SUNDERLAND — Roughly two years after per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) were first detected in water in private wells on Reservation Road, residents on that street are calling for the town to better protect their drinking water.
The testing for PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” began after the nearby landfill closed in 2005, according to Jeffrey Arps of Tighe & Bond, which has led the water monitoring. After the testing detected PFAS in July 2024, Tighe & Bond, an engineering, environmental, planning and design consulting firm, tested water from 15 properties between 40 and 118 Reservation Road, and found the chemicals in the wells of five properties.
During Monday’s Selectboard meeting, Kim Drake, a Reservation Road resident, asked why the company did not notify all Reservation Road residents about the positive PFAS test in 2024. In response, Nick Guidi, an environmental scientist with Tighe & Bond, said the company only notifies residents with homes that fall within a 500-foot radius of a positive PFAS test and then pursues testing at those homes.
“It would’ve been courteous in hindsight to notify everybody,” Guidi said, “but we also don’t want to create a scary scenario where people have to worry about things when they don’t.”
“I don’t understand why our town wouldn’t, out of courtesy, let us know so we could even do our own test if we wanted to. … Instead, we hear about it two years later,” Drake said to the Selectboard. “I love my town, I love my community, I love where I live, but I’m always in these kinds of incidences fighting with the town to do what’s right.”
Selectboard Chair Nathaniel Waring said it would have been better if the town had notified more people, but the board was under the impression in 2024 that PFAS was only found in one private well and he “didn’t have any reason to know that we were going to start getting more hits.”
Arps then continued Tighe & Bond’s status report, explaining that the state requires that levels of PFAS 6, or the six most hazardous PFAS chemicals, not exceed 20 parts per trillion in drinking water. Principal Environmental Scientist Jesse Arroyo, who is taking over for Arps as he retires, added that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also requires levels of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanoic sulfate (PFOS) to remain below 4 parts per trillion in drinking water.
Of the five houses with water that tested positive for PFAS since the first detection in 2024, two came in with levels above 20 parts per trillion of PFAS or above 4 parts per trillion of PFOA and PFOS. Guidi stressed that the levels were still “extremely low” and similar to the concentration in an average person’s bloodstream given how “ubiquitous” the chemicals are. Arroyo compared 1 part per trillion to a drop of water in an Olympic-size swimming pool.
To treat the residents’ water, Tighe & Bond recommends that point-of-entry treatment systems be installed in the homes of the properties that tested positive for PFAS. According to Arroyo, “granulated activated carbon” inside the systems catches the PFAS molecules like an adhesive to filter them out.
For the two homes with PFAS levels above 20 parts per trillion or above 4 parts per trillion of PFOA or PFOS, Tighe & Bond recommends a system with two units that contain the carbon filters —the “gold standard of remediating PFAS and eliminating that exposure pathway that’s above the regulation level,” Guidi explained. For the homes with PFAS levels below this threshold, the company suggests a one-unit system.
With the necessary approvals, Arroyo expects the systems could be installed in mid-to-late November. For the first three months after the systems are installed, Tighe & Bond suggests the town provide bottled water to the residents until the company can confirm the filters are effective. Then, the company will monitor the systems four times each year.
“It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach; at that point of time, we may be sampling different people at different iterations based on the individual [PFAS] concentrations at the residences,” Arroyo continued. “It’s not like once we install the [point-of-entry treatment] systems, we’re abandoning the systems — we’re going to continue to monitor and ensure that everybody’s drinking safely.”
Drake, whose water tested positive for PFAS at below 20 parts per trillion, urged the town to consider installing more two-unit systems on Reservation Road.
“If it’s the gold standard,” Drake said, “why is their house getting the gold standard and their house, and I’m smack in the middle and so I get [a one-unit] system?”
Guidi clarified that Tighe & Bond based the recommendations on the constraints of the town’s budget, because the town pays for the monitoring of the wells and would be responsible for funding the installation of the filtration systems.
“I wish we could do more than the minimum for everything in town — schools, roads, police, everything in town,” Waring said. “The sad unfortunate state of municipal finance in 2026 is that we have to scrape together money just to get books in schools and things like that. … That’s not to say that we’re not going to have a conversation and decide that it does make sense to put two systems in, but our duty to the town involves our duty to you, but also to the fiscal responsibility for the whole town, and we have to balance those two things in a way that makes everybody as happy as we possibly can.”
Drake said she took offense to Waring’s comment, claiming that he was pitting their “street and [their] water against schools.”
Selectboard member Daniel Murphy told Drake that the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection may recommend two-unit systems for the houses on Reservation Road, requiring the town to install those systems instead.
“I don’t care. I’m talking to my town to take care of us, because you know what? You haven’t,” Drake said. “I just want my water back. … I want the best I can have all the time, not the time that you test or the time after. I want it all the time so that I know what I’m getting day-to-day is fine for me to give my 10-month-old granddaughter in her bottle.”
Selectboard member Christyl Drake-Tremblay told Drake she will look into the cost of installing two-unit systems in more houses on Reservation Road beyond those with PFAS levels above 20 parts per trillion. The Selectboard plans to discuss Tighe & Bond’s report and determine next steps at a future meeting.
Waring called manufacturers DuPont and 3M the “real bad guy” for “[making] these products, [putting] them into everything that we touch and not taking any responsibility for the damage they’ve done.”
The two companies paid hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements to the state of New Jersey for contaminating drinking water with PFAS.
Waring hopes Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell and other state attorney generals follow New Jersey’s lead, and encouraged residents to ask state Sen. Jo Comerford, D-Northampton, and the next state representative who will fill former state Rep. Natalie Blais’ seat to pressure the state to help towns navigate PFAS.
“There is some hope on the horizon that this isn’t just going to be a fight that small towns have to keep doing,” Waring said.
