is below lab detection level for both raw and finished.

We've used the term raw and finished.

Raw is the water coming into the plant, finished is what's going out of the plant.

And you see we collected a sample again in approximately one year later, and then we kept collecting samples every six months.

UCMR5 compliance sample was collected in May of 2023.

And as a part of UCMR5, you're required to collect a finished water sample.

So that's as to as it's leaving the plant.

So we did not collect.

No sample was collected on the raw side.

We don't know what was coming in that day.

We just know what went out that day.

And we got these sample results back July 4th, about 10 o'clock at night.

July 5th, we shut the plant down.

It took six weeks to get the results back.

July 5th, we shut the water treatment plant down, changed our production, we were able to remove water from another water treatment plant to the North Ravana area, and we collected repeat samples.

We said, hold on a second here.

We have no sampling history.

A really substantial detection of PFAS at North Rivanna except for right here on 524.

Hold on, let's take some samples.

Let's see what's going on here.

So we collected samples on 7-10.

I'm sorry, we collected samples on 7-7, which was a Friday, and on 7-10, which was Monday.

And on the seven samples, we had no detection, both raw and finished.

There was nothing, no PFAS detected.

But on Monday, the 10th, we did detect some PFAS on the raw side.

But then on the finished side, what went out to our customers was below detection level.

Why is that?

We processed all the water through the GAC contactors, and then GAC removed it.

Again, the PFOS, PFOA and PFOS standard, proposed standards are four.

They are not necessarily, they're not enforceable at this point, but we took actions to shut that plant down until we could confirm the results.

I have three minutes left.

The story here, South Ravana treatment plant, again, back to 2014 with UCMR5.

A lot of below detection level results here.

Two very low detections on the raw side for PFBA and PFPEA.

Observatory, again, a lot of below detection levels.

Crozet, again, same thing.

A lot of numbers below detection level.

On the raw side, in August, we had 8.0, and it was two non-regulated.

That's not true, because the PFBA is in the hazard index.

But again, two low levels of PFAS.

Scottsville, again, we had some lower levels, but in UCMR 5, which was 524 and 589.

I'm told I'm done.

I'll end just with that.

If the PFAS standards are approved, the cost of water treatment will more than likely go up, whether it's Rivanna or Western Virginia or anyone else, because the cost of treatment.

Thank you very much, Dave.

That's a great good news session here.

And continuing the good news, we have our next speaker, James Moneymaker, and he is the project officer with DEQ's Clean Water Financing and Assistance Program, which, as we know, is a very important funding source for clean water projects in the Commonwealth.

He has degrees in environmental studies and his interest in environmental

The environment comes from growing up on a farm and volunteering his time with the old SOS program, which was I was involved in that, too, taking less than thrilled middle schoolers in the winter out to a stream to collect bugs and count and things like that.

But it was a great experience.

And thank you for doing it.

He has experience also as a conservation technician with the Headwater Soil and Water Conservation District in Augusta County and helping implement BMPs throughout the best management programs.

and joined DEQ in 2014 as the non-point source coordinator.

Oh boy, that's the hot seat.

So thank you very much for being here and for working with partner agencies to help us do better.

All right, well, good morning.

I feel like I'm standing in the way of lunch and a good Q&A session we're gonna have too.

So I'm gonna try to wrap up a little faster just so we have a little more time for the question and answer session.

I definitely look forward to that.

Again, my name is James Moneymaker.

I'm a project officer with DEQ's Clean Water Financing and Assistance Program.

Been with DEQ now for, shoot, probably about eight, nine years.

I've really enjoyed my time there.

I never thought I would be working with regarding PFAS issues.

I entered a program that we have at DEQ called the Emerging Leaders Program, kind of a program to

help mentor future staff members that wanna go into managing other staff and just to advance within the agency.

And this was two years ago, I started into that.

And one of the, of all the people that entered, we had four team project options you could take on.

And one I ended up on was PFAS.

Most of us knew nothing about PFAS at that time, because we work in different areas of DEQ.

I had always been non-regulatory, just working with grant programs and things like that, and other folks in AIR, and we got to work with Mr. Jeff Steers here, and it's definitely been eye-opening.

I got to put together a survey for other states trying to determine what other states were doing as far as PFAS.

Were other states, did they have adequate staffing?

Did they have adequate funding?

So the survey kind of gave us a picture of that to help us move forward in our project to

kind of to basically help DEQ determine what we need to do as an agency moving forward and how to help train our staff as well.

Because you meet somebody in the stairwell and you're talking about PFAS and somebody would say, what is that?

And so that's just a lot of knowledge there that people are not yet familiar with.

Now, I promise I'm not going to read from all the slides, but I do want this one because it ties into the next slide to our mission statement.

At DEQ, Clean Water Financing and Assistance, where we provide cost effective funding solutions and technical assistance to localities, organizations and citizens to protect and enhance water quality in the Commonwealth.

So the first thing that most people

In our program, it seems like we're flush with money at the moment, right Karen?

It's a blessing, I guess, in many ways, but we've taken on some newer programs lately, and that is money from the American Rescue Plan Act, in which we've been able to take those funds appropriated to DEQ by the General Assembly.

And we've developed five programs out of that.

And two of those were competitive, our sewer collection system program, as well as our septic local partnership program.

And we're getting started on a lot of these projects now.

Those folks are at very different stages and we look forward to working with a lot of these partners.

And some of our other funding programs, I'll go ahead and mention a couple of the ones that are a bit smaller.

Our Water Quality Improvement Fund,

In which I used to work with that when I worked at a soil and water conservation district, but that funding source we're targeting point sources of pollution that lead to the Chesapeake Bay and

The thing about the water quality improvement funds and how that gets funded, usually you'll have, if you're lucky, a budget surplus at the state level, and they'll take 2% from that budget surplus and allocate 1% of that to DEQ for our side of the WQIF program.

And then the other 1% will go to the Department of Conservation and Recreation.

That helps to fund their agricultural best management practice cost share program, or VAX.

That's a mouthful.

So that is the WQIF.

We also have our SLAF grant program, which is our Stormwater Local Assistance Fund.

And that we get to work with a lot of localities that maybe want to do stream bank restoration or buyer retention projects, things like that.

So that is a grant program that we have available.

and I've tried to branch out a little more with that here over the last year and maybe even trying to coordinate some, do better coordination with other state agencies like VDOT and seeing where we can kind of work together and just better leverage the sources of funds that we have.

It's like with many of the VDOT projects and I'm fortunate enough to have an in since my wife works for VDOT in Salem.

and so I know that stormwater eats into a lot of their project budget.

So if DEQ, if we can help to take on some of the stormwater expenses and the locality chip in their match, then more funding can go towards the actual road and pedestrian improvements.

So we do try to branch out and be as flexible as we can

with that particular program.

But the main one I do want to mention, oh, and there is also the combined sewer overflow program.

A lot of our, there are some localities in which the General Assembly will allocate some funding to those cities that have CSO systems, so combined sewer and stormwater.

trying to fix issues there, such as I think Richmond, Alexandria, and Lynchburg are the three main CSO cities.

But I'm going to spend most of our time talking here about the Clean Water Revolving Loan Fund.

And that is where towards the end of my slides, we'll get into how we will

How the emerging contaminant monies can possibly benefit you and things like that.

Now, with the federal authorization, just wanted to give a little quick background of that.

And the purpose is basically to establish some seed money for states to set up their own

And of course, as the health department folks mentioned just a little while ago, every state and they have their own drinking water state revolving loan fund, as well as the clean water revolving loan fund.

See, some of these guys already stole my thunder talking about this earlier in the morning.

and then states will provide a 20% match to that federal grant to capitalize their state revolving fund.

The thing I like most about working with the revolving loan fund program, to me it's nice that we could offer the loans to municipalities for very low interest and the interest that they pay back goes back into the fund.

So then we can loan out to other applicants later down the road.

And then, of course, once the feds authorized the revolving loan fund, the state had to do so as well.

And just like I said, that money goes to low rates that we can loan out.

just being able to put money back into the fund from that interest.

But a little more about the Clean Water Revolving Loan Fund.

Of course, the main focus is wastewater, but unlike some other states, DEQ is kind of, we've branched out over the years and we're now able to offer more than just

Wastewater Loans.

We can do stormwater, maybe some land conservation, things like that.

So it is nice to be able to offer that.

But typically, there's never enough money.

You all know how that goes.

We can never fund.

We've got with us Karen Duran sitting back there, our program manager.

I'm trying to remember how much in funding requests we received just this year.

612 million and we only had a hundred and oh

I'm forgetting off the top of my head.

Nowhere near that that we could possibly loan out.

So then we have to start going through a process to eliminate some of those projects just based on what language is in the state code, whether some localities they'll submit to multiple projects.

So if they have more than one project, we can just rank them and maybe just only accept the highest ranking project

and then they can apply in a future year for some of the other ones.

So we go through the whole process of scoring and ranking the projects to be able to fund those.

And let's see, as far as our schedule goes, I know, what was it?

You all have applicants submit year round just through the Health Department.

For us in the Clean Water Revolving Loan Fund, our solicitation period, we open that up usually in the June, July-ish timeframe in which folks are applying.

Now, I hope the people will

Be interested, spread the word, feel free to apply.

Always looking for new applicants, don't wanna scare anyone off either.

Our staff, we're really good to work with.

We provide you with basically a map to closing document, which is a checklist of things that you submit in order to reach that stage to where we can issue the loan.

And through DEQ,

Our staff, we work in conjunction with the Virginia Resources Authority.

So DEQ, we're kind of the, we're the project managers on that side administering things.

And then our bankers are basically the Virginia Resources Authority.

So we very much enjoy that partnership working with them.

And this is just another graphic here, just showing our, just our application timeline.

Now, of course, when folks are applying, as I said, we're going through the ranking process, scoring projects based on a lot of different factors.

And we do make things publicly available, of course, if anyone would like to see how that is done.

We'll look at an applicant's locality, how the fiscal stress is in an area, things like that.

and of course, with the program being federal, it comes with a lot of federal requirements.

So I'll touch on some of those here in the next few slides as well.

What I really wanna talk about here is the money we're getting from the bipartisan infrastructure law.

So here in Virginia, just over 10 million for emerging contaminant funding, not as much as the drinking water guys, but that's okay, we take what we can get.

And of course this money is 100% principal forgiveness.

That means it does not have to be paid back.

So of course that can go towards addressing emerging contaminants like PFAS and your wastewater and stormwater and non-point source as well.

Now, of course, there are going to be eligibility factors included with that source of funding.

I think many of you could probably take advantage of that with the granular activated carbon technology or reverse osmosis, things like that, trying to tap into this source of funding while it's available.

I think this year we had just two applications come in, but this was all very, very new.

It was a rush to get it off the ground and be able to advertise it in the last revolving loan funds solicitation.

So we had two applicants for the emerging contaminant funds and I'm hoping in future years, we'll have a lot more people, localities try to take advantage of that funding.

Let's see.

and of course some ineligible things as far as that bipartisan infrastructure law money for the emerging contaminants is concerned.

We cannot fund operation and maintenance activities after a project is installed or water quality monitoring activities that may be already required.

Those are some things that we cannot cover using that money.

And of course, you would have to be an eligible applicant to be able to apply for the funds.

Couldn't be a for-profit company or something like that.

And we cannot loan out to another state agency.

And then our application period.

Just this year, we opened up an online portal for submitting applications to the Clean Water Revolving Loan Fund.

And I have there a link to our website.

You can also easily navigate to the Clean Water page on our website.

And some folks, we make it available.

They can submit a PDF through the Virginia Resources Authority.

through their file share site as well.

So we're given different ways of applying and that's just the first step.

Just apply and see where it goes from there.

We're trying to do what we can.

We're trying to help as best we can.

And then here are some of those requirements that have come out in recent years.

This is one, we already have to, when you apply for say a Clean Water Revolving Loan Fund for wastewater, for example, you're already, you have to meet the requirements of the American iron and steel requirements.

So, and then we now have the,

By America Build America Act requirements requiring contractors and things for these projects to source iron, steel, and these manufactured products and construction materials that are manufactured in the United States.

But there are some options for waivers and things like that should you not be able to find a component that is manufactured in the United States.

So we do have some options available through that mechanism.

EPA will reach out to them in that situation and they'll do market research and then get back to us.

They'll let us know if they can find a supplier for the component that a project that's needed.

And then I've got enough time here

We should have Jim come up here too.

I guess before I introduce Jeff Steers, would all the presenters please take a seat up here so that when we have our panel to answer further questions from the Slido deck,

then it'll be easier a few days.

Microphones do stand up so you can have one that you can easily talk into like that.

Thank you very much.

So Jeff Steers is currently the director of communications for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.

He serves on their leadership team overseeing all aspects of DEQ's communication and public engagement.

He's also responsible for permitting assistance on economic development projects, oversees the agency's pollution response and emergency preparedness program, and also emerging chemicals.

He formerly was director of regional operations for their regulatory air, water, land and sea enforcement and pollution response preparedness programs.

And also has been director of the agency's land protection division in the northern part of the state.

He is a civil engineer and worked for 20 years with the Ohio EPA in their air, water and waste programs.

Thank you so much for being here.

There it is, okay.

So if you have any remarks before we start our Slido questions, I'm glad to do that.

So, all right, well, thank you.

Please join us.

And we look forward to hearing your answers as well.

So please go ahead and submit any other questions that you have.

Well, I don't know whether I should start.

Well, here's one for James since he was just speaking.

Could the BIL funding be used for setting up or expanding in-house testing labs at a water agency to be able to get more reasonable time turnaround for all this extra testing that we're required to do?

I saw that someone put that in and then I saw you reported on that a little bit.

If you could refine that a little bit more, that would be great.

Yeah, that is one of the options that we're considering with the bipartisan infrastructure law of money, being able to expand some in-house testing.

Oh, all right, so we have to stand up a parallel operation for that.

Okay, well, that's good.

At least there's a plan and I love that.

Another question, this one, okay, no one was assigned this answer, but I'll just, someone can take a stab at it.

Good morning and thank you for allowing me to be on the panel and help answer questions.

I'm Jeff Steers with DEQ and the short answer is it provides additional lines of evidence in trying to understand not only current but historical PFAS loadings in a water body and by that I mean

that we can look at, you know, certain PFAS compounds as we've been talking about this morning are more bioaccumulative than others.

GenX, for example, isn't as bioaccumulative in fish tissue as P4 might be.

So it's used as a marker.

There's a couple different reasons for doing it.

First,

to see if we do have issues with fish consumption working with our partners at VDH to allow us to actually see whether or not we've got high concentrations that could be a public health issue, although the standards and the risk for that, just like the science behind drinking water is still evolving.

But the other thing is it helps us in understanding the current state, but also, you know, if these chemicals are bioaccumulative in fish,

You know, to what level fish move around a lot, but we can try to get a sense of is this a problem in this area because we've noticed a higher concentration of this species of fish.

All right.

Anyone else want to add on to that before I move on?

Okay, great.

Thank you.

Let's see.

This one says for Dave, for the North Fork detection, was there any weather rain data or anything that might have impacted it or is it a more residual component?

There was a significant rain event in early May.

in the watershed, but there was nothing within two weeks of that sample collection on 5-24.

So no, we don't think it was necessarily tied to a rain event.

Ironically, and independent of this, we took

Rainwater samples at all of our five surface water treatment plants for PFAS.

We waited for a rain event and we collected just as a point of reference to see if there was any contribution from the planes and whatever else is flying over our watersheds.

And we had no PFAS detections in our rainwater samples that were collected in May.

Right.

Any others there?

Okay, thank you.

And

There is currently no requirement for testing landfill leachate.

And of course, if you think about consumer products that have these chemicals in them, they get discarded into a landfill.

Naturally, we're going to see levels of, some levels of PFAS in landfill leachate.

All of our landfills in Virginia that have been constructed since the late 1990s are double-lined landfills with leachate collection so that leachate isn't getting into the environment directly but it's being pumped out and sent to an industrial or municipal wastewater treatment plant.

So potentially PFAS could be in that leachate.

We also have about 50 landfills across the state that are unlined landfills that have what I'll call uncontrolled leachate getting into groundwater.

They've been capped, but there's still leachate that's accumulated and is getting into the environment potentially.

We have a whole program for remediating those landfills for things like organic chemicals and metals, but PFAS is not on the list.

PFAS isn't required to be tested, but with some new solid waste amendments to our regulations recently, once an MCL is established,

we will be allowed to, we'll have the authority to actually require leachate to be tested as well as wastewater or as well as groundwater at landfills.

Now I will say a lot of the leachate that gets sent off to a municipal wastewater treatment plant may be actually being tested for PFAS now that it's made it's such a mark on the industry that

Well, Dave, I'll ask you to follow up.

We've tested the effluent leaving our Morris Creek wastewater treatment plant.

It treats the Crozet community, the urban area of Charlottesville and Albemarle County.

But not specifically from the landfill?

Not specifically from the landfill.

All right.

This is fascinating.

Let's see.

We're going up the list here.

This one is not a sign so someone can jump in.

What are the impacts of burning off collected PFAS on air quality?

I guess that's true.

So

The research on the air side is probably the last thing that is actually, when you look at the schedule, if EPA was on the line, they've got a lot of research they're doing on the impacts to air quality.

And so I think as was mentioned earlier, when you're burning

or trying to destroy these long chained fluorine carbon compounds of PFAS, it takes very high temperatures, temperatures that are higher than you would see in a municipal waste incinerator.

And so when you get those really high temperatures, you can break those bonds and presumably there's more complete combustion

at those higher temperatures than would be if you were just putting it in some other kind of treatment system or incinerating it with not a side temperature.

The test methods are still being evolved.

There's no test method approved yet for air quality.

There's no test collection protocol.

There's no ambient air quality data or they're still collecting data.

There is no standard per se.

But we do know that municipal, just like you take waste to a landfill, some waste goes to a municipal incinerator.

And there is likely burn off of those compounds or volatilization of them to some level.

And that may be establishing a vulnerable community.

Right there around the incinerator and anywhere downwind as well.

Okay, let me roll up here and find another one.

Here's another one for Dave Tungate that's about to go off screen.

Under CERCLA hazmat designation for PFAS, could this increase the disposal costs of carbon and other filters?

Are there alternatives being considered or in process yet?

Currently, we send our carbon to a reactivation facility in upstate New York where they're able to burn.

They reactivate the carbon, they burn off.

the PFAS and bring it back to us.

As far as cost, I'm assuming those costs are only going to increase as the energy costs go up, transportation costs go up, and any pending better regulations from those facilities.

The other option is when they reactivate drinking water carbon, it has to come back to the facility where it came from.

Rivanna Carbon can't go to Richmond or Western Virginia Water Authority.

One of the other things they do with that carbon, if it's not reactivated and brought back to the drinking water facility, is that they reactivate it to a lesser grade and they use it for environmental response.

So that would be, at least that's what our carbon provider tells us.

What would be an example of that kind of response, like cleaning up from a spill or something like that?

Trained around a spill and whatnot.

I don't, is my microphone active?

Yes, go ahead.

I'm sorry to interrupt, I just wanted to add to that.

There's a

our EPA speaker mentioned this morning that they have moved to add these compounds to the CERCLA liability list or at least for PFOA and PFOS that you know it's probably a good move overall because obviously we want people to be responsible for cleanup costs in the future but the comment about the residuals that also affects

local governments that use carbon for treatment or you would use other compounds.

So anything that gets used in this process and ends up, say, in a landfill may later be subject that local government to the cost of cleaning up that landfill.

So because most water utilities are publicly owned and essentially they're not generating this waste, they're passive receivers, they're getting the waste in from

other sources and they're just people that have to deal with it.

There's actually an effort to exempt local governments from circular regulation in this particular case.

Unfortunately, you know, until recently EPA has not supported that idea so

And I can add one other thing to that mix as well.

And that is that we have a lot of sources from old activity that we currently cannot

Regulate.

We have another big investigation near the Richmond Airport involving Newport News, who has done a great job of identifying this problem.

And we're working with the military, the airport authority, VDH and Henrico County to address contaminated wells, to address a significant level of PFAS in the Chickahominy, middle Chickahominy watershed.

And the process for cleaning these sites up, just like at military sites, there is, with the lack of it being considered a hazardous substance, we can't use the process of Superfund to compel cleanups.

And that's a problem.

And to Michael's point on the liability issues with it, the other thing to be concerned with, if your utility on the wastewater side is,

potentially biosolids and where it's been land applied across the nation.

Those sites have potential liability under CERCLA, under joint several liability that could become an issue.

So it's not an easy issue to deal with.

Okay, but it does that circular thing you just described.

For decades, people have been talking about sewage sludge and the fact that it contains things that we don't know what they are and we know that's going into the food supply and the water supply.

So talk about liability.

That's a huge liability for local governments who are forced to accept these.

We don't have the jurisdiction yet.

to overturn state law that says you have to take this product.

So that's, I think, on the regulating agencies, like DEQ, to Chads Rodnick and others to help us with that.

Very good.

Let me jump on to the next question here.

We have a series for Mike.

I'm glad.

Oh, James, I'm sorry that he's still there.

No, wait a minute, Mike McAvoy.

Wait a second.

Let me find the right one.

Pardon me a minute, things slid.

Okay, lots of GenX questions here.

So we actually send those samples out to a national laboratory firm.

And you mentioned a $12.5 million improvement to the treatment plant.

So the Chemours company in combination with Toupon and another subsidiary there, Cortiva,

have actually proposed a national settlement for this issue.

Essentially there's a number of drinking water utilities that have sued those companies plus the 3M company who had the most market share of production of these chemicals over the years.

3M by far was the largest manufacturer of these

All those cases have been consolidated into a class action activity and it's being adjudicated in the federal court system in South Carolina out of Charleston and that case was about to go to trial and the companies I mentioned proposed

class action settlement to the court and that's being examined right now by the plaintiffs and the court is trying to also do its own analysis and see if it's adequate.

So potentially there could be some recovery through those class actions and it really depends on the amount of chemicals that you're seeing, the number of the different compounds, the concentrations, what kind of flow rates you produce every day, so it's a very complex

Well, thank you.

There have been some news items floating around that you had received something.

So I'm glad to get that clarified that it's not quite settled yet.

So our experience has been

that it tends to stay in the water column but we are seeing decreasing concentrations in the Roanoke River.

I guess the question is what is relatively quickly?

You know, we were able to stop these discharges a little bit more than a year ago on the Roanoke and we're seeing decreased numbers

That's a long time to wait, that's for sure.

Okay, please clarify.

Someone has thought that the JetEx compound was released by a wastewater treatment facility.

Was that correct?

And what were they using it for?

I thought it was a industrial cleaning facility or something for the machinery.

Yes, so the compound was being

Again, the ProCam company was servicing this equipment for the Chemours facility in West Virginia.

And as part of that servicing, they created a wastewater.

That wastewater contained the GenX compound.

It was discharged to the Elliston sewer system, went through the Elliston wastewater plant and out into the Roanoke River.

And I will add that Prochem has been doing monitoring of their effluent and of the effluent from Elliston.

And even after they stopped taking those chemicals or those products that had those chemicals in it, they were still seeing levels above the health, levels that were high in their effluent.

They had to go through a whole process of cleaning out their system and doing things at the front end before it went discharged to actually get their water clean to the point where it just recently was right about at the detection level.

Meanwhile, at the Elliston wastewater treatment plant, Effluent, it's still at pretty high levels.

It's come down considerably, but it's still persistent.

And, you know, it stays in, you know, you've got a process for

with sludge in the treatment process where it just gets circulated and it's going to take time and some treatment to completely flush it out of there.

So there are still detections in the river.

There's still a contribution.

Yes, there is an actual requirement.

So the General Assembly a year ago passed legislation that requires companies like Prochem to actually treat and sample for these chemicals, or they're required by the utility actually, the utility needs to identify these, sampling needs to be done by the company and transmitted to the

utility the public own treatment works so they at least can see where we've got similar it's very narrow in its applications so not this doesn't apply to every use industrial user of a wastewater treatment municipal wastewater treatment plant just companies that operated similar to what Prochem did

So that's currently being implemented.

Lots more questions rolling in here.

This is fabulous.

Let's see.

So we have several programs.

I'll take the, I think the example was our voluntary remediation program that

Companies get their no further action letter and are released from liability if they voluntarily clean things up to a standard.

We're quite a ways away from ever trying to figure out what to do with PFAS and whether it should be required to go back and look at it.

At this point, I'm going to say no for those kinds of sites at this point.

It's still going to depend upon what EPA is going to do with

There's a lot of Superfund sites and hazardous waste sites that we don't know if they have PFAS in them.

They've got all kinds of other chemicals.

We've got some in Albemarle County, for example, that are being addressed either by the company or by EPA or us.

And until there's more testing done,

Yes, I have three of those sites in the Whitehall district that were involved with sheet metal manufacturer and the degreasers, THC, PDQ, XYZ, whatever it was that sank down through the concrete floor and went right out into the watershed.

I mean, that's going to be there for decades more, I'm sure.

I know the levels in the river it goes down because there's been sampling and Mike can weigh in on this but I you know the levels with GenX have gone down I don't know you know what if any concentrations there are downstream beyond when you get past Smith Mountain Lake we expect they would we've got the same issue with them

Middle Chickahominy River, which goes into the James River.

There's some pretty substantial concentrations in that watershed that we're still tracking to see how far down it may get into the James and impact the James as well.

We've already described full-time need for multiple labs to be set up right away to be able to track all these things, that's great.

Let's see, what are Virginia's plans for addressing landfill leachate and WWTF, oh never mind, sorry, biosolids containing PFAS that are spread onto soil and crops, as well as removing the PFAS from rainwater?

And again, I'll add that when it comes to biosolids, EPA, as was mentioned earlier, they're still doing research and a risk assessment on what's out there.

There's been a lot of study and sampling done, although there are not approved methods yet that can compel a legal reason to

to sample for them.

They still have done a lot of research working with different organizations and generators.

Until they develop standards under their authority and look at the risk, Virginia is not going to get ahead of that science and we don't have the resources to do the research, so we're relying upon them.

And I'll just also add that when you look at

Land Application of Biosolids with PFAS.

You're looking at two things.

You're looking at what might be up, what might uptake in crops from it.

And you're also looking at separation of groundwater and what potential impacts it could have on the aquifer.

I should also speak up a little bit.

We operate a 15 million gallon waste water treatment plant down the road and we generate about 13 million tons of biosolids every year and biosolids aren't sewage sludge, sometimes the term is used interchangeably, but biosolids are typically the waste from anaerobic or aerobic

It's a dewatered sludge.

So it's not like peanut butter.

It's more like a topsoil.

In our case, it looks like a topsoil.

It's a considerable amount of product that's generated and we're a medium-sized wish bar treatment plant.

There are limited options as to where that can go.

Currently, we truck our biosolids to Waverly, Virginia, roughly 126 miles away.

It's combined at a commercial composting facility.

McGill Environmental is made into a compost product.

We spend a considerable amount of money every year, about $700,000 a year extra to haul that down there and pay for disposal.

There are limited options for disposal of biosolids and one of the most cost-effectives is landfilling and so if it's not going to land apply it's more likely to end up land filling.

There is an option to combust thermal decomposition of the PFAS in biosolids but that's a considerable greenhouse gas emissions issue and it's very expensive too.

So while I understand there are issues with land applying biosolids, there is limited options.

And as we like to say, as long as you're flushing toilets, we're still getting it.

So it never ends.

We haul biosolids.

And landfills are less likely to accept it now because of PFAS, so it's even more limited.

And then you have states like Maine that outlawed land application of biosolids, which created a huge disposal problem.

There were companies trying to take it to Canada.

Well, Maine's had an up close and personal experience with the dairy industry, and that's all from X to Y to Z, very clear.

So, whoops, wait a minute.

For Duane and Bob, this says, is there a plan for establishing a producer pays for remediation in Virginia?

That's been a term that's used a lot at the EPA Local Government Advisory Committee, especially among the water industry folks is.

Help us with this.

So our program regulates public drinking water systems.

And as far as I know, public drinking water systems are not producing PFAS.

At the national level, there is a discussion about the, you know, if

depending on how EPA does the rulemaking that the PFAS that gets collected in the GAC or the treatment processes at the water treatment plant, how are they gonna dispose of it and where are they gonna take it and what kinds of rules are going to apply to that?

And we heard from others here on the panel already, that can be done, it just comes at a cost.

Of course, that cost question is always very giant because there's the cost to the wastewater utility, but then there's also the health costs for children, et cetera, and the long-term health remediation that they may need.

What are examples of funding requests that DDH is receiving for water system improvements?

Yeah, so we're taking a lot of applications right now for infrastructure construction.

So you're replacing distribution lines, you're replacing water meters, you're adding sand filters, or you're doing any kind of infrastructure work, we do that sort of thing.

And that's connected to our inspection program.

So we've got a team that goes out and they perform

what we call sanitary surveys or inspections of water systems.

And as we identify and find needs for infrastructure upgrades or treatment improvements, that's kind of the standard kind of funding application that we get.

We've got some new opportunities with the lead program.

So if you have lead service lines, the EPA has got a new rule that's coming out in October on

an inventory of your lead service lines that we're actively working with the public water systems on so we've got specific dedicated funding for doing lead service line inventories right now and eliminating lead service lines and then we've got specialized funding for emerging contaminants which essentially means PFAS

And that's free money.

So I think on my slide, I had a $12 million emerging contaminant section that's there.

And so somewhere around 10 to 12 million in dedicated free money for PFAS removal was possible.

And so all it takes is for the public water system to ask for it.

And depending on your application, it's scored and ranked in a

You mentioned the lead service lines.

Is that only within the utilities control or does that also go from the pipe at the street to the house?

If that's where a lot of the problems are.

So we do have a special, we call it the Lead Elimination Assistance Program or LEAP.

And that can, the way that program right now works is that if a utility wants to offer a lead service line removal

on the property owner side from the water meter to the house or to the gooseneck that we can provide funding to the utility to administer that program.

And so the city of Richmond, city of Alexandria, and a couple of other places have taken advantage of that program.

It's not substantial amounts of money, but it is consequential money and it does help.

I mean, we tend to find

That's for sure.

I'd like to add something.

So there's a new pot of money from EPA that was mentioned as emerging contaminants for small and disadvantaged communities.

And Virginia has a slice of that, but there's really been limited takers for that.

and so I wanna highlight this.

Right now we have exactly one water system and Virginia has asked for money for this and another one is working on it and maybe there's some other ones out waiting in the wings, I don't know.

But the thing is this is money, this is free money, in other words, a grant, okay?

That's available to small and disadvantaged communities for addressing PFAS contamination.

So that's out there.

There's a chicken and egg problem.

And the chicken and egg problem is a lot of the small and disadvantaged communities don't know that they have a PFAS problem.

So Virginia is planning to do some drinking water sampling to find out where those problems are.

And then hopefully that'll inform the next steps.

And small communities of 2,500 or 10,000 people have so few resources to be able to have a staff to do all that grant stuff too.

So we're working with one town.

The thing is that town has a water quality manager who is a person who has time to fill a grant application.

The problem is there's plenty of small towns, less than 10,000 people that don't have anything to have someone who can sit and fill a grant application.

Great.

Well, we'll all have to follow up on that.

And let's see.

We probably have time for two more questions.

All right.

Let's see if I can.

Can I interject something before we lose time?

I just wanted to let everybody know that

We have a tracking tool on our website that you can actually go through and see.

It's a dashboard that includes all of our environmental monitoring for PFAS in fish tissue, sediment sampling, water column testing, and that's

That it's on our PFAS homepage on our website.

So if you just get, if you get to DEQ's website, just type PFAS in the search bar, you'll get the first thing that comes up is our PFAS homepage.

And so you can filter the results.

and it'll give you ranges.

This is just a screenshot and it's actually kind of old.

We have a lot more data.

It's tied directly to our database and every time we get results back, it gets updated.

But you can look at where there's been detections and the range of detections and comparing them with what we've got, what we know about, whether it's a health advisory number,

or preliminary standard that we've developed with BDH for fish tissue.

You can sort it by areas.

There's a lot of interesting things you can do with it.

So we're thinking of adding other, having a similar dashboard for our other impairments for benthics, or maybe it's our sampling of nutrients in the Bay.

One follow up to that.

So is there also information about groundwater?

That's a separate thing as far as and we are doing some ambient groundwater monitoring, we got some grant money for.

All right.

Well, my brain is exploding, and I expect that we've all learned a lot here this morning.

But I want to thank all of you very, very much and thank our audience for your questions and participation.

And this has been very, very exciting and terrifying all at the same time.

But that's what motivates us to do better is all those concerns that we have.

So I would like to invite everyone to head on down to the party.

If you have time to join for

a little pizza.

There is a food truck in the parking lot out the end door there that you could grab a Papito's.

but you are so inclined.

But thank you very much again for making the effort to come and talk to us and help us all learn.

And I'm sure we will be back in touch with each of you with lots of questions and we have all of their presentations, right?

So those can all be circulated and available through Isabella which will be wonderful for those of us who have trouble taking fast enough notes to get all this information down.

All right, everyone have a wonderful day.