[CPEO-MEF] PFAS: "Tucson [AZ] wants out of requirement to serve treated groundwater to customers"

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Tucson wants out of requirement to serve treated groundwater to customers

By Tony Davis
Arizona Daily Star 
January 22, 2020

Tucson wants the EPA to let it off the legal hook for serving its customers once-tainted water cleaned by a south-side treatment plant.

Tucson Water is negotiating with the Environmental Protection Agency to amend an old agreement that requires the city to serve more than 5,800 acre-feet of water annually cleaned by its plant near the Interstate 19-Irvington Road interchange. That is enough water to serve more than 20,000 Tucson homes per year.

The City Council voted Jan. 7 to support the amendment effort, through negotiations that actually began in September.

A key reason is to insure the city is never required to sell customers water from the Tucson Airport Remediation Project, or TARP, in the event the plant is overloaded by toxic PFAS compounds. The compounds, in very heavy concentrations, are now slowly migrating through the aquifer toward south-side wells that already send water with lesser PFAS levels to the plant for cleanup.

In a related matter, the city is putting off suing to force cleanup of its PFAS-tainted groundwater by the U.S. Defense Department and other parties for their alleged role in the pollution. Instead, by a unanimous City Council vote on Jan. 7, city officials will seek to negotiate a cleanup with EPA, the state, the Defense Department and other parties, Mayor Regina Romero said. Litigation will be left in reserve as a “hole card” to use in case negotiations don’t work, council members said.

...

For the entire article, see
https://tucson.com/news/local/tucson-wants-out-of-requirement-to-serve-treated-groundwater-to/article_d048bced-6244-548a-8a02-0583cf5fc7d1.html

--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org





_______________________________________________
Military mailing list
Military@lists.cpeo.org
http://lists.cpeo.org/listinfo.cgi/military-cpeo.org