Big Grant From State Will Help Filter PFAS out of Hampton Bays Water Wells

The Hampton Bays Water District this month was awarded a $4.7 million grant from New York State that will pay for some 60 percent of upgrades to one of two well fields in the district that have been contaminated by the chemicals known collectively as PFAS.

The water district has already bonded for $3.7 million to begin the work to upgrade the well field off Bellows Pond Road, known as Plant 3, with a granular activated carbon filter that can effectively scrub PFAS chemicals from drinking water supplies.

Along with the carbon filter, the district is making other necessary upgrades to Plant 3, which is fed by three wells. The project will cost about $7.4 million.

“We bonded the $3.7 million to get the project moving. We’re in design and engineering now, so we’ve already begun, but this funding will help us complete the work without having to bond any more money,” James Kappers, the superintendent of the Hampton Bays Water District, said this week.

He said the district hopes to have the approvals for the work by early in 2025 and for the new filters and other upgrades to the well field’s infrastructure in place and running by the end of 2025.

The water district has five well sites with a total of 11 supply wells, pumping up to 9 million gallons of water per day in the summer.

The Plant 3 well field first showed signs of contamination by the most infamous of the PFAS chemicals, a pairing known as PFOA/PFOS, in 2020. The levels detected are very low, Kappers said, but the water district does not know whether, since they only appeared four years ago, they can be expected to climb in the coming years or how long they will persist in the groundwater flowing beneath the Plant 3 pumphouse.

The chemicals PFOS and PFOA were for decades, until about the year 2000, common ingredients in a wide variety of products designed to repel water — including things like pizza boxes, stain resistant upholstery and carpeting, nonstick cookware and a variety of personal care products like dental floss and eye makeup. They were also a key component of fire retardant foams used by fire departments around the county, especially at airports, to combat fuel fires that water was ineffective at dousing.

The PFAS chemicals were only identified by the federal Environmental Protection Agency as potentially harmful contaminants in 2009, and it wasn’t until 2017 that concerns about their presence in drinking water in many areas near airports spread. The agency issued an a safety threshold of 70 parts per trillion for drinking water safety, although as what are known as “emerging contaminants,” relatively little was known about their potential harmful effects.

Very quickly, however, the chemicals were found to be contaminating drinking water supplies around the country, even at levels far above the high safety threshold the EPA had set. They were dubbed “forever chemicals” for their ability to persist and accumulate in water, the environment and, most concerningly, in humans. Studies soon determined they were likely carcinogenic and could cause other health concerns, and states began rapidly slashing the levels in drinking water that were acceptable.

In East Hampton, groundwater carrying high levels of PFOA and PFOS was found to be flowing from beneath East Hampton Airport, where the fire retardant foams had been used at plane crash sites and in training exercises by firefighters, and into southern Wainscott where hundreds of private residential wells were found to be contaminated. In response, East Hampton Town delivered bottled water to residents and funded a $10 million project to connect the entire region to Suffolk County Water Authority supply mains.

The town also joined the hundreds of lawsuits being filed around the country against the chemical manufacturers that had created the chemical compounds — and who, many said, had known about the potential health concerns they posed — the companies that produced the firefighting foams that led to the spread of the contamination and, in some cases, like in East Hampton, against the fire departments that sprayed them. All of the lawsuits have been lumped into a single court proceeding in South Carolina.

In 2020, New York State set a new safety threshold of 10 parts per trillion for PFAS chemicals and earlier this year the EPA set a new national standard safety threshold of just 4 ppt that will go into effect in 2027 — requiring all public water suppliers to treat their water supplies to levels below that threshold.

Kapper said that the detection levels in the Bellows Pond wells are below even that 4 ppt currently, but that there’s no telling how they will change in the coming years. And with the 2027 deadline approaching, the water district decided it should just move on installing the filters now.

The Bellows Pond wells are the second set of wells in Hampton Bays to show PFAS contamination. Another well field on Ponquogue Avenue, near the Hampton Bays Fire Department firehouse, where fire retardant foams had been stored and used in drills for decades, was found to have high levels of the chemicals in 2014. The water district shut down the wells for two years and installed a filter system in 2018. That filter cost just $2 million at the time, Kapper said, but demand for the systems as the breadth of the contamination nationwide has been uncovered has driven the price up.

Unlike the Ponquogue Avenue well field, Kapper said, the source of the contamination of the Bellows Pond Road wells is unknown.

“It’s been discovered in so many sources now, and these levels are on the lower side, so it really could be anyone’s guess” Kapper said. “According to our spot models, it could have come from the highway, maybe a car fire that foam was used on. But it’s been found in cesspools, from fabric softener, so there’s no telling for certain yet. Our focus is to get this system up and running and not have to worry.”

Southampton Town Councilman Tommy John Schiavoni said that the town — the Town Board members serve as the commissioners of the Hampton Bays Water District — was relieved to land the grant for the well field filters.

“This is major — this makes nearly $7 million for the Hampton Bays Water District that we’ve gotten from the state,” said Schiavoni, who was elected to the State Assembly earlier this month and will take office in January, succeeding longtime Assemblyman Fred Thiele. The town won grants in 2022 to install new underwater supply lines beneath the Shinnecock Canal and through Shinnecock Bay and beneath the Ponquogue Bridge to improve water pressure along Dune Road.

“The bottom line is, the people are getting a grant from the state and will be drinking the cleanest water on Long Island,” he added.