“PARCHMENT, MI — Long before high levels of PFAS were found in Parchment’s drinking water, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality found its municipal well field was ‘highly susceptible to potential contaminants.’

That conclusion, from a 2002 source water assessment, is referenced in Parchment’s annual water quality reports. According to the DEQ, of the 2,400 statewide community groundwater sources evaluated from 2000-03, only 4.8 percent were given a ‘high’ susceptibility rating.

City Commissioner Robert Heasley said it’s been known for years that the three groundwater wells which supply water to Parchment and parts of Cooper Township were ‘somewhat vulnerable.’ But an effort to replace them was scrapped decades ago, Heasley said.

‘At least personally, I was aware this well field might be an Achilles heel,’ he said. ‘But we didn’t have the resources to go on a hunt for other well possibilities.’…

Two rounds of DEQ testing showed highly contaminated water entering the municipal water system from three source wells. The latest test showed one well was contaminated with PFOS and PFOA, two PFAS compounds, at levels more than 26 times greater than the EPA health advisory.

Parchment City Manager Nancy Stoddard said she has no record of the 16-year-old DEQ assessment, which was required by 1996 amendments to the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. DEQ officials on Sunday, Aug. 5, said they are not aware of the analysis either.

A 2015 source water assessment gave each of the three wells a ‘moderate’ susceptibility rating. It found two known sources of contamination nearby…

Parchment Mayor Robert Britigan and Heasley also said they were unaware of the 2002 DEQ report stating the well field was at risk. Britigan, who joined the City Commission in 2005, said he did not know if steps were taken based on the source water assessment.

Stoddard was hired as city manager in 2017. She said she was never briefed on potential risk associated with the Parchment wells…

The small city’s well field sits less than a mile northeast of a former paper mill landfill located just north of Parchment in Cooper Township, bordering Parchment city limits. After PFAS was found on July 26, the DEQ began testing private wells in a 1-mile radius around the well field.

Three municipal wells wells — two installed in 1963 and a third in 1973 — sit on a line near the east bank of the Kalamazoo River, which puts all three at risk of being contaminated by the same source…

Heasley has served on the City Commission in all but four years since 1979. He said an effort to find wells that would have been more protected from potential contaminants was dropped by the city of Parchment 25 years ago…

The logical option was to hook up Parchment’s water system to the city of Kalamazoo, Heasley said, but that would have been a non-starter. ‘Chauvinism’ on Parchment’s part made a partnership with Kalamazoo politically unpopular, he said.

‘You gotta understand the politics of that,’ Heasley said. ‘If you want to get thrown off the City Commission, that’s what you would suggest … Parchment people love Parchment. The minute you start taking one brick out of the wall, they’re on you.’

Heasley said he had no doubt; a commissioner who suggested using Kalamazoo drinking water would have been voted out of office…

W. Richard Laton, a professor of hydrogeology at Cal State University Fullerton, gave a similar warning five years before the DEQ’s assessment.

In a 1997 dissertation Laton wrote while at Western Michigan University, he found Parchment’s well fields were susceptible to contamination.

Laton called it a ‘precariously-placed municipal well field,’ partly due to its proximity to the James River landfill and North American Aluminum plant. Other risks included its close location to the Kalamazoo River. Kalamazoo’s wastewater treatment plant, which discharges treated wastewater into the river, is located about three miles upstream from Parchment’s well field…

As work continues to connect Kalamazoo’s city water system to Parchment’s, tests are being conducted to confirm whether the water being pumped in from Kalamazoo is free of contamination and safe to drink. Residents were given instructions to flush their homes’ pipes of any remaining tainted water, but are cautioned their tap water is not yet safe to drink.”

Read the full article by Malachi Barrett