Members of Westfield Residents Advocating For Themselves (WRAFT) read with great interest and gratitude the continuing water treatment updates provided by The Westfield News and its staff, most recently on January 24, 2019. Thank you for your continuing efforts to keep our Community informed throughout this man-made, environmental, and public health crisis. I am writing to you today to offer some additional information to share with our Westfield neighbors.
First, WRAFTers were invited by Douglas Fine, Assistant Commissioner, Bureau of Water Resources at the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP), as recognized Drinking Water Stakeholders, to its meeting on January 16, 2019 held to discuss and solicit feedback on a petition they received titled: “Petition for Rulemaking to Establish a Treatment Technique Drinking Water Standard for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances.” Upon arriving we were delighted to find the DEP conference room packed with attendees, including: our own DPW Director Dave Billips; Councilors Emmershy, Surprise, and Babinski; National PFAS Contamination Coalition Members from Cape Cod, GreenCAPE; Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH) officials; Silent Spring Researcher Laurel Schaider; notable PFAS academic researchers; and MassDEP officials in charge of Waste Site Cleanup, the Office of Research and Standards, and the State’s Drinking Water Program, among many others. Media from NECN/Boston 10 and Fox News were also in attendance, and the DEP has placed all related materials, including documentation and video, available online. In a very long session, in which every single participant was encouraged and allowed to speak their mind in full, MassDEP listened to the feedback offered on the submitted petition and anticipated releasing their response as early as Monday, January 28. Stay tuned.
Second, the month of February will be a very busy one for WRAFTers, including: meetings with UMASS researchers to discuss state level PFAS work as well as our proposal for the upcoming Multi-site PFAS Health Study being conducted by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR); meetings with state legislators to help encourage a statewide PFAS response plan; and two upcoming community events. The first Community Event to take place will be our second PFAS Health Study meeting, to be held from 6:30-7:30pm on Wednesday, February 13th in the Florence Rand Lang Auditorium at the Westfield Athenaeum. At this public meeting, we will update attendees on our progress with our ATSDR Multi-site Health Study proposal and on the hundreds of pages of public record cancer statistics for our community that we received from the MDPH on January 18th. The second Community Event will be WRAFT’s second Birthday Party, celebrating two years of education and advocacy. Details on that soon!
The third update we would like to offer our Westfield family and neighbors is in direct response to something mentioned in the January 24th piece regarding Arsenic. WRAFT members have made several public records requests regarding Arsenic testing of our Well 2 filtration system and its components. We will be happy to unpack the results of these requests at our February 13th meeting. Our extensive inquiries were prompted by a letter sent to one of the private well owners on Lower Sandy Hill Road, dated June 14, 2018, in which MassDEP’s Eva Tor stated:
“The aforementioned samples were also analyzed for arsenic which is initially present in the carbon from the manufacturing process but is flushed from the system by water passing through the carbon units.”
Ms. Tor was, of course, referring to the fact that court documents (2009 & 2011) and trade magazine reports reveal that:
“The discharge of Arsenic from activated carbon water filters was specifically discussed at an August 8, 2000 meeting of the Water Quality Association. At that meeting, a report was presented of a multi-year study conducted by KX Industries, L.P. The KX Industries, L.P. study concluded that, “arsenic and antimony contamination occurs broadly in activated carbons,” and that “[t]his contamination leads to extractable levels of arsenic and antimony that can often exceed the current arsenic and antimony standards and pervasively exceed the proposed future arsenic standard.”
With City officials who bemoan the Specter of social media, we appreciate the platform provided by The Westfield News to dispel any “mis-information”, question the dissolution of the Barnes Aquifer Protection Advisory Committee (BAPAC) and our absence of local environmental protection and enforcement, challenge the repeated tampering with the audio recordings (public record) of our city meetings, and to denounce the intimidation tactics applied to our members. Thank you for maintaining Freedom of the Press, and for providing this opportunity to share the finer details with our fellow residents suffering from decades of exposure to these chemicals in our drinking water.
Sincerely,
Kristen Mello, Co-founder
Westfield Residents Advocating For Themselves
