EPA will meet next month with residents of a Lehigh Valley town whose “forever chemicals” problem is linked to a surprising source: the cleanup of a Superfund site.
The agency has scheduled a Jan. 13 community meeting in Palmerton, Pennsylvania, months after the synthetic chemicals were found in drinking water wells next to a federal Superfund site remediated with sewage sludge fertilizer.
The meeting will be the first since the agency concluded in October that Superfund cleanup activities likely contributed to the contamination. The chemicals, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, were found this summer in soil on the site and have gotten into Palmerton’s drinking water wells.
“At this time, it is believed that the source of the PFAS contamination on the Site is related to the … selected [cleanup] remedy,” EPA’s regional office in Philadelphia reported in October.
