Suspect water in east metro safe to drink, agency says

People in six east metro suburbs can start putting away the bottled water and the carbon filters. An industrial chemical in their drinking water is so diluted that it poses little risk, the Minnesota Department of Health announced Thursday.

The discovery of a former 3M chemical in underground drinking water supplies early last year came as a shock to residents in Woodbury, Cottage Grove, Newport, Hastings, South St. Paul and St. Paul Park.

The levels of the chemical, called PFBA, were above a temporary guideline set by the Health Department, which cautioned that little was known about the long-term health risks of the chemical.

After months of study, the department said its interim level was overly cautious, and raised the maximum allowable concentrations from 1 part per billion to 7 parts per billion.

The change means that none of the municipal systems is considered contaminated, although some private wells are still higher than the limit.

The news was welcomed by some in the east metro as removing a taint from their communities, while others weren't convinced that their water was safe.

"Generally speaking, PFBA is less toxic than we previously thought, in part because it passes through the body even more quickly than was suspected earlier," said Helen Goeden, Health Department toxicologist. At high levels, the compound has been shown in animal studies to affect liver or thyroid functions.

Large margin of safety

PFBA, a film-coating compound, is thought to have seeped into groundwater from old dumpsites used by 3M. Company officials said Thursday they still don't agree with the Health Department's new limit, which they say is unnecessarily low.

"The number has an extremely large margin of safety," said 3M spokesman Bill Nelson. "We hope it will offer east metro residents peace of mind."

Cottage Grove Mayor Sandy Shiely was glad to hear of the change. "It's been a long year and the cloud is starting to lift, and it feels good," she said. The image of a city with groundwater contamination was bad for city business, Shiely said, but she thinks it will change for the better now.

The mayor said she was satisfied with the Health Department's findings. "Until now there really hasn't been a lot of accurate information to share with people," she said.

The revised guidelines relied heavily on three major studies done within the past year that used rats or mice to study PFBA. Two studies were commissioned by 3M, said health officials, but conducted by independent testing labs. The third study was financed and conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Some residents questioned whether the results were truly independent.

"As a citizen, I'm concerned that the Minnesota Department of Health continues to rely on studies paid for by the party that's polluting the water," Mike Bradley, a Woodbury resident, said. "And as a father, I'm concerned that our water has any amount of PFBA in it."

John Linc Stine, environmental health division director for the Health Department, said that it's appropriate for the manufacturer of the chemicals to pay for the studies, which cost several hundred thousand dollars.

The department received raw data from the research and did its own interpretation, he said, and consulted with toxicologists from the EPA, the University of Minnesota and the University of Massachusetts, none of whom was funded by 3M.

"People may say that there's a way for 3M to jigger the results, but it's very, very difficult for that to occur given all the people who look at the data and the very high standard of review that's done," Stine said.

Others were skeptical that the water is safe because of 3M's history in the area.

"They haven't proved to me that there's nothing wrong here," said Woodbury resident Mark Erickson, who worked for 3M at its Cottage Grove plant. "It wasn't illegal at the time, but 3M still dumped all over this area, and it's widespread."

3M has acknowledged that it disposed of PFBA and other perfluorochemicals in dumps between the 1950s and mid-1970s, and last May signed agreements with state pollution control officials to clean up the wastes.

Some wells still suspect

Stine said that more than 1,000 private wells have been tested and that only about 35 of them -- already supplied with bottled water or filtering systems by the state -- will continue to have 3M contaminants at levels of concern. Most of those wells are very near the former dumpsites that 3M used, he said, and in some cases have more than one type of perfluorochemical in their wells.

The highest concentrations of PFBA in any city wells were about 2.5 parts per billion, he said.

Woodbury Mayor Bill Hargis said that he still wants aggressive cleanup of the former 3M dump near Woodbury's border with Cottage Grove to hedge against any further problems. "This chemical did not naturally appear in the groundwater," he said.

Woodbury officials have delayed sinking new municipal wells until the Health Department supplied more information about the PFBA contamination, said Hargis, and the city can now move forward with those projects.

"I think what we've been told is that we don't have a health crisis on our hands," Hargis said.

Tom Meersman • 612-673-7388