Read the full article by Ryan Lewis

“At a long-awaited public announcement Saturday, Oct. 20, state health officials said residential wells near Otsego showed relatively safe levels of dioxin contamination.

The news was tempered, however, by concerns over extremely high levels of another contaminant near the site of the former Menasha Paper industrial landfill…

Of the 62 tested in Otsego, Otsego Township and Alamo Township, 17 tested positive for dioxin, a highly toxic contaminant that causes cancer, reproductive and developmental problems, damage to the immune system, and interference with hormones.

The sampling was done in July. Preliminary results were announced in early September, when those 17 homes, 14 in Allegan County, were given bottled water out of an abundance of caution while the dioxin levels were still being determined…

Dave Heywood, Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s Kalamazoo district supervisor, said, ‘We sampled for about 200 individual compounds. With regard to dioxin, we had some detections, but they came in—the highest was one result that was a little over 13 ppq.’ …

Those measurements are of overall toxicity, a calculation called TEQ, from the group of roughly two dozen types of dioxin. It is measured in parts per quadrillion, or ppq. A quadrillion is 1,000 trillions. State officials have described 1 ppq as being similar to one at zero.

Another clue came from the first lab’s own practices. As a way to ensure accuracy, labs typically include some clean samples in with the actual samples. No dioxins should be detected in these ‘blank sets,’ yet some traces were.

That suggested that something in the lab environment may have contaminated the results—either residual dioxin from previous tests that had been not washed completely out or some other source…

Flawed though they may be, the data so far shows that the residential wells showed very little of a different contamination: PFAS. None, including several monitoring wells, tested at higher than the safe limit of 70 parts per trillion, or ppt.

However, ponds near the former Menasha landfill tested at higher than 1,000 ppt for PFAS.

PFAS are per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says are likely carcinogens and also are linked to other illnesses.

Lantinga said, ‘We did a survey of all the remaining houses in the area surrounding the landfill. And we’ve identified 25 additional wells we’re going to be sampling specifically for PFAS in the next few weeks.’ “