TICO fire products reached a settlement this month with the state of Wisconsin to clean
up PFAS contamination in Marinette County. TICO manufactured firefighting foam that spread
the forever chemicals in soil and water. The settlement requires TICO to put 10 million
dollars 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 Pestigo and requires TICO 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.
Welcome, thank you for having me. So how long in coming was this settlement?
We, AG call was up in Marinette for a DNR listening session, which they were doing
about every six months at the time to update the public on what was happening and what
TICO 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 TICO about the responsibility 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, you weren't 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
and not the expanded investigation area or the 3000 acres of contaminated biosolids that was
spread in Marinette County. But isn't the settlement in the $125 million in state funding and potential
of an ongoing lawsuit starting point better than nothing? It is better than nothing. But if you
want to put that into perspective, TICO 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 TICO 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 of our community know that these are
very, very long drawn-on processes. I mean, a lot of the super-spun sites that I worked on had been
in the years 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 Joaquin Harbor cleanup,
I did, we were there for seven or eight years from once we started the projects. 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 of money and different techniques
to clean up. You know, TICO 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.
They're reactive barrier walls are one that is being used a lot these days on air force spaces
and in different communities across the country. But TICO 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, these atriple F-thomes by igniting accelerants
and then, and then having different groups that were being trained, whether it was department
at defense or whether it was different fire, you know, fire departments from different communities,
airports, they would spray this foam 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 down gradient for their site. So
typically a big source like this, 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 grower extraction system is going. So all the water underneath the high school
is contaminated. And of course, we're learning now that air deposition and, and deposition
through 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, they're saying, every day I would walk out after they 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 that this will be adequately remediated in Wisconsin?
Not a lot without significant, you know, outpour and outcrying from the public.
It's just, it's such a costly endeavor that unless there's a responsible party like
we have, Tycho Johnson controls, 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 dollars 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, too mildly.
It is. We just, we just wrote the secretary for the DNR, the interim one here,
because AG call 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 dollars is there because of us, and we think it should be used there. So
we're, 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 its 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 of 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.
All right. 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. Thank you. Appreciate it. Bye.