The city intends to blend water contaminated with PFAS with clean water to reduce concentration levels.
PFAS are a group of toxic chemicals that do not break down easily due to their chemical composition. A Dayton Daily News investigation last fall identified at least 15 public water systems in the region, including Dayton’s, where PFAS levels recently exceeded the U.S. EPA’s new guidelines on PFAS limits that will go into effect in March.
The existing guidelines are 70 parts per trillion, but the new safety standard will be 4 parts per trillion for certain types of PFAS. Recent measurements have put Dayton’s PFOS level (a type of PFAS) around 7 parts per trillion.
PFAS over the EPA levels don’t represent an immediate health risk, officials say, but the standards are meant to reduce the risk from a lifetime of exposure, with the EPA saying the changes will “prevent thousands of deaths” over years.
Dayton City Manager Shelley Dickstein said the city’s water department is strategic, proactive and aggressively goes after outside funding, helping to keep water rates and operating costs down.
“We want to make sure we’re delivering clean, safe water to 400,000 people,” she said.
In addition to serving the city’s 140,000 customers, Dayton sells water to Montgomery County — which in turn provides it to hundreds of thousands of residents across the county — as well as parts of Greene County.
Dayton City Commission this week approved spending $8 million to expand and improve part of the Miami Well Field near Rip Rap Road.
The commission also approved spending $2.5 million for engineering and design work for a raw water interconnect project and $360,000 to assess the city’s water quality lab and come up with a design for its expansion.
The city wants to construct a 48-inch raw water line that connects the Miami Well Field and Ottawa water treatment plant.
The new pipeline would convey groundwater with non-detectable levels of PFAS from the Miami Well Field to the Ottawa treatment facility, said Aaron Zonin, Dayton’s deputy director of the water department.
This would allow the city to blend clean water with water pulled from the Mad River Well Field that contains certain levels of the toxic, man-made chemicals.
The Miami Well Field is located in northeast Dayton, while the Ottawa plant is near the northeast corner of downtown.
The $2.5 million will pay for design work for the project, Zonin said, and the city next year hopes to go after funding to construct the water line.
The money for the design work comes from the federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency supports the city’s project. The funding is basically a grant, since it has 0% interest and principal loan forgiveness.
The city also plans to double the number of water production wells near Rip Rap Road from four to eight, and existing wells will receive enhancements, Zonin said.
Currently, the city does not utilize this portion of the Miami Well Field, Zonin said, but these wells will produce about 12 million gallons of water each day when this project is complete.
“That’s about half of what we produce at Miami (Well Field) right now,” he said. “Certainly, this will increase our production overall.”
The city also plans to expand its water quality lab to help with PFAS detection and testing.
Dayton is one of a small number of municipalities across the nation that have water labs that can test for these chemicals, Zonin said.
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