Residents left out of PFAS settlement express frustration

KENT COUNTY, MI -- The Andersons want to sell their house. They’re looking to downsize. But they said they have a problem - no one would ever buy their house because the water has tested for PFAS in the past.

900 parts per trillion at one point, they said.

And unlike about 1,000 homes around them, they won’t be getting a free connection to municipal water.

“I don’t think it’s a fair choice for them to pick and choose who they want to hook water up to,” said Marilyn Anderson.

Rockford-based shoe maker Wolverine World Wide announced in December that it would pay $69.5 million for new municipal water mains and filtration in northern Kent County.

The company years ago dumped tannery waste that contaminated the groundwater in the area with toxic fluorochemicals that were in the company’s leather manufacturing waste.

The tentative construction schedule for 1,000 new municipal hookups in the Plainfield and Algoma townships area was explained during a public forum Feb. 4. This is part of a consent decree between the townships, the state and Wolverine.

During the forum, multiple people outside the zone that will get either new municipal water hookups or free filters in their homes spoke out.

“Why can’t they bring us water?” asked Fiona Williams during the forum. She lives in the Childsdale area of Plainfield Township. She said there are water mains that could be hooked into around them, so why aren’t they part of the settlement.

“This is an old section, been there a long time. I feel like we’re going to be overlooked,” said Williams. “It’s just a small section.”

Others questioned why the Boulder Creek area was not included. Or the Spring Valley Mobile Home Park near Boulder Creek.

“Unfortunately, when you have a crisis like this, you have to tackle it one area at a time,” said attorney for Plainfield and Algoma Townships, Doug Van Essen after the forum.

“The state and Wolverine were primarily responsible for figuring out what areas were going to get studied first. And that was the House Street and the Algoma Township area. So the North Kent study areas is what received most of the initial attention in the first two years.”

Van Essen said the parties were all able to come to a compromise on the North Kent study area, but the people outside the area will have to wait until they know the extent of the pollution, where it’s coming from, and who the responsible party is.

The question of who is responsible for the pollution could make it tricky for others to get help.

For example, during the forum, Van Essen explained that in the Boulder Creek area, it’s not clear how much responsibility Wolverine has in that area, in part because it hasn’t been studied like Plainfield and Algoma Townships.

The Boulder Creek Golf Course built atop 12 acres of Wolverine’s tannery waste in the late 1990s. The golf course has since filed a lawsuit against Wolverine, accusing it of hiding its knowledge about environmental risks posed by 3M Scotchgard. The Scotchgard was applied to shoe leather for years at the company’s former Rockford tannery.

Wolverine has said it isn’t responsible for the Boulder Creek contamination because other companies dumped at that location.

“There are other responsible parties, frankly, that were involved in the Boulder Creek waste deposit,” Van Essen said.

“The bad news is, I don’t have any resolution for you folks yet.”

But there is nothing in the consent decree that would prevent lawsuits against Wolverine in the future for that area, Van Essen said.

Spring Valley Mobile Home Park is near the contaminated golf course in Boulder Creek, and has since had its own problems with PFAS in its wells.

“Ours would be an easy fix, because if they put that whole house filter on our two wells, you’d have our 68 residents safe,” said Helen Fiser after the forum. She’s a coordinator for Spring Valley Citizens Association.

The wells at Spring Valley are being looked into by the Department of Environment, Great Lakes & Energy (EGLE), Fiser said, but they’re a long way from any sort of resolution.

“We’re in phase one of six stages of investigation. We aren’t even anywhere near a lawsuit yet. And so we’re trying to figure out a way to hurry that up because you have people that are suffering that, there’s no relief in sight until we can do something to make the water safe.”

Gina Harrington, a manager at Spring Valley, didn’t find the forum helpful. But Fiser was more optimistic.

“It lets you know that there’s a possibility that people can take responsibility,” she said. “But the reason I went forward was to reinforce what I was understanding, that this nowhere near affects us.”

During the meeting, Van Essen said he would talk to the Attorney General’s office about what is going to be done for people like Fiser and the residents of Spring Valley. But he said the advantage of getting this settlement out of the way is that it frees up time for EGLE to study other areas.

Exposure to the chemicals has been linked to an array of health problems, including cancer, autoimmune disease and changes in hormone levels. They have been nicknamed “forever chemicals” because the compounds resist breaking down in the environment.

The Attorney General’s Office and EGLE are holding the state’s forum from 6:30-8 p.m. Monday, Feb. 10 at Rockford High School. The state will accept comments via email on the proposed consent decree through Feb. 13.

EGLE, Plainfield and Algoma townships filed a lawsuit in 2018 against the global footwear company. In December, it was announced Wolverine agreed to pay $69.5 million toward new municipal water mains and filtration in northern Kent County.

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