Air Force Won’t Use New EPA Levels in Wurtsmith PFAS Cleanup

OSCODA, MI — When Sen. Gary Peters, in a committee hearing this month, asked a senior official whether the Air Force would begin using new federal health advisory levels for PFAS in its cleanups, the answer was pretty equivocal.

Maybe. We’re going to look at it. That’s essentially what Nancy Balkus, deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for environment, told Peters on Aug. 1.

When Mark Henry, a former state regulator who co-chairs an advisory board that provides community input to the toxic chemical cleanup at the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Oscoda, asked the same question, the answer from the new Air Force site manager at the base was more direct.

“Those EPA numbers are interim numbers; they are not enforceable. They are advisory numbers. So, at this point in time, we are not using them,” said Steven Willis, the newly assigned Air Force site manager at Wurtsmith.

“We are continuing to use the (Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy, EGLE) values that have been promulgated,” Willis continued, in reference to state standards which govern PFAS cleanup in groundwater.

Willis’ admission came amid an Aug. 17 Restoration Advisory Board (RAB) meeting in which advocates and local officials sought expansion of stopgap cleanup measures around the base and pressed for community access to technical meetings about the yearslong PFAS cleanup.

Bob Delaney, a former state regulator and site manager who discovered PFAS at the base more than a decade ago, called out the Air Force’s sudden embrace of state standards in the face of new stringent federal guidance levels after years of substantial pushback against state rules.

Delaney, who is not on the advisory board but works as a technical advisory to community advocates in Oscoda, noted that the Air Force long relied on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s previous health advisory level of 70 parts-per-trillion (ppt) as its defacto threshold for a variety of actions despite it being a non-enforceable guidance level.

In June, the EPA dropped that safe exposure threshold to 0.020-ppt for the individual compound PFOS and 0.004-ppt for its sister compound PFOA. Those new concentrations are so small they’re below the ability of most labs to reliably measure.

When Michigan passed enforceable limits on several PFAS compounds, the Air Force “steadfastly refused to acknowledge those until pressure from Washington arrived,” Delaney said. Now, “suddenly Michigan’s criteria are the thing they are going to default to.”

“I explain this to you so you understand how the game is played,” Delaney said during the meeting’s public comment session, saying the Air Force defaults to “whatever number is more convenient.”

Tony Spaniola, an attorney and national PFAS activist who owns a home on Van Etten Lake, said after the meeting that refusing to acknowledge the new lower EPA levels is going to cause extra work and potential delay for the Air Force when it’s eventually forced to begin tracing the boundaries of its pollutant plumes to nearly non-detectable levels.

Spaniola speculated that the Department of Defense is attempting to delay any acknowledgement of the new EPA advisory levels until the agency promulgates an enforceable standard, which is likely to be higher than the advisory levels.

“I think there’s a hope on their part that EPA will come out with MCLs (maximum contaminant levels) and that number will be higher than non-detect because you have to factor in economic feasibility,” Spaniola said.

At the meeting, Spaniola read from a July 27 letter to Congress in which the Department of Defense pledged to engage with the state and community in an open and transparent manner. That’s not happening, he said.

“Transparency is totally lacking,” said Spaniola, in reference to an ongoing and escalating dispute over community access to technical cleanup meetings.

Access to meetings between the Air Force, EGLE and other agencies has become a sore point among community advocates, who say they’re being improperly excluded from an important decision-making forum that was previously open to local Oscoda officials and others.

Despite urging by Peters during the senator’s homeland security committee field hearing this month, Balkus would not commit to expanding meeting access.

The Air Force says BRAC Closure Team (BCT) meetings are meant solely for state and federal officials, which members of the advisory board and the Need Our Water (NOW) cleanup advocacy group dispute, saying nothing in the law prohibits community involvement.

“We hear from the Air Force’s attorney that Air Force policy only allows for three people in the meeting, but I think at the last meeting there was 30-some people in attendance from 10 different agencies and private enterprise,” said Spaniola. “No one — not a soul, not a single person from Oscoda, Michigan. That’s wrong.”

On Wednesday, board members said they were not receiving minutes from the meetings.

“This is one of the concerns that we keep bringing to the Air Force, because it is actually affecting the transparency feeling between the Air Force and the community,” said Tim Cummings, an Oscoda Township trustee. “We don’t know what’s going on in there. And we don’t have any readout.”

The township and community groups like NOW want more information and input on Air Force plans for new interim remedial actions, or IRAs, which are essentially smaller stopgap cleanup projects being positioned around the base to capture various PFAS plumes while an expansive but extremely slow-moving base-wide investigation proceeds.

One, an expansion of a groundwater capture and treatment system, was recently completed near Clark’s Marsh, a heavily polluted wetland near the base.

A second, a new groundwater capture and treatment system, is being installed at Ken Ratliff Park to capture PFAS entering Van Etten Lake, where it causes toxic foam to accumulate along the public beach and private shorelines. That system is expected to begin operating soon. A third system is being installed on the base at the former alert aircraft area.

The Air Force announced new stopgap actions during the senate field hearing, including plans to install treatment at Pierce’s Point on Van Etten Lake and a stormwater capture system on the Three Pipes Drain, which empties to the Au Sable River.

Board members say more stopgap systems are needed, including at Landfill 3031 near the YMCA Camp Nissokone, and near the old base wastewater treatment lagoons near Clark’s Marsh now used by Oscoda Township.

Related stories:

PFAS harms take center stage at hearing

PFAS safety levels plunge in drinking water

Pentagon reply to Michigan governor goes AWOL

Air Force dismisses evidence of veterans PFAS exposure

Pentagon PFAS cleanup is ‘bureaucracy run amok’

‘They brought the poison.” Air Force wont own PFAS issue

In Oscoda, a tourist town wrestles a ‘forever’ problem

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