Rockford-area residents demand answers at townhall after PFAS found
ROCKFORD, Mich. (WOOD) — Concerned residents came together at Rockford High School Thursday for a townhall about the recent discovery of PFAS affecting dozens of home in the Rockford area. Those residents are demanding answers.
Years have gone by since Wolverine Worldwide’s tannery waste dumps allowed PFAS, a man-made class of chemicals linked to certain cancers, to enter private drinking wells.
Thursday’s townhall came after an investigation done by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy detected PFAS in dozens of private wells East of Rockford, in Courtland and Cannon townships.
Red and yellow dots on a map released by EGLE are among the areas impacted by PFAS in wells in the Rockford area. Those dots show 59 tested homes with some level of PFAS with 24 of those having levels that exceed the state’s safety limits.
This information left many residents still questioning how this could happen. Helen Fiser does not remember a life without PFAS.
“We live with PFAS everyday of our lives,” Fiser said. “We all suffer from illnesses; I have more teeth broken off in my mouth than I can count with both hands. They are rotted they are rotted away at the gums. We have animals that have died.”
Study finds high PFAS blood levels around old Wolverine Worldwide dump site
Fiser also demanded someone be the voice for the voiceless.
“There just doesn’t seem to be any voice for the legal system. There is no voice for the people,” she added. “I am leery of the EPA, I am leery of EGLE. It is kind of like having the fox watch the hen house. I don’t trust our test and I guess … if I don’t want to trust the tests that are coming out, it’ll be my burden to find a laboratory that’ll test it.”
Gail Mancewicz came to the townhall representing Concerned Citizens for Responsible Remediation, a citizen led advocacy group that has worked to find answers about the PFAS contaminations. She said she just wants to help educate people about the dangers of this chemical.
“PFAS is a forever chemical and its pervasive and it doesn’t go away and its linked to many types of cancers that no one should be exposed to,” Mancewicz said. “It’s life and death. I have nieces with cancers and I don’t want anyone else to get cancer.”
New PFAS discovery near Rockford prompts Thursday townhall
Some, like Fiser, want more advocacy. EGLE said that its next steps will be to continue collecting water samples in the area.
“We are going to keep sampling until we are finding the boundaries of our area,” Leah Gies with the EGLE’s Remediation and Redevelopment Division said. “We want to make sure we are sampling everyone that needs to be sampled and then as far as Wolverine’s next steps goes, they are doing some additional ground water sampling to test further out in areas where they are finding concentrations of PFAS.”
While EGLE said PFAS will likely never go away, its main goal is protecting those that might be impacted.
“Anyone that the state is testing, if they have a detection or an exceedance of PFAS, anyone above zero is getting a filter free from state and local health departments, that’s really important. If you are outside of our sampling area, we would encourage you to test your own well if you can,” Gies added.
If you’re unsure whether you’re affected by PFAS, more information an be found on the state’s Michigan PFAS Action Response website.
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