DOUGLASS (Mont.) — The state has spent more than $1 million conducting testing and installing home water filters in its response to chemical contamination found in groundwater around the closed Boyertown landfill, but it still has no final plan for how to handle the problem.
That’s what a room full of hundreds of concerned residents was told on Dec. 10.
Similarly, a year after the state asked for help, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is still in the early stages of conducting a study, which, among other things, includes re-testing wells the state has already tested, and will not issue a report until next year on whether the site will be declared a Superfund cleanup site.
The chemicals of concern are called PFAS, Per and Polyfluorakyl, and are sometimes called “forever chemicals” because they do not occur naturally in nature and are very slow to break down in nature.
Although state authorities have known about problems at the landfill for more than 25 years, it is only recently that science has discovered the dangers of PFAS to human health, and its discovery in private wells surrounding the landfill has spurred both the state and federal government to revisit the site.
The landfill, located between Jackson, Merkel and Gilbertsville roads, had been in operation since the 1950s and accepted municipal, residual and hazardous wastes, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection presentation Wednesday night at the Gilbertsville Firehouse.
It was closed in 1987 by the DEP because of poor maintenance at the site. The man who owned the property died earlier this year, “and I’m not aware of the state of his estate,” said Colin Wade, a regional project officer with DEP’s Hazardous Sites Clean Up Act (HSCA) Program.
Wade said about two-thirds of the landfill has no liner at the bottom, and so the leachate from the landfill — the liquid created when rainwater passes through the landfill cover, comes in contact with what is buried there and reaches the groundwater beneath — is not being collected and treated.
The EPA assessed the landfill in the late 1980s, but at the time, science was not aware of the dangers from PFAS, and so the EPA took no action. As the substance has emerged as a health threat in recent years, the state has set a minimum health standard of between 14 and 18 parts per trillion, which Wade said is the equivalent of a drop of water in a swimming pool.
The federal standard is even lower, 4 parts per trillion. The Trump administration recently extended the timeline by which public water systems are required to meet that standard from 2029 to 2031, Joseph Vitello, remedial project manager for the EPA, told Wednesday night’s crowd. He also said the administration’s slimming of staff and other changes have slowed the agency’s response to the Boyertown Landfill situation.
“The standard has been made more protective as we’ve learned more about how toxic these chemicals are. As we know better, we do better,” said Wade. Current science has linked PFAS to liver issues, immune system dysfunction, and kidney cancer, Wade said.
DEP began to take action in 2023 with well-testing and installing filter systems in homes where the water exceeded the federal safe limit, said Wade. To date, its efforts have added up to about $1 million.
“But we still have a ton of work to do,” he said.
“We all want public water, and the availability is there,” said one audience member. “Must we wait until it’s a Superfund site to do that?”
Wade acknowledged that the final solution may end up being providing public water to those with contaminated wells. That would require laying water pipes in at least four linear miles of road. Wade said he is not sure the state program has enough money to make that happen. “That’s why we called the EPA,” he said.
Vitello told the crowd his agency is undertaking a “site assessment” and that the water tests done by the federal agency mirror the findings of the state tests. He anticipated that a draft report now under review would be finalized in the first quarter of 2026, and that report will dictate whether the EPA will move toward declaring the site a Superfund clean-up site.
“How many more things need to leach into our community before the federal government steps in to fix it?” one audience member asked.
Vitello warned that Superfund cleanups can take years to complete. “It’s a long process,” he said.
To date, the testing perimeter is about a half-mile, and so far, “we don’t know the full extent of the contamination,” adding that the size and concentration of the contamination were “surprising and unexpected” to DEP officials, said Wade.
“There are still several dozen homes we would like to sample,” Wade said, adding that the DEP is “trying to get filters into the homes that need them as fast as we can.”
DEP is also providing weekly supplies of bottled water to some homes.
He said to date, no health agency has studied the neighborhood to see if there have been any adverse health effects potentially caused by the well contamination.
“If you look at our neighborhood, we’ve had a hell of a lot of cancer,” said one audience member. “We all know that awful stuff is in there,” said another audience member, “but we’re the ones who have to live next to it.”
Another resident wondered aloud why homes had been allowed to be built so close to the landfill. “We’ve got Love Canal in our backyard, and they allowed houses to be built right up against it. You’re putting Band-Aids on this stuff, and people are drinking this water.”
Both Vitello and Wade said there will likely be more public meetings to update residents on the progress of the investigation and to inform them about next steps.
