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https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/4584a08af3877edd2c552c594af6a135.mp4
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https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/ef91903aafff181b946c400aef5d06f5.pdf
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Living with PFAS
Interviewee: Brian Steglitz
Interviewer: Dani DeVasto
Date: October 8, 2021
Dani DeVasto: I’m Dani DeVasto and today, October 8, 2021, I have the pleasure of chatting
with Brian Steglitz. Hi Brian!
Brian Steglitz: How are you?
DD I’m fine, how are you?
BS: Good!
DD: Brian, can you tell me about where you’re from and where you currently live?
BS: So, I originally grew up in New Jersey, and have lived in several different locations. I was
working in Washington D.C. for a consulting firm before I moved to Michigan 25 years ago to
take a job with the city of Ann Arbor, as their weather treatment services engineer, so I’ve been
here since 1997, currently live in Ann Arbor, I am president of our water system, too, and
currently serving as the manager of the water treatment services unit for the city.
DD: Alright. Brian, can you tell me a story about your experience with PFAS, or with PFAS in
your community?
BS: Uhh sure, so for us it really started back in 2014 when we had to sample this drinking water
as part of a safe drinking water act requirement, part of the monitoring rule, which is part of what
EPA looks at for evaluating emerging contaminants. So we had data from our water system
dating back to 2014 but we didn’t hear anything about it for several years. You know, EPA
comes up with lists of these things, utilities typically don’t know what the health issues are, or
really much about these, we just know that these are what they want data on so we continue to
investigate and explore. So, it wasn’t until probably 2016, 2017 it sort of started to become
more, the media picked up on some of these contaminants, the environmental working group
did a piece on utilities across the country that had PFAS in them, the water in Ann Arbor was
featured there, there was a news article that, “There are poisons in the city of Ann Arbor’s
water,” and the next thing I knew is Channel 7 news was showing up at our doorstep, wanting to
interview me about what we’re doing about these poisons in our waters. So, it was sort of a trial
by fire, we had no, we really didn’t have any information about what these things are, what they
did. No real indication that the levels we had were or were not problematic, so I mean, once
again the media sort of dictated the conversation so at that point we were really scrambling. So
we began to do our homework and understand what the science was around these chemicals
and where is this coming from, you know you, and back at that time, a lot of the contamination
associated PFAS was groundwater related in airport bases, it’s used as part of firefighting foam,
so A-FFF is a common thing sprayed on fires in our airports, it can get into groundwater, we
actually have 2 sources of water for our water supply, the first one being huron river, and the
second one being wells, and the wells are on our Ann Arbor airport property, so we were like,
“Let’s go, let’s sample the groundwater and then we can figure out what we can do about it, we
can replace the FFF that’s at the airport with a safer firefighting foam, maybe that will take care
of the issue. So this is what was going through our minds, originally the samples that we were
�doing were regulatory sampling, it was just in our finished water, so we didn’t know what the
source was, so we were just checking what the finished water contains. So it turns out it wasn’t
our well water, our wellwater had non-detectable levels of PFAS, so we were like, “Wow, that’s
really weird,” and we were at that point, no one had heard of any contamination levels
associated with PFAS, so we started to explore and we measured it, and it was in the heron
river. We started doing some analytical testing and we went upstream and we were trying to see
where, was there a certain distance upstream, does it just disappear, like can we find out where
maybe it’s getting into the watershed? And we might’ve gone up maybe ten miles north of Ann
Arbor in our watershed, and we just continued to see it at similar concentrations, so there’s this
background, on the river? We really didn’t know where it was going, we started engaging
conversations with the state of Michigan, they ended up putting together a really robust
sampling unit, and they went way upstream, like they went over 50 miles upstream, and they
quickly found that there is a creek entering the huron river that is 50 miles upstream that had
extremely high levels of PFAS. I think at the time it was tens of thousands of parts per trillion,
and just to give you a magnitude, we were seeing like somewhere between 50 to 100 parts per
trillion of total PFAS at our intake down in Ann Arbor, so it it was getting into the river at tens of
thousands, then being diluted as it mixed in with the main stretch of the river, so then they
started exploring this creek, so what’s coming in from this creek? The wixam waters treat plant
empties their discharge into this creek, so their affluent was sampled, extremely high levels of
PFAS. So anyway, to make a longer story shorter, it ended up that there is a manufacturing
company that called Tribar, who manufactures parts for the auto industry and they use PFAS
containing chemicals as part of their suppressant to protect their workers, and it’s in their
wastewater, and it’s all over their property, so it’s getting into their storm drains, and so they
were, they’re probably the source of at least 50% of the PFAS that we see in Ann Arbor. So this
took a while, this wasn’t something we discovered right away, this was maybe years in as we
went through this investigation. So the state began to intervene, they’re out of our jurisdiction so
we had little control, and there’s also limited to no regulation, so there were some health
advisory levels at this time, but no regulation, so a lot of this was just collaborative work, like,
“are there things you can do?” so the polluter was not very responsive to taking any voluntary
action, so it took some litigation involving attorney, and consent degrees to eventually implement
some changes, and in subsequently they put in some treatment on their discharges that go to
the wixam plant and now there are guidelines for the wastewater, that comes out or wixam that
gets to the river, unfortunately they’re still out of line with what the drinking water standards are,
so we are still responsible for taking out PFAS from our source water, which I think is very
unfortunate, because customers in Ann Arbor are paying for PFAS remediation which should be
handled, but that’s the philosophical discussion, but it is part of our story, and it’s something that
I’m still fighting for, and I think we should be looking at this more holistically at a water shed level
and make sure that there is alignment, they’re putting it in, I think they should be responsible for
taking it out, so my customers don’t have to deal with it. So that’s the story of how it got into the
system. Through this time a lot of other things have happened, also. So, there was Sconan
Michigan where they had some surface water bodies that had this very bright white foam
accumulating, and there were some stories about PFAS accumulating in the foam, and it’s a
health issue and people should stay away from it, well, we operate and maintain four dams on
the river, and as the water cascades over these dams, foam is generated, and in some cases
�there’s standing foam on the river, and one of my bright ideas is, “Let’s sample this, just to make
sure that there’s not high concentrations of PFAS, and of course where you look you will find,
and we found PFAS in the high tens of thousands of parts per trillion, and in foam sitting in the
heron river where we have people recreate. So we share this information with the state and
people were just freaking out, because no one had had done this type of sampling in this type of
environment, so very quickly, all the health departments in the state were together in a meeting
explaining our situation to them and we’re deciding, “What do we do about this,” and in parallel
with this, the state was taking samples from fish that were living in the heron, and analyzing
them for PFAS, and very quickly we finding that there were hundreds of thousands of parts per
trillion in certain species of fish, so they’re just trying to deal with all these different issues, we
have the drinking water issues, we have the environmental exposure issues, so very soon there
was a “do not eat fish” advisory and it still exists, due to PFAS along the huron river and we
have a lot of anglers who fish. Ann Arbor also has the largest livery in the state of Michigan, in
terms of people, and we have people who canoe and kayak and paddleboard across all these
areas where we have accumulated foam. So subsequently to this there was a “do not eat foam”
advisory, and we never thought that people were coming to Ann arbor just to eat foam, but we
had to post signage to reflect that risk and people had dogs swimming in there keep them away,
so it became a big thing where we were dealing with this from a lot of different places. We
eventually tested things like our compost and we found PFAS in our compost and there’s still
really not a clear direction that has been given to customers that are using this. If you’re putting
your compost into your vegetable garden, there’s a chance of getting some uptake in your food,
so should we post the PFAS levels, and what does that mean? Are there hazards? We’re still
dealing with this evolving issue, and it’s not just a drinking water issue, it’s a community issue. I
think we’re been very transparent about how we handle this and sharing data with our
community and we’ve been very upfront about talking about it even when we didn’t have the
answers and I think that this has built up a lot of trust in our communities. We completely
revamped our public strategies once this hit because if you look at our media coverage of Ann
Arbor in 2016-17, it was all about poisons. This is not the type of coverage you want as a
drinking water utility. You want people to be drinking your water, and if they’re not, you can’t
serve them. So we hired somebody to help with this conversation, so we rebranded the utility
because of PFAS, and we developed a new logo. We have this URL that’s called
qualitywatermatters.org and we use that to talk about this issue. Quality associated with us was
really important to us. If you look at how the community has responded after several years,
we’ve completely changed the perspective on Ann Arbor water, and we’re seen as a leader,
we’ve participated with the state, I’ve testified on PFAS in congress. We are seen as (Audio cuts
out) Ann Arbor Handle it. We have a newsletter called quality water matters and we have as
close to real time information as we can, that we send out monthly. Normally we’d submit our
report yearly, six months into the next one, so the data is old, but now it’s every month, with
these emerging contaminants. It’s been a big part of what I’ve been dealing with these past
several years, but I think we’ve learned a lot and we’ve done a really good job of dealing with a
problem that was fatal to the water. We’re on the cusp of a $100M water improvement plan and
we need to get community support for this. This is the largest water system project in history of
Ann Arbor, and right now what we’re finding is that one of the alternatives is connecting to
Grand Rapids water authority. Should we maintain water autonomy or should we join with the
�water system and make the investments in Ann Arbor? Our township customers in Ann arbor
township are all saying we’re able to deal with these water threats. We want to keep control of
the water system, and 5 years ago they wouldn’t have said that, so being transparent tells them
we’re able to handle this, which helps. We’ve been part of research. We’ll do whatever we do to
make our water drinkable, and I want people to know we’re looking for solutions for everyone in
the water community. We have pilot systems we’ve set up to study how to better remove these,
with types of filtering media, exchange resins, things that we don’t have at our plant, we’re
building and looking at capabilities to remove these, and we’ll be publishing this, so we’re part of
the solution, developing answers.
DD: That’s awesome, that’s inspiring, so it really sounds like you’ve been busy!
BS: We’ve been busy, yeah!
DD: So you mentioned before, you kind of told the story of how the PFAS got into the water, can
you say anything about how it’s now getting out?
BS: So we quickly started to look at the tools in our toolbox, and we already had an inland water
river. In Michigan, that’s unusual, we’re surrounded by the great lakes, there’s a lot of
groundwater, but an inland river has very significant water quality variability because it rains and
the water river could change rapidly, so our plant is probably the most complex in Michigan, so
we already had a lot of technology to deal with stuff like this, so we have filters that contain
grano activated carbon, that’s probably the best available thing that can remove PFAS, but we
weren’t using the right medium, a different type of carbon. There’s lots of variables, and we
settled with one, and we used it for all of it, and it took a couple of years. Our filters are mixed
media, they have sand and carbon. Sand is a marble, but carbon has a bigger surface area, and
PFAS will stick to it, and the carbon will absorb the PFAS and other things, so you have to
replace it, which we already did. Once we started doing that, we looked at how long it would
take, so we started sampling filters to predict the life expectancy, which while costly, helps. So
we settled on a 2 year life, increasing costs by 3K a year. It used to be landfilled, but we’ve been
working to regenerate it, cooking the carbon to get rid of the PFAS, one of the best ways to
destroy it. They bring it back to us so we can reuse it. We’ve made some graphs for the
community about PFAS and how we want to keep from landfilling because that doesn’t help the
environment. PFAS strains are different, some we’re able to remove, but not the smaller ones,
because the bigger ones will kick them off to stick instead through competitive absorption. We’ll
get pretty good removal of all the big ones, the ones we know the most about, but the shorter
ones will be coming to. Looking into the future, we’re keeping an eye on what we can do about
these little ones, and the public health impacts. This is not going away, we’re still learning, and
we’re just trying to stay one step ahead of science so we can be prepared.
DD: Well, it sounds like you guys are doing a lot of really good work, and being really proactive
which is really nice to hear! So, you did hint at my other question about moving forward, are
those the two that you would say, or did you want to add anything else?
�BS: I’m concerned about our ability to deal with this that our current tools don’t have and the
challenge of making affordable safe water depending upon what the rules are. There is a cost
element. We could regulate something at a low level, but nothing exists to do that, so seeing
how technology develops for this, and there’s a lot of research and money, and the university of
Michigan is looking at using plasmas, I don’t quite understand it, but there’s a lot going on trying
to figure out the best solution is. To me, it’s very clear what the best solution is, which is keeping
it out of the environment. We’re lobbying the EPA about the toxic substances control act as they
look at new poisons, we need to be looking at this ahead of time as opposed to afterwords,
which has been the biggest flaw. We need to prevent them from getting in the environment
before we do anything, so we’re pusing EPA to use existing tools to protect all of us.
DD: For sure. So before we wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to add that we haven’t
touched on or anything you’d like to say more about?
BS: I don’t think so, unless there’s anything I missed.
DD: I very much enjoyed listening to your story and all the work that you’re doing, so thank you
so much, Brian, for taking the time to share your story today.
BS: You’re welcome.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Living with PFAS Interviews
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Devasto, Danielle
Description
An account of the resource
The Living with PFAS interviews were recorded during 2021 to gather the personal stories of individuals impacted by PFAS contamination. PFAS, or per- and polyflourinated substances, are a group of chemicals used to make coatings and products resistant to heat, oil, stains, grease, and water. These products include clothing, furniture, adhesives, food packaging, and heat-resistant non-stick cooking surfaces. They are considered "forever chemicals" in that they do not break down in the environment, can move through soils and contaminate drinking water sources, and they build up in fish, wildlife, and in the human body. Studies have shown that exposure to large amounts of PFAS may affect growth and development, reproduction, thyroid function, the immune system, and may injure the liver. More research is needed to assess the full health effects of exposure to PFAS.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2021
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Living with PFAS (project)
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
In copyright
Subject
The topic of the resource
Oral history
Personal narrative
PFAs (Perfluorinated chemicals)
Groundwater--Pollution
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
DC-11
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/mp4
application/pdf
audio/mp3
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Motion Picture
Text
Sound
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PFAS0032
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Steglitz, Brian
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2021-10-08
Title
A name given to the resource
Brian Steglitz, 2021 (Interview video and transcript)
Description
An account of the resource
Brian Steglitz moved to Michigan in the late 1990s and currently lives in Ann Arbor. Brian is the manager of the city's water treatment services. In the interview, Steglitz discusses work and response to the presence of PFAS contaminants in the water.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
DeVasto, Danielle (interviewer)
Subject
The topic of the resource
Oral history
Personal narrative
PFAs (Perfluorinated chemicals)
Groundwater--Pollution
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Living with PFAS (project)
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In copyright</a>
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Moving Image
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
video/mp4
application/pdf
Language
A language of the resource
eng