Tyco fire products reached
a settlement this month with the
state of Wisconsin to clean
up PFAS contamination in
Marinette County.
Tyco manufactured firefighting
foam that spread the forever
chemicals in soil and water.
The settlement requires Tyco
to put $10 million into
Wisconsin's PFAS trust fund
for future cleanup.
Provide clean water in the Marinette
area, including deep drinking
water wells in a prescribed area
for 20 years,
monitor and report water quality
within the 35 square miles
that includes parts of the
city of Marinette and the town of
Peshtigo, and requires
Tyco to remediate and restore
the environment in soil,
groundwater, and surface water.
Another lawsuit against the company
and others is ongoing.
For reaction to the PFAS
settlement, we turn to Jeff Lamont,
a resident in Marinette and a
retired hydrologist.
And Jeff, thanks very much for being
here.
You're welcome. Thank you for having
me.
So, how long in coming was
this settlement?
Um, we...
The AG call
was up in Marinette for a DNR
listening session, you know, which
they were doing about every six
months at the time to update the
public on what was happening
and what Tyco was doing.
And in 2019
December, we were
able to beg some time from him
and pleaded our case
to file this suit
against them for essentially
at the time not reporting this.
They found PFAS on their
fire training facility three
and a half to four years before
they reported it to DNR,
which violated the spills
law. And they let the
community drink this contaminated
water for four years, before
reporting it.
So yeah, we're
seven years.
And we were first informed
of the contamination in
November of 2017.
So it's almost been 10 years.
But in your mind, this settlement
barely touches the problem?
Yes, well, so the settlements
were not
happy at all about because what
it did essentially it
said there was the
initial investigation area
and then there was an expanded
investigation area and
for 10 years the DNR had
fought with Tyco about the
responsibility be beyond
this essential first
area that was investigated.
The contamination was the same.
I mean, we're talking in places
where its neighbors right across
the street. Well, we were going to
take care of you on this side of the
street, but the other side of the
Street, that's not our
contamination.
And this lawsuit limited
their liability to just the
initial investigation area,
not the expanded investigation area
or the 3,000
acres of contaminated
biosolids that was spread in
Marinette County.
But isn't the
settlement and the 125 million
dollars in state funding and
potential of an ongoing lawsuit
a starting point, better
than nothing?
It is better than nothing.
But if you want to put that into
perspective, Tyco has
set aside $180 million
just for
this site.
So I mean, we're just one
of many, dozens,
if not hundreds, in the state
that are impacted.
So it really does not
go very far.
And the deep wells
Tycho has been putting in
approximately $100,000
a piece. So if you look at another
$10 million, that
might address another 100
wells in the community beyond
the initial investigation area that
are still contaminated with their
PFAS.
So you have experience in
large-scale cleanups with
the EPA.
What in your experience should
be happening?
Well, you know, I tried
to let the citizens and our
community know that these are very,
very long drawn out processes.
I mean, a lot of the Superfund sites
that I worked on had
been in the
gears for 10, 15,
20, sometimes 30 years before
the remediation actually went into
place or started.
And often these remedial
efforts can take multiple years.
The Waukegan Harbor cleanup I
did, we were there for seven or
eight years from once
we started the
project, so.
Can PFAS,
these forever chemicals, can
they be removed,
remediated, make
people safe?
They can be, there's
a number of technologies and
as PFAS has become such
a huge problem,
country-wide, a lot of companies
have started to invest a
lot money in different techniques to
clean up.
Tyco chose, in my opinion, a very
ineffective solution.
They did a pump and treat system
to remove shallow groundwater and
treat it with. Granulant-activated
carbon and
resins.
And it can remove that,
but there are more practical
ways. They're more expensive.
The reactive barrier walls are
one that is being used a lot these
days on Air Force bases and
in different communities across the
country.
But Tyco chose, in my opinion, a
very ineffective method to address
this.
How can the sources of contamination
be held accountable in
your experience?
Well, in this particular case, this
fire training center, I mean, they
were testing for 60
years, these
AFFF foams
by igniting
accelerants and then
having different groups that were
being trained, whether it was
Department of Defense or whether it
different fire departments
from different communities,
airports.
They would spray this phone directly
on open ground to
put these accelerants out, the
trainers, and then once they were
done, they would just hose it down
to the original ditches.
So I
would have liked them seeing them
do a reactive barrier on
their site.
This groundwater treatment system is
approximately a half
mile downgradient for their site,
so. Typically a big source
like this you you want to do source
control you want to control the
contamination where it happened
instead of a half mile or
a quarter mile down the road from
where it happened.
The high school Marin High School is
between the fire training center
and where the growler extraction
system is going.
So all the all the water
underneath the high school
is contaminated.
And of course, we're learning now
that air deposition
and and deposition to
rainwater is a significant
contributor to this.
And so, you know, when they would
burn, this soot would go
right over the high school.
And I remember talking to one of the
teachers there that retired there
saying, every day I would walk out
after they'd burn, I'd have to wipe
my car down because there would be
this dust from the fires on
my vehicles.
Do you hold out hope that
this will be adequately
remediated in Wisconsin?
Um, not
a lot with, without
significant, you know,
outpour and outcrying from the
public, um, it's
just, it such a costly endeavor
that, um unless
there's a responsible party like
we have Tycho
Johnson controls, um
this is going to fall on the
taxpayer and you know there's only
so much resources in the state
budgets for this kind of thing.
And like we talked about earlier,
$135 million is kind
of a drop in the bucket, really.
But it is a starting point.
So I should be more optimistic,
I guess, for that.
All right. Well, we will leave it on
that note.
Jeff Lamont. Thanks so much.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Yeah, what a disaster
puts it too mildly.
It is.
We just we just wrote the secretary
for the DNR, the interim one
here, because
AG Cole suggested
that we reach out for that money so
that 10 million dollars were
trying to trying to get it to be
spent in the Marinette area and not
just thrown into the state coffers
and used elsewhere where
we would have to compete with other
sites for that.
I mean the 10 million is there
because of us.
And we think it should be used
there. So we're lobbying big
time at the state to have those
additional funds spent here
for those people outside
the area that the settlement does
not include.
So we've got our fingers crossed.
Yeah
Absolutely.
I mean, there's a cluster of
three teenage high school boys
within a two block
area in the town,
all with testicular cancer,
which is one of the six that was
defined by the large study
that was done, you know,
in Parkersburg, West Virginia.
So, so, so Absolutely
I have a niece that recently
had her third and fourth child
in the past couple years.
She had a preeclampsia
associated with both of those
pregnancies and she lives in the
plume.
So, yeah, yeah.
We have friends and neighbors that
have been impacted health-wise.
That was another thing we thought
the settlement didn't do.
We were hoping that
they would kick off or require some
kind of medical monitoring
or some.
Something associated with the
settlement and there was nothing,
so.
Alright, well thank you on
behalf of Wisconsinites,
thank you for your work.
Thank you so much.
Marissa, if you could send me the
link when this goes, that would be
wonderful.
Thank you.
Appreciate it. Bye now.