The goal of WeAreWolverine.com is to provide regular updates to the community on what’s happening and what we are doing to address the situation.
Below, you’ll find important updates for this week…
Well Testing Results
To date, we’ve sampled approximately 642 wells in the House Street Study Area, Buffer Zone, and Southeast Expansion Area, and have received results for 641 of them. So far, 611 of these wells have tested below EPA lifetime drinking water advisory level of 70 parts per trillion (ppt) for PFOA/PFOS – and 30 wells have tested above it.
The EPA lifetime drinking water advisory level of 70 ppt has a significant “safety buffer” built in, including assuming exposure for an entire lifetime, and that a pregnant or nursing woman could drink over 4 liters of water per day at 70 ppt PFOA/PFOS with no effect on developing babies and infants. For more information, please see our blog post on this topic.
In addition to the House Street Study Area sampling mentioned above, we’ve also sampled approximately 412 wells in the Jewell and Wolven Study Areas, and have received results for 310 of them. So far, 256 of these wells have tested below 70 ppt, and 54 wells have tested above it.
Finally, over 200 homes in the Rogue Area have been sampled over the past two weeks. There are more to sample, and we are working through those as permission is granted. We expect to receive the majority of those results in the next two to three weeks
Whole House Filter Installation Update
To date, 448 whole house filters have been installed in homes in the House Street, Wolven, and Jewell Study Areas. Installations are being prioritized based on the levels of PFOA/PFOS detected in wells.
Field Work Update
The field work to remove non-hazardous waste from two parcels in the House Street area is complete, and all waste has been disposed of by our contractor at a state-licensed facility. Additional removal actions will occur as weather permits and Wolverine obtains permission from landowners. We will be drilling approximately 10-12 additional monitoring wells over the coming months, in both the House Street and Wolven Study Areas. We appreciate the patience of the residents in these areas while this work is being completed.
We developed this blog as one way for you to hear directly from us. West Michigan is our home and we’ve always acted responsibly and taken our obligations as part of this community personally – for over a hundred years, Wolverine has been not only a leader and contributor to this community, but we’ve also been your neighbor – that’s why we’ve taken the proactive steps we have so far and why we’re committed to seeing this through to the end. We hope you’ll keep following this blog, learn about what we’re doing to make this right, and hear our side of the story.
We Are Wolverine.