The Prescott Valley Town Council got an update on efforts to remediate tremediate PFAS chemicals present in groundwater pumped by certain town wells at its meeting Thursday.
The town had originally shut down all wells found to have detectable amounts of any PFAS compounds. However, the Little Pete Well in northern Prescott Valley has resumed operation because sample results for that well do not exceed the draft MCLs.
Ion Exchange, the proposed treatment for Prescott Valley’s wells, is currently in the 30 percent design stage for three of the wells in the Quailwood area. These three wells are slated for the first mitigation efforts because, while connected to the town’s upper water system, the Quailwood area has the least amount of well redundancy in the Prescott Valley system. The cost of installing Ion Exchange Treatment systems at these wells will be around $2.2 to $2.4 million each. The town is exploring various funding avenues, including loans from the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority (WIFA). The town is also a party to national litigation against various entities that produced PFAS and will be filing claims to participate in recent settlements with DuPont and 3M.
The town will also be testing its wastewater effluent to determine the best treatment options for removing PFAS compounds there to ensure that effluent recharge in the aquifer does not reintroduce PFAS chemicals into drinking water. This will include treatment facilities installed at a future recharge injection well near Mountain Valley Park. That effort will take longer because treating wastewater is more complex than treating drinking water and is not yet as common. The town received a $2.1 million allocation from the recently approved federal Interior and Environmental Appropriations Bill to help offset this cost.
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