DEP indicates it won't reassess PFAS discharge limits until permit reissuances despite sharply lower new EPA advisory levels

The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection indicated it wouldn’t adjust discharge limits for that group of chemicals known as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) during a recent meeting to discuss recommendations to revise a legislative rule governing water quality standards.

DEP Deputy Secretary Scott Mandirola said the agency would consider the Environmental Protection Agency’s new interim health advisory levels when deciding whether to reissue permits. Mandirola noted that that’s the approach the agency usually has taken in response to past health advisory or water quality standard changes.

“Upon reissuance, we reevaluate based on the new information,” Mandirola said.

“I think we’d urge you to make an exception in this case,” Angie Rosser, executive director of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, replied during a meeting last month to consider water quality standard rule revision proposals.

Rosser urged “immediate action” to change limits based on the EPA’s new health advisory levels for PFAS, which the agency released last month.

The agency’s new health advisory levels apply to four PFAS chemicals and slashed two of the most widespread PFAS to tiny fractions of what they were before, signaling that the EPA had severely underestimated the health risks they pose.

PFAS are everywhere, used in food packaging, non-stick cookware, stain-resistant fabrics and water-resistant clothing and show up in the blood of most Americans.

Human studies have found links between exposure to some of the most common PFAS and adverse cardiovascular and immune system impacts, reduced birth weight and cancer.

PFAS long have been used in everyday products because they repel water, grease and stains. They can be ingested through air, drinking water, food packaged in PFAS-containing material, use of PFAS-made products and eating fish caught from water contaminated by the chemicals.

Mandirola noted that the EPA said its new, non-enforceable health advisory levels aren’t for regulatory purposes.

Regional EPA representative Denise Hakowski said during the DEP’s meeting that the EPA “has no expectation” that states would need to implement health advisory levels in their own standards.

The EPA plans to propose a federal drinking water regulation for certain PFAS this fall.

But the EPA said last month that the new health advisories give technical information that federal, state and local agencies can use to inform actions to address PFAS in drinking water, including water quality monitoring and strategies to lower exposure to the substances.

Some states, including Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Vermont, have established enforceable regulatory limits that require both PFAS testing of public drinking water systems and action to address different PFAS if levels are found to be above those limits — which they made more stringent than the EPA’s previous health advisory levels.

Alissa Cordner, co-director of the PFAS Project Lab, a group of researchers studying the chemicals, and an associate professor at Whitman College, said setting regulatory limits low enough to protect public health are one of the most meaningful protections against PFAS that states are taking.

“The EPA’s new Health Advisory Levels clearly tell us that extremely low levels of exposure to these PFAS are harmful to human health,” Cordner said in an email. “West Virginia, like all states, should work quickly to prevent any new exposures to PFAS.”

Jamie DeWitt, an East Carolina University professor who studies PFAS toxicity, said she doesn’t think PFAS should be present in drinking water, surface water or groundwater because of the chemicals’ persistence, potential to build up in organisms and ability to migrate from emission points.

Water quality advocates have urged legislators and environmental regulators in West Virginia and throughout the country to go after PFAS polluters to cover increases in PFAS treatment costs that could stem from the EPA’s new health advisory levels and forthcoming drinking water regulation for PFAS.

Doing so, Rosser and other proponents say, will be key to limiting ratepayer liability as water utilities face greater PFAS treatment costs.

“A big reason for pursuing a water quality standard [for PFAS] is that we think it’s unfair and misplaced to put the burden of treatment on water utilities and passing that onto customers,” Rosser said.

Permit limits and compliance issues at one of the nation’s most prominent PFAS polluters show how yawning the gap is between the levels of PFAS that West Virginia industrial facilities can legally discharge and what levels below which federal regulators have determined adverse health effects aren’t expected to occur.

The Chemours Company’s Washington Works facility near Parkersburg has the fourth-largest amount of PFAS discharge to waterbodies not meeting water quality standards nationwide, according to a Gazette-Mail analysis of EPA data.

The facility has had 16 effluent exceedances in the past five months for a PFAS used to produce chemical-resistant substances that help make semiconductors, cars, planes and electronics.

The PFAS, hexafluoropropylene oxide dimer acid and its ammonium salt, have been replacement chemicals for perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a PFAS that DuPont used on the site dating back to 1951 to make Teflon-related products. They’re better known as GenX chemicals.

Chemours took over ownership and operation of the Washington Works facility in 2015 after it was formed as a spinoff of DuPont’s performance chemicals division.

Issued in 2018, Chemours’ state water pollution control permit sets GenX effluent limits at two outlets into the Ohio River of more than 2,000 parts per trillion — over 200 times more than the final health advisory value of 10 parts per trillion for GenX chemicals announced by the EPA last month.

One of the outfalls into the Ohio River had an interim maximum daily limit for GenX chemicals of 32,000 parts per trillion — 3,200 times the current health advisory level of 10 parts per trillion — before that limit was reduced to 2,300 parts per trillion (230 times the current advisory level) last year under a provision in the permit.

Last month, Chemours told the DEP that it had an exceedance of nearly double that new maximum daily limit at that outlet.

Chemours said the facility believed the exceedance was “correlated to” rainfall at the site.

“As previously discussed and shared with regulatory agencies, when precipitation events occur, we may observe increases,” Chemours spokeswoman Cassie Olszewski said in an email.

Olszewski said that Chemours is taking action at the site to reduce PFAS discharges associated with wet weather flows, including installing two tertiary air treatment units.

The DEP hasn’t taken any enforcement action in response to Chemours’ state water pollution control permit PFAS exceedances.

When asked why, DEP spokesman Terry Fletcher said the agency has been reviewing the matter and is “working towards an appropriate resolution.”

“We cannot comment on potential or pending enforcement actions,” Fletcher said in an email.

Chemours’ state water pollution control permit for the Washington Works facility expires in July 2023.

The EPA has said that one part per billion can be thought of as one grain of salt in a swimming pool.

“Current daily limits in the [parts per billion] range are almost certainly much too high to protect public health,” Cordner said.

Last week, Chemours asked a federal appeals court to throw out the EPA’s GenX chemical health advisory, arguing that it was flawed and unlawful.

In 2017, DuPont, which the EPA has said hid data indicating PFAS health risks from manufacturing at the Washington Works plant, joined Chemours in agreeing to pay $670 million to settle 3,500 PFOA personal injury claims.

People living in the Parkersburg area had experienced increased rates of testicular and kidney cancer, thyroid disease, ulcerative colitis and pregnancy-induced hypertension.

Now that the EPA has reassessed how unsafe PFAS can be, water safety proponents want permits to reflect that as soon as possible.

“[W]e need to go upstream and get these limits in place so that the dischargers are doing the best job they can do on treatment and reduction on their end,” Rosser said.