Union Leader Correspondent BEDFORD — Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics is considering extending public water to at least 64 homes with contaminated wells in Bedford, but town officials are hoping that even more residences will be included in the plan.
“The town absolutely, and I believe the Department of Environmental Services, feel the same way that people on bottled water need to be on municipal water in 2017,” said Town Manager Rick Sawyer.
Although Bedford officials have not received anything in writing from Saint-Gobain, they have been notified by DES that Saint-Gobain has requested a design proposal from Pennichuck Corp. to provide public water to 64 properties.
Sawyer said town officials previously requested that Saint-Gobain consider providing a public water extension to 288 properties in Bedford — not just the original 64 homes where perfluorooctanoic acid was discovered in private wells last year.
“That is part of our request — that Saint-Gobain work toward providing water to the entire area, and at least do the design solution if at all possible,” said Sawyer.
He is still hopeful that Saint-Gobain, which owns a Merrimack plant that is the likely source of the PFOA contamination, will still consider providing public water to the nearly 300 properties.
Elevated levels of private well water contamination were detected at houses on Hemlock Road, Green Meadow Lane, Back River Road, Smith Road and other streets.
“We are hoping to get more definitive announcements in the short term.” Martin said that although Saint-Gobain has requested an estimate from Pennichuck Corp. on design work for about 64 homes in Bedford, that doesn’t mean that discussions aren’t taking place to provide more Bedford properties with municipal water.
Work is ongoing to address water problems in Litchfield and Merrimack as well.
Free blood testing is still being offered to residents who live near the Saint-Gobain facility who have private wells with PFOA contamination above 70 parts per trillion.

Source of contamination in wells still unknown.
Officials in south-central Idaho still don’t know the source of contamination in wells in Lincoln and Gooding counties but are retesting them to determine whether the water quality is improving.
Abundant snowfall, heavy rains and warm weather have caused widespread flooding across the region.
Last month, several wells northwest of Shoshone began producing what officials describe as “green water.” Lincoln County Commissioner Cresley McConnell said, he “believes there are groundwater issues in northwestern Lincoln County.” The South Central Public Health District is sending its environmental health staff to Lincoln County to retest 16 wells previously tested by the Idaho State Department of Agriculture.
“We do not know the source or sources of the groundwater issues.
The wells being retested are in the advisory zone, an area of northwestern Lincoln County and northeastern Gooding County.
The tests will be processed by the Idaho Bureau of Labs and results should be available next week.
With widespread flooding, the ag department is responding to calls, complaints and requests for technical assistance in the Magic and Treasure valleys, Chanel Tewalt, ISDA communications chief, told Capital Press last week.
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The compost facility received paper mill sludge that was contaminated, according to the state.
Then the company spread the contamination through the area with its compost.
Resident Robert McIntosh said he was worried about the “environmental safety of the content of the paper sludge,” and he was joined by two other residents who expressed similar concerns.
The company makes compost by mixing the paper sludge with yard debris, Kip Foley said, according to minutes from the meeting.
So far, no water systems tested have had more than the federal limit in PFOA and PFOS contamination, but tests are ongoing.
The state has tested nine wells and began going door-to-door last week to ask owners to agree to tests.
It’s not clear which paper mill delivered contaminated sludge to the Agri-Cycle, or whether the sludge was contaminated after it left the paper mill.
The state is now checking sludge at six mills and six other facilities that use that sludge.
While the state regulates paper mills, it doesn’t yet routinely test for PFOA and PFOS at the mills, state officials said.
That led them to find well water with elevated PFOA in Cambridge, and eventually a property owner suggested they check to see if Agri-Cycle was the source, officials said.

The plan includes a $5 billion bond for clean water projects and the creation of a new institute of public health experts, scientists and state officials that would set standards to address water contaminates.
The Senate and Assembly are both scheduled to pass budgets this week and must negotiate a budget compromise before April 1.
Creation of a New $5 Billion Clean Water Bond Act To help begin making real progress in addressing the state’s ongoing infrastructure crisis, the Senate is proposing a new $5 billion Clean Water Bond Act.
The Bond Act would provide critical funds for many different types of projects to prevent contamination that endangers public health and safety, clean up pollution, protect water sources, and promote the growth of the economy through infrastructure investment.
Support for the Proposed $2 Billion for Clean Water Infrastructure The proposal of a $5 Billion Bond Act is in addition to the Senate’s support of $2 billion allocated in the Executive Budget.
Establishment of a New Drinking Water Quality Institute A new Drinking Water Quality Institute is proposed by the Senate to address emerging contaminants affecting water supplies.
Creation of the Emerging Contamination Monitoring Act To help better protect public health and establish safety thresholds for drinking water contaminants, the Senate proposal establishes the Emerging Contamination Monitoring Act.
Support for $300 Million Environmental Protection Funding The Senate’s budget proposal continues the state’s record commitment to the protection of natural resources by concurring with the $300 million proposed in the Executive Budget for the Environmental Protection Fund.
Continued Funding for the Water Quality Infrastructure Investment Program For the past two years, Senate Republicans succeeded in securing additional funding above the Executive Budget proposal for critical water and environmental infrastructure improvements in the final budget.
Continued Funding for Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds The Senate’s budget proposal continues support for state-administered programs that continue providing low-cost financing and grants for the construction of water system projects and drinking water improvements in disadvantaged communities.

At toxic cleanup sites across the country, environmental agencies have allowed groundwater contamination to go untreated and slowly diminish over time — a strategy that saves money for polluters but could cost taxpayers dearly and jeopardize drinking water supplies.
Alvarez is particularly critical of the use of MNA at radioactive waste sites around the country, where it’s estimated that certain radionuclides will take millions of years to naturally degrade to safe levels.
It appears that most state environmental agencies, which supervise many cleanups, do not keep data on MNA use over the years.
“Their only source of drinking water is groundwater.” More than $100 million already has been spent on an active cleanup of the pollution over the years.
But contaminants are continuing to spread, and the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board, the agency overseeing the cleanup, claims that they won’t reach safe levels for up to 500 years if MNA is applied as proposed by the Air Force.
That directive, and the EPA’s updated guidelines, state that MNA shouldn’t be applied when, among other things, the source of pollutants isn’t yet under control, when the tainted groundwater still is spreading and when the contaminants won’t break down to safe levels within a “reasonable” period.
At some Superfund sites, critics say, MNA has been applied in circumstances that clearly violate the agency’s guidelines.
While EPA guidelines call for MNA only where pollution will degrade to safe levels within a reasonable period, it is one of the techniques being used at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southwestern Washington State along the Columbia River.
Cheryl Whalen, an official regulating the cleanup for the Washington State Department of Ecology’s Nuclear Waste Program, downplayed environmental concerns about the plume.
“Monitored Natural Attenuation says, ‘we’re not going to do anything because it costs too much money,’” she said.

Researchers find new way to deal with water contaminated with fire-fighting foam chemicals.
Australian researchers may have found a solution to help deal with fire-fighting contamination water at Defence bases and other airports around the country.
The chemicals in the foams, per- and poly-fluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS), are today known as being ubiquitous in the environment and human bodies.
But researchers at the Cooperative Research Centre for Contamination Assessment and Remediation of the Environment have found a way to use electricity to create strong oxidising agents that strip PFAS molecules of electrons, breaking them down into smaller and safer compounds.
It could be part of a solution to wider chemical contamination globally, to treat "almost all organic contaminants", and help remediate some of the 160,000 contaminated sites CRC CARE estimates Australia already has.
Lead researcher, University of Newcastle’s Dr Cheng Fang, said previous "iterations" of the technology needed expensive materials to be effective, but the new substance used more common, and cheaper, lead peroxide, to cut production costs.
Dr Fang said that while authorities had often simply removed PFAS-contaminated material to store elsewhere, it did not solve the problem of ‘what to do with the hazardous chemicals’, which still needed to be properly treated.
CRC CARE managing director Dr Ravi Naidu said the new treatments could be used to treat wastewater or ground water, and there was more research underway to treat contaminated soil – one of the other key issues currently facing authorities around Australia.
Read more about the political lobbying behind the scenes of chemical regulation reforms underway in today’s Canberra Times Forum.
The story Researchers find new way to deal with water contaminated with fire-fighting foam chemicals first appeared on The Sydney Morning Herald.

Study finds small public wells in Minnesota have viruses, bacteria.
ST. PAUL — Bacteria and viruses that could make people sick have been discovered in small public drinking water wells across the state, according to a report released Friday by the Minnesota Department of Health.
The study, ordered by the state Legislature in 2014, found that, while the overall presence of microbial indicators in samples was low, a high percentage of wells had at least one detection.
But 37 percent of systems had DNA-like evidence of human viruses and 89 percent of systems had evidence of microbes, including some that don’t cause human illness, detected at least once.
They also don’t know if there is any widespread human health risk for people drinking from wells that test positive — whether people drinking that water are getting sick.
“That’s part of the work we still have to do: looking at the wells, potential sources of contamination and other factors, and figuring out how the contamination is occurring and what can be done about it.” None of the wells involved serve municipal water supply systems — those larger systems require treatment to kill viruses and bacteria.
There are about 1,500 of those small, public systems across the state that don’t treat their water, officials said Friday.
Finding such evidence of microbes in a drinking water system does not necessarily mean that those consuming water from these systems would become ill. “We continue to analyze the results of the study to get a better sense of the potential risk,” said Paul Allwood, assistant state health commissioner, in a statement Friday.
The 2014 Minnesota Legislature directed the Health Department to conduct a groundwater virus monitoring project using funding from the state’s Clean Water Fund.
The Health Department recommends that both public and private water systems continue to maintain their wells and conduct routine testing of their water supply.

One year into a two-year study requested by state lawmakers, scientists with the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) report finding evidence of genetic material, like DNA, from viruses and bacteria in water from some of the state’s public water supply wells.
Finding such evidence of microbes in a drinking water system does not necessarily mean that those consuming water from these systems would become ill, but it does indicate the system may be vulnerable to contamination, according to a news release.
Health officials will now work with systems to determine how to reduce potential contamination.
The project has two components: a monitoring study divided into two phases and a community illness study.
In the first phase of the monitoring study, MDH looked at how often microbes were detected in groundwater by sampling source water from the wells of 82 systems.
The second phase of the monitoring study, scheduled to be completed by this summer, includes wells with different characteristics than the wells in the first phase.
However, 37 percent of systems had evidence of human viruses and 89 percent of systems had evidence of microbes (including some that don’t cause human illness) detected at least once during the study period, according to health officials.
In the next several months, MDH and project partners will complete an analysis of all study results including the community illness study.
After completion of the study, MDH will work with systems to determine what recommendations might be warranted to ensure public health.
“Understanding how they get into aquifers and wells may help us find a cost-effective way to predict problems and take preventive action.” MDH recommends that both public and private water systems continue to maintain their wells and conduct routine testing of their water supply, and to follow recommended procedures for operating and maintaining septic systems or other contaminant sources.

Yet even as contaminants continue to spread, the Air Force wants to finish part of the cleanup with a laissez-faire strategy, raising alarm at the local water board.
The approach—adopted by environmental agencies at toxic cleanup sites across the country—leaves contaminated groundwater to remain untreated and instead slowly diminish over time.
It’s a strategy that saves money for polluters but could jeopardize drinking water supplies and cost taxpayers dearly.
That includes when contaminants are expected to degrade over a period of years rather than centuries, and when there is no risk of polluted water seeping into, and spoiling, fresh water supplies.
If the pollutants aren’t correctly monitored, they could continue to spread and contaminate nearby aquifers.
In California, for example, water-quality authorities and the Air Force have been locked in a protracted battle over pollution at the George Air Force Base.
The Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board, the agency overseeing the cleanup, claims the contaminants won’t degrade to safe levels for up to 500 years if MNA is applied as proposed by the Air Force.
But the Air Force disputes the water board’s dim assessment of MNA for the site.
That directive and the EPA’s updated guidelines state that MNA shouldn’t be applied when, among other things, the source of pollutants isn’t yet under control, when the tainted groundwater still is spreading and when the contaminants won’t break down to safe levels within a “reasonable” period.
At some Superfund sites, critics say, MNA has been applied in circumstances that clearly violate the agency’s guidelines.

Food poisoning is a scourge.
Yet preventing it is far from foolproof.
But in a new study in Analytical Chemistry, scientists report that they are closing in on a way to use a combination of color-changing paper and electrochemical analysis — on plastic transparency sheets or simple paper — to quickly, cheaply and more accurately detect bacterial contamination of fruits and vegetables in the field before they reach grocery stores, restaurants and household pantries.
Of all the contaminants found in food and water, bacteria cause the most hospitalizations and deaths in the United States.
Nearly half of these incidents are attributed to spinach, cabbage, lettuce and other leafy greens, which are sometimes irrigated with unsafe water containing fecal material.
But traditional lab cultures take up to 48 hours to produce results, and other techniques such as DNA amplification and immunoassays are costly and are prone to false results.
Recently, Charles S. Henry and colleagues developed a paper-based method to detect Salmonella, Listeria and E. coli in food and water samples.
To simulate contaminated food, the researchers exposed clean alfalfa sprouts to E.coli and Enterococcus faecalis bacteria.
They also collected unfiltered water from a nearby lagoon.
For colorimetric detection, the team built a simple light box, which served as a substitute for a laboratory plate reader.