ASDWA President Testifies at House PFAS hearing
ASDWA’s President, Lisa Daniels, testified on September 6th at a PFAS hearing of the Subcommittee of the Environment of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. You can watch the tape of this hearing by clicking on the link above – note that the hearing opens at 15:43 on the recording so skip forward to that time to catch the start of the hearing. Other representatives from EPA, DoD, ASTSWMO, Michigan PFAS Action Response Team, Clean Cape Fear, and NRDC also testified.
The hearing lasted a little over three hours, primarily due to 16 members of the Subcommittee (a lot) each asking their five minutes of questions to the first panel. Some takeaways from this hearing:
- EPA is still committed to its four-step action plan from its PFAS Leadership Summit in May. Draft toxicity values for GenX and PFBS will be released at the end of the September and EPA’s PFAS Management Plan will be released by the end of the year. Peter Grevatt from OGWDW said that this Plan will include its decision (regulatory determination) on whether to regulate PFOA and PFOS (or not)-note that EPA would still have to publish a proposed and final determination sometime after the end of the year.
- The Department of Defense will be on the hook for many cleanups at many sites, noting that there are plenty of other sources besides their bases such as fire training academies, manufacturing plants and others.
- One Subcommittee member asked a yes/no question on whether MCLs were needed, and all of the second panel agreed that MCLs were needed, noting that the question didn’t ask for which PFAS or what numbers the MCLs might be.
- Michigan is in the middle of a full-court press on PFAS through its PFAS Action Response Team. MI is testing all regulated public water systems (and some private wells) by the end of 2018.
- Personal stories of health problems in Cape Fear, NC, can carry a lot of weight during a hearing.
- A lot of research is needed on sources of PFAS (it seems like we are learning about more sources every day), health effects (how many PFAS need to be looked at?), analytical methods (how many PFAS can be sampled in a single method?) and treatment (how low can we go?).
ASDWA’s written testimony can be found below, and included the quote – “ASDWA believes the question is not whether to regulate PFAS, but when and how, using sound science as required by the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA)”.
