Federal studies confirmed PFAS in Eastern Henrico swamp more than 4 years ago

The presence of dangerous chemicals known as PFAS in Eastern Henrico, potentially stemming in part or full from former military operations at Richmond International Airport, first was identified more than four years ago and subsequently documented by a federal report in May 2019, but that report apparently never made it to Henrico or state officials.

Neither, seemingly, did a separate federal report from July 2020, which concluded there was a possibility of PFAS in the area.

Instead, county and state officials learned about the chemicals for the first time just about four months ago, after a third report – this one from Newport News Waterworks, which supplies water to the much of the Hampton Roads area – identified their presence in the nearby White Oak Swamp Creek basin.

Local and state officials have been scrambling since then to confirm or disprove the findings of the NNWW testing with more tests of their own and then to take any subsequent necessary actions.

On that front, there’s now good news: most of the 260 private wells located near the swamp tested by Henrico County late last year have shown no signs of PFAS, while all but a handful of the ones that did show such signs produced levels far below the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s lifetime health advisory level of 70 parts per trillion (or ppt).

That’s encouraging because it suggests that the chemicals (which do not break down over time) either have not existed in the area long enough, or not in high enough concentrations, to seep deep into the soil and infiltrate drinking water, where they could cause health issues ranging from birth defects to cancer.

But why weren’t county officials notified about the chemicals four years ago to begin with? Henrico County Manager John Vithoulkas would like to know.

“What’s really disturbing to me is that the Department of Defense has known about it for years,” Vithoulkas told the Henrico Board of Supervisors during its Jan. 22 retreat.

Later, speaking to the Citizen, Vithoulkas expanded upon his frustration.

“It’s really disappointing, and you have to wonder why the feds took this approach,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many contacts I’ve had with state partners, federal partners [about other issues in years past]. This one’s just really weird. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

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PFAS are found in a variety of items, including non-stick cookware, stain-resistant pants and certain firefighting foam known as aqueous film forming foam, of AFFF; the latter has been used for years at airports and military operations in training exercises and to help quickly extinguish the type of fires that may occur following an aircraft crash, for example.

Awareness of PFAS and the potential health issues they can cause is relatively new; the EPA didn’t establish its lifetime health advisory level for the chemicals until May 2016. Doing so suggested that drinking water with PFAS levels of more than 70 ppt likely was dangerous.

Realizing that many of their military bases used AFFF, federal officials began comprehensive studies of 651 bases about seven years ago to determine whether PFAS were present at or near any of them.

In Henrico, contractors working for the National Guard Bureau and Army National Guard conducted two separate studies between 2015 and 2020 of the former Virginia Air National Guard base at the airport and the current Virginia Army National Guard base there as part of a hunt for possible PFAS contamination.

The former confirmed their presence, while the latter (a less exhaustive study) concluded that they could be present there.

The first study began in 2015 with a preliminary assessment of five potential PFAS release locations (or PRLs) at the former Air National Guard site (which was operational from 1947 to 2008 on 143 acres on the northeastern corner of the airport site) and then continued during a five-day period in November 2017 with the collection of soil, groundwater, surface water and sediment samples from more than 25 locations in and around those five PRLs at the former base.

The study found surface water PFAS levels above federal guidelines at four of the five PRLs and groundwater levels above those guidelines in 10 of 16 individual locations, according to the 163-page report issued by the study’s authors from Amec Foster Wheeler Environment and Infrastructure, Inc.

No elevated levels were found in soil or sediment, but the study’s authors concluded that the nearby drainage basin was a migration pathway and that the soil “may be an ongoing source of contaminants to groundwater” and that “there is a potential for [PFAS] migration” downstream of each PRL “toward the White Oak Swamp Creek.”

The report recommended additional investigations to evaluate the concentrations of PFAS in the groundwater at each PRL and testing farther upstream and downstream to determine if other sources could be contributing PFAS to the area. It is unclear whether the National Guard Bureau completed any such follow-up studies.

In a 64-page report published in July 2020, the second study, conducted in 2019 and 2020 for the Army National Guard of the 94-acre ANG site in the southeastern corner of the airport, detailed 10 possible sources of PFAS there. They included the ANG site itself; the Air National Guard base; the Richmond Fire Academy site on Beulah Road; the airport’s fire department; private hangars operated by Altria Group, Inc., the Virginia Department of Aviation, and the FBI; and airplane crashes at the airport in 1996, 2008 and 2012.

Army operations at RIC began in 1964 and continue there today.

The DOD, however, never communicated any of its findings directly to Henrico County, the Virginia DEQ, the Virginia Department of Health or even other federal agencies, email communications obtained by the Henrico Citizen appear to show.

The Citizen analyzed hundreds of emails between county and state officials about the PFAS situation between October and December 2021; none suggested that any of those officials had been aware of the chemicals’ presence in Eastern Henrico until October, when the NNWW report alerted them.

NNWW officials found PFAS in the White Oak Swamp last year while attempting to track their source after discovering them farther downstream in the Chickahominy River basin (which supplies water to the Newport News region). Their quest began in 2019 but test results didn't confirm their preliminary findings of PFAS in in the swamp until October 2021. They notified state officials then, but Vithoulkas was miffed that they hadn't notified Henrico officials sooner.

“Newport News was digging around the swamp, and they don’t pick up the phone? That’s a courtesy that should have occurred, but for whatever reason it didn’t,” he said.

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Once county and state officials learned in October of the possibility that PFAS existed in the local waterways near the airport, they mobilized quickly to begin their own testing quickly.

The VDH and DEQ found PFAS levels in the region that exceeded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s February health advisory level of 70 parts per trillion; in some spots, they were 30 to 40 times higher, according to Ron Harris of the NNWW.

Henrico Public Utilities officials identified 170 private wells within a one-mile radius of the RIC property line and offered to test each of them for PFAS at no cost to the property owners. Most accepted, Public Utilities Director Bentley Chan told the Citizen, and roughly 100 other property owners with wells nearby but outside of that radius also asked if theirs could be tested. The county obliged.

“We wanted to be good stewards. . . and good members of the community and help address those concerns,” Chan said. “We didn’t say no to anyone who came to us and asked for a test within that area.”

In total, tests at only about 40 or 45 of the private wells detected any PFAS, Chan said, and only several showed levels higher than 20 or 30 ppt – well below the EPA’s health advisory level.

The other two or three wells returned PFAS results so far above those of adjacent properties and the EPA’s health advisory level that county officials don’t believe they are accurate and are conducting additional analysis.

“It’s suspect to us,” Chan said.

Officials have mailed letters and test results to the majority of people whose test results showed no PFAS, Chan said, while letters to the rest of those property owners and the ones whose results showed low levels will be sent shortly.

There was no immediately discernible geographic pattern among the wells that did show signs of PFAS, Chan told the Citizen. Virginia Department of Health officials are conducting follow-up research to determine whether those wells have any other similarities, such as the level of their depths, he said.

At about the same time the county began testing private wells late last year, the Virginia DEQ also partnered with the U.S. Geological Survey to embark upon a $180,000 water and environmental testing effort in the White Oak Swamp Creek basin to learn more about the PFAS present there, where they are located specifically and how long they might have been there. That multi-phase study of surface water, sediment and fish tissue (all but $20,000 of which is funded by the state) is ongoing, with results expected later this spring.

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When the DOD began evaluating 651 of its military bases for the presence of PFAS, it established a number of guidelines about the process that should occur in each of those communities.

Among them: that the DOD would work “in collaboration with regulatory agencies, communities, and other stakeholders” throughout the process and that when it “detects elevated levels of PFAS that may pose an unacceptable risk to human health, it uses an outreach strategy to promptly notify affected community members.” Those include communications to potentially affected communities, partnering with local regulatory and governmental organizations, hosting public meetings, alerting and engaging with the media, messaging through social media and updating community leaders.

The DOD established a policy in September 2020 that required agencies under its umbrella “to seek to enter into agreements with municipalities or municipal drinking water utilities adjacent to military installations to jointly share drinking water monitoring data for PFAS and other emerging contaminants of concern.”

But with one exception, there is no evidence that any of those federal actions ever occurred here.

And it wasn’t until Varina District Supervisor Tyrone Nelson’s Dec. 2 community meeting about the topic that either group of officials learned about that exception – letters that the National Guard Bureau had sent to some area residents last April, indicating that PFAS sampling conducted by the DOD had found elevated levels of the chemicals there.

At that meeting, Sandston resident Ann V. Goggin presented Nelson with the letter she had received Apr. 15 from National Guard Bureau Environmental Division Chief Elaine Magdinec, who wrote that the agency’s tests showed PFAS levels ranging from 11.3 ppt to 2,270 ppt – the latter more than 32 times higher than the EPA’s health advisory standard of 70 ppt.

It is unclear how many Henrico residents received similar letters, or when; repeated email and voice mail requests by the Citizen to the NGB for details during the past two months have gone unanswered.

Magdinec’s letter also indicated that the “the Byrd Field ANGB will coordinate its investigation with the appropriate state regulators and provide opportunities for public participation” and directed Goggin to a U.S. Air Force Civil Engineer website for further information.

It’s unknown which state regulators the letter was referencing or whether such communications or public participation opportunities ever occurred, though no evidence of either was apparent in the state communications analyzed by the Citizen.

Earlier this week, officials from Henrico, Richmond and the state met in person with officials from the airport and military, Chan told the Citizen, to review recent findings and share information.

“I believe that there are some other ongoing studies that we will be made aware of,” Chan said.

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Even before the PFAS issue arose, county officials had been working to devise plans to extend water and sewer service to all portions of the county currently not served by either. Now, they intend to make the White Oak Swamp Creek region the first to receive that service.

During the board’s Jan. 22 retreat, Chan told supervisors that it would cost $80 million to run 40 miles of water lines to the entire area; the county already has budgeted for associated sewer lines there, he said.

“We think we can program that in. . . to make it happen,” he said.

If all funds were available at once, it would take about 24 to 36 months to install all the lines in the region, he said.

Typically, it would cost property owners roughly $20,000 apiece to connect their homes to run extension lines from their property and connect to the county’s water and sewer lines, Chan said, but Henrico officials want to use a combination of federal American Rescue Plan funds and county water and sewer credits to apply toward those costs so that property owners would not incur the fees themselves.

“You’re not talking about significant amounts of money on an annual basis – $500,000 to $1 million,” Vithoulkas told supervisors. “What you would be able to do, though, is incrementally and over time get to all of the septic and be able to extend water as far as you possibly can. You’d have to have concentrations of development, but I think you could pretty much cover most of the county taking this approach.”