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Plainfield Twp. board’s resolution for water contamination falls short for residents

Posted at 11:07 PM, Dec 11, 2017
and last updated 2017-12-11 23:07:05-05

PLAINFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. -- Residents of Plainfield Township gathered for a monthly town hall meeting Monday, and things started out much differently than they usually do.

After a closed meeting with its attorney, the township board passed a resolution to authorize spending $400,000 on a water plant filter to remove PFAS, contaminants that may potentially cause cancer.

The township's attorney says they're doing this to ease people's minds, even though they say there's no problem in the first place, despite numerous reports.

Doug Van Essen, an attorney for the township says he hopes action to install a water plant filter to remove PFAS will start in January of 2018.

During the public comment portion of the meeting one resident said, "It’s great that we’re going to try to implement something that’s gonna take the PFAS out of the water but we don’t know what else is in that landfill," referring to a superfund site that was used for dumping and has contaminated the public water supply.

Though the township has testing wells, they don't detect all the chemicals that have been found in the township's water because the EPA can only test for 90 chemicals at a time, none of which include PFAS, chromium, TTHM's, or 1,4-dioxene, all of which have shown above legal levels in the municipal water supply, according to members of the Plainfield Township board and numerous reports.

Residents voiced their concerned for an hour and a half during Monday night's meeting.

One resident took to the podium and said, “There should be some place where we can go to get our water, there should be some place we can go to get bottled water. The state should be helping us, the federal government- somebody should be helping us.”