Nearly all of the water wells serving Hastings and South St. Paul have PFAS chemical levels exceeding the new limits for drinking water announced last week by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The cities are among several in the east metro that are stepping up efforts to handle the “forever chemicals” after the EPA on April 10 finalized standards of no more than 4 parts per trillion for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. While some communities are able to comply by shutting off certain wells or blending water with cleaner wells, others will have to install costly new filtration systems to remove the chemicals.
Minnesota health officials said more than 300,000 people across the state have unsafe levels of PFAS in their water systems under the new EPA standards.
The updated guidelines mean that five of the six municipal wells serving Hastings are now above the allowable drinking water standards. The city of South St. Paul found that seven of its eight wells do not meet standards.
“We expected this,” said Hastings City Administrator Dan Wietecha. “For the last two years, we have been trying to avoid being in the position we are in now.”
Wietecha said the drinking water in Hastings is safe to drink in the short term, but if anyone has concerns, they should contact their doctor. “It’s not an emergency in terms of needing to boil the water,” he said. “It’s a matter of ingesting this water over years, it will increase the risk of certain cancers and other serious health impacts.”
A feasibility study conducted last summer recommended three new water treatment plants to address PFAS contamination, Wietecha said, adding that three separate plants was found to be the most cost-effective solution.
The total estimated cost for the three plants is $68.9 million, Wietecha said. Funding for the water treatment plants has yet to be secured as the city is submitting requests to both state and federal agencies. Completion of all three plants is anticipated for 2027.
Design of the first water treatment plant is underway thanks to a grant from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, Wietecha said, and will include an interconnect with the Minnesota Veterans Home in Hastings.
The veterans home, which currently draws from its own well and private water system, is working with the city to potentially connect to its infrastructure after it also was discovered to exceed the new limits, Wietecha said.
Also ongoing for the city is an environmental site assessment, currently in its second phase, working to narrow down the source of the chemicals.
As part of the ESA, one particular PFAS-related chemical was found in one of the city’s six wells that could only come from 3M Co., Wietecha said. The chemical has been described as a “fingerprint” for 3M, he said, and could allow the city to access part of 3M’s settlement funding.
Hastings residents are invited to a public meeting at 6 p.m. May 9 at Hastings High School, where there will be presentations by the city, the Minnesota Department of Health and the MPCA.
Hastings and the Minnesota Veterans Home are two of 22 water systems in the state – 10 in the metro area and 12 others statewide – put on notice after the EPA standards were announced.
The other metro systems are Brooklyn Park, Lake Elmo, Newport, South St. Paul, Stillwater, Woodbury and mobile home communities Cimarron Park (Lake Elmo) and Mobile Manor (Shakopee).
The nonmetro water systems out of compliance are Alexandria, Battle Lake, Cloquet, Pease, Pine City, Princeton, Sauk Rapids, Swanville, Wabasha, Waite Park, and mobile home communities in Austin and Bemidji.
Cities have five years to bring their water systems within the new lower limits, according to the EPA. Here’s how the new standards are affecting east-metro communities:
South St. Paul
The city of South St. Paul was informed that seven of its eight wells do not meet the new standards with some exceeding the PFOA and PFOS limits and other wells containing a mix of other PFAS chemicals.
“We were a bit surprised that seven of eight were over, because they were below guidance until recently,” said Nick Guilliams, city engineer for South St. Paul.
Currently, the city is monitoring its wells and working with MDH to get new testing results done, Guilliams said. Next steps include conducting a feasibility study to identify potential solutions to get below the new standards.
“This is not an emergency, so there is no need to seek an alternative source of water or boil water,” the city said on its website.
The city is looking for grant opportunities, Guilliams said Wednesday. “Any improvement we implement is going to be pretty costly, so trying to plan ahead for those costs is pretty important,” he said.
Community members who would like to learn more can attend the May 6 city council meeting, where there will be a presentation discussing the new guidelines and what it means for the city.
“The city is actively working on a solution to this issue that is complicated and ever-changing as we learn more,” Guilliams said.
Lake Elmo
Nothing has changed for Lake Elmo since the new limits were announced, said Interim City Administrator Clark Schroeder.
Over the past few years, traces of PFAS have been found in Well No. 2 at levels that were below the old maximum contaminant level, or MCL, of 15 parts per trillion. “Out of an abundance of caution, (city officials) elected to only utilize Well No. 2 on an emergency basis to maintain water tower levels,” he said. “These occurrences included a handful of days where (Well No. 2) would run a couple of hours a day to keep up to demand. When it does run, it is always blended in the distribution system with water from other wells.”
City officials are applying for a $2 million Minnesota Pollution Control Agency 3M settlement grant to install an ion exchange system at Well No. 2 to treat the PFAS – “a process that is expected to be complete before the 2025 irrigation season,” he said.
City officials met Wednesday with MPCA officials to discuss the design and construction of a $40 million water treatment plant for the city – and one or two more wells around 10th Street “to create more supply for the peak water demands of summer,” he said.
The city’s average water use per day is 600,000 gallons in the winter; summer peak days can exceed 3 million gallons per day. In 2023, city officials modified the city’s irrigation restrictions to two days a week and limited it to the hours between 5 p.m. and 5 a.m. This has allowed the two wells to maintain acceptable storage levels in the towers for fire protection and domestic daily use. Those same restrictions will be in place this year, he said.
With the new limits in place and the creeping of the contamination plume, city officials are anticipating possible positive tests on Well No. 4 and Well No. 5 in the future, he said. The city has received a grant to study a common treatment plant for those wells should they exceed the new levels, he said.
“Unfortunately, the city is limited in where it can put a new well due to the White Bear Lake level lawsuits,” he said, referring, in part, to a court order issued in 2017 by Ramsey County District Judge Margaret Marrinan that effectively prohibits the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources from issuing new or expanded groundwater pumping permits within five miles of the lake. “The cleaner water is in the north part of the city and due to the possible effects on the level of White Bear Lake, we would have to drill new wells in contaminated water in the south part of the city and add a treatment plant to remove the PFAS.”
Cimarron Park, the city’s mobile-home development, has its own water system, which is tested and monitored by the Minnesota Department of Health. Conversations revolving around connecting Cimarron Park to the city water system have started, but no plan has been established, Schroeder said.
Schroeder said residents should go to the city’s website and click on “Lake Elmo Water Topics” for more information.
Newport
Last week’s news was not a surprise for Newport city officials.
PFAS substances have been present along the city’s eastern border, and city officials have long known the “forever chemicals” would eventually flow into its groundwater, Mayor Laurie Elliott said.
“Even before the wells showed anything, we knew it was only a matter of time,” Elliott said. “We planned accordingly.”
One of the city’s two municipal wells has tested slightly above the new EPA health standards, but the city’s second well tests below, she said. “We’re blending water from our two wells to meet the EPA standards,” she said.
Eventually, Newport will connect to water from Woodbury and/or Cottage Grove – both of which are building new water treatment plants to treat the PFAS contamination, Elliott said.
The plants are being paid for with money from a multibillion-dollar settlement reached with 3M, a leading manufacturer of PFAS. Depending on what additional contamination is found, the amount paid out will range from $10.5 billion to $12.5 billion, officials said.
Stillwater
Affected wells in Stillwater are not being used, and there is no immediate health risk posed by Stillwater’s drinking water, said City Administrator Joe Kohlmann.
“The safety of our community is the guiding force for the urgency with which we are exploring both short- and long-term ways to mitigate PFAS,” Kohlmann said. “We are now evaluating those options with the new EPA standards in mind.”
On Tuesday night, the Stillwater City Council approved a $98,200 contract to conduct an options analysis for PFAS for the city’s water supply.
The study will include a summary of the city’s water usage, modeling of existing water distribution systems and will consider mitigation options for short-term treatment solutions. The cost of the study will be covered by an MPCA grant, Kohlmann said.
Kohlmann urged residents to go to stillwatermn.gov/waterupdates to sign up for email updates from the city on the water issue, or reach out with any questions or concerns.
Woodbury
The EPA announcement last week had no immediate impact on Woodbury’s municipal water system, either, said Jim Westerman, the city’s assistant public works director.
“Woodbury’s years of proactive work on temporary water treatment for PFAS, operational adjustments that we’ve made and our progress on a permanent treatment solution for the city’s system puts Woodbury in a very good position to meet the MCL standards and continue to provide the highest quality water possible to our residents,” he said.
Nine of the city’s 20 wells previously exceeded PFAS water quality standards and guidelines, but those nine are operational due to treatment technology known as granular-activated carbon that works to remove PFAS and can meet the city’s water demands for the bulk of the year, he said.
The 11 other wells are used in summer, when water demand is highest; city officials anticipate that seven of those wells will not meet the new MCL standards, he said.
“On those limited days, when we may need to turn them on and use water from those (seven) wells, that water will commingle with the water from the other 13 wells from our system,” he said.
Woodbury officials say a permanent solution won’t be available until 2028, when the city expects to complete its new $400 million water treatment plant capable of filtering all of its water of PFAS.
The money for the plant, which will be located on 24 acres of land in the south-central part of the city, is coming from the $850 million settlement reached in 2018 between the state of Minnesota and 3M, Westerman said.
The high cost of the plant is due, in part, to the estimated 18 miles of pipeline needed to connect wells to the plant, he said. The city, population 82,000, is “already developed, so we have to put a lot of pipe in the ground to get water in and then back out to the community,” Westerman said. “That is about half of the cost.”
The Woodbury City Council elected to treat water from all of the city of Woodbury municipal water supply wells – whether they are eligible under the settlement agreement or not, he said.
“That’s based partly on the continuing changing science of PFAS,” he said. “While those wells may not today receive health advisories – they may have low-level trace detections of PFAS that are acceptable today, but in the future, that may change.”
Home PFAS filtration
While water softeners, iron filtration systems and boiling water are not effective against removing PFAS, there are steps you can take if you have concerns about your health.
According to the Minnesota Department of Health, filters containing activated carbon or reverse osmosis membranes have been shown to be effective at removing PFAS from water supplies.
A granular activated carbon filter is one option for a point-of-use filtration method that allows water to pass through while accumulating contaminants on the filter.
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, MDH and West Central Environmental Consulting evaluated one of these filters and found that it removed six out of seven PFCs, or perfluorochemicals, typically found in south Washington County groundwater when installed and maintained properly. The results of this study were found to remove PFCs to below “detectable levels and MDH health recommendations,” but it has not been updated to reflect the new EPA standards for PFAS.
Some refrigerators also are equipped with water filters that can remove or reduce PFAS. The Environmental Working Group, a research nonprofit, has composed a list of their top-rated water filters that reduced the presence of PFAS.
Find more information at www.pca.state.mn.us/pfas-in-minnesota.
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