MONTAGUE CENTER — The Montague Center Water District will use its first state grant to date, in the amount of $100,000, to study per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) inside the district’s groundwater source in hopes of future mitigation.
The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection announced in July that $14.7 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Emerging Contaminants in Small or Disadvantaged Communities program was distributed to 21 public water suppliers. The Montague Center Water District is the only funding recipient in Franklin County. The grant is awarded to communities with a population of under 9,000 people served by the public water provider.
“My people in the water district are pretty excited to hear what the proposal is going to be,” Commissioner Gary Dion said about the grant and what the plan will be for mitigation.
A study will be conducted of the water district’s infrastructure, which includes the groundwater source and roughly 3 miles of water main.
Dion said 152 customers are served by the district within Montague Center, and options for PFAS mitigation include treating the groundwater, installing a new well, or creating a permanent interconnection with the Turners Falls Water District and discontinuing the current water source, which comes from a pond on Main Street.
A request for proposals (RFP) has been opened for firms to submit their interest in conducting the study, the cost of which will be covered entirely by the state grant. Dion believes this portion of the project could take six months to a year to complete, based on conversations he’s had with MassDEP officials.
According to the MassDEP, PFAS are “a group of harmful manmade chemicals widely used in common consumer products, industrial processes and in certain firefighting foams.” People exposed to “sufficiently elevated” PFAS compounds could experience various health effects. The chemicals have been linked to different forms of cancer, reproductive problems, immunotoxicity, colitis and more. In Massachusetts, the maximum contaminant level for the six most common PFAS chemicals is 20 parts per million.
Dion said the Montague Center Water District follows tests as required by state regulations for PFAS and other emerging contaminants. The MassDEP Drinking Water data portal for PFAS testing indicates that out of the 19 PFAS tests taken in July at the Montague Center Water District, the results of 17 tests are considered nondetectable.
However, two chemical detections, PFAS6 and PFOA, fell just above the reporting limit of 1.83 parts per million at 3.73 parts per million. The highest result of the documented tests online was 6.11 parts per million in July 2024 for PFAS6.
With this grant, Dion said the district wants to become compliant with the incoming federal guidelines for PFAS contamination, which aim for a zero-detection rate of PFOA and PFOS in water by 2029. Without this grant, compliance could be harder to accomplish.
“It’s a grant to try to get a handle on what’s best for our little district to go forward with the PFAS problems that we have in our water,” Dion said.
