By Daniel Ochoa
Tempe is currently testing the quality of its drinking water to ensure it meets all federal recommendations and regulations.
The decision came after the federal Environmental Protection Agency issued a new health advisory for two chemical compounds—PFOA and PFOS—that can be found in certain products such as food packaging, shampoos, fire retardants and non-stick cookware, according to a city of Tempe press release.
The EPA contacted Tempe on April 11 about the issue concerning PFOA and PFOS, and the city took three of its 12 supplemental water wells offline on April 14 due to the presence of the two chemicals.
David McNeil, environmental services manager for the city, said the three wells were taken offline once they were advised by the EPA about the adjusted health advisory.
“When we learned about the advisory, we immediately made the decision to place those wells on a do-not-use status,” he said.
“Those wells hadn’t been discharging into our drinking-water system for several months prior to that in order to evaluate EPA’s new health advisory.”
In addition, the 12 water wells were sampled and tested through EPA’s Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule.
“Every five years EPA comes up with more than 30 emerging contaminates and they ask utilities to sample for those contaminates just to determine what the occurrence is,” McNeil said.
“In 2013 and early 2014, we sampled all of our water wells for those 30 contaminates that they had established that weren’t regulated.”
According to the EPA’s new health advisory, the combined level of both PFOA and PFOS is 70 Parts Per Trillion (PPT).
The previous level for PFOA and PFOS was a combined 400 PPT, which the levels of the three water wells met in 2013.
The 2013 samples of the three water wells were 58 PPT, 94 PPT and 184 PPT.
Tempe’s remaining water wells are presently online and show no presence of PFOA and PFOS.
Currently, the city of Tempe is conducting tests on the three water wells to ensure there’s no presence of PFOA and PFOS before they’re placed back online.
The first rounds of sampling on the water wells were conducted May 19, and McNeil said the results should be issued within a few weeks.
Information: tempe.gov/waterquality.
