ALGOMA TOWNSHIP, MI — Wolverine World Wide is distributing bottled water and testing residential wells for toxic fluorochemicals in another Rockford area neighborhood amid a continually expanding state investigation into old tannery waste disposal.
State officials say the latest testing area includes about 100 homes, many of them upscale and located on former farmland where a longtime local resident says Wolverine once spread its lime-heavy tannery sludge as crop fertilizer decades ago.
Homes in the Rezen Drive NE neighborhood and two private drives off Childsdale Avenue NE suspected of being old sludge dumps sites are awaiting results of PFAS testing.
Several homeowners declined on Monday to share the results of private well testing along Elstner Drive NE and in the Wellington Ridge neighborhood, a planned unit development subdivision of $300,000-plus homes first developed in the late 1990s out of an old farm.
Richard Geldhof, a local historian who lives on Elstner Drive, said he alerted the DEQ to sludge application on the farm that is now Wellington Ridge.
Geldhof did landscaping in Wellington Ridge during housing development and said sludge residue was rototilled into topsoil that was spread around the neighborhood.
It’s not entirely clear what years the sludge application occurred, although Geldhof said it was more than once.
Brown said the DEQ has heard about sludge applied to farmland as fertilizer in numerous neighborhoods around Kent County amid the agency’s investigation into PFAS groundwater contamination connected to Wolverine waste sites.
The list of sites, or "source areas," the DEQ is investigating has grown to 75, about 26 of which the agency has referred to Wolverine for follow-up testing, she said.
The agency is working off tips from the public and Brown said a majority of sites investigated aren’t connected to Wolverine, although DEQ is looking at each one.