July 30, 2026 – PiP Meeting – Former DPW Site – Video & Transcript

July 30, 2026 - PiP Meeting - Former DPW Site

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Okay, good evening. It's 630. I'd like to start this presentation. So I hope you can all see the screen here. I've got the first page up just saying what it is we're doing tonight. I think everyone here knows that this is information meeting regarding the former DPW site at 195 Main Street and a couple associated or a couple of joining properties at 207 to the north, 201, which is the Wayland Middle School to the east. And they're all involved and probably more will be involved and I'll get to that. We'll get to it. So moving along here. What I'd like to discuss tonight is first the DEP requirements for this type of meeting and for what we're actually doing out at the former DPW site. I'd like to talk about the timelines that we have to conform to. And just a spoiler alert there. We're going to be submitting a notice of delay prior to the due date for the Phase 2. We have not got enough information yet to fully provided to provide a full phase to report yet. We've got a lot of information, but there's still more to get. Talk about the Phase 2 assessment we have to date, the information we've got and what we've done. One of the problems we have is the site area originally thought the site was going to be limited to the former DPW property. That's not true. It's substantially larger than that. So I'll get into that as well. And finally, I want to invite public commentary on our draft revised Phase 2 Scope of Work, which is available. I believe you all received a link. If you got an email invitation or a letter of invitation, you should have got a link with that to get that downloaded from the DEP. It's also available from the town website. You can download it there. And there's also a paper copy that's in the PIP repository that the health department maintains. So hopefully everybody can get access to that. I'm running solo tonight, so I have to not just present, but I'm also doing the letting people in and meetings and muting, unmuting and that sort of thing. So I look distracted. That's probably what I'm doing. So the first thing I'd like to talk about is what the requirements are from the MCP. We have certain timelines we have to follow. And the way that the MCP, the Massachusetts contingency plan rules are set up. Once you have a site that's tier classified, then you have three years to provide in Phase 2 comprehensive site assessment. I'll just abbreviate that to Phase 2 for these purposes. But that is the big study that you need to do. And there's a lot of requirements to go along with that. Following that, about a year later, you're supposed to provide a Phase 3 remedial action plan. And also, if applicable, a Phase 4 remedy implementation plan. And a year after that, the goal is to provide either a permanent solution or a temporary solution. And that comes within five years of the data tier classification. So our timeline, we tier classified the site on November 1st of 2023, which means that we're supposed to be done with this whole process by November 1st of 2028. There's also provision that if that's not feasible because of site specific circumstances, then you can just notify DP that there's going to be a delay in complying with those particular time frames. And you have to provide an explanation of why that is and what steps you're taking to see if you can speed it up a little bit. Excuse me. When we talk about a site, that's a word that gets used in various contexts. Generally, when we talk about an environmental setting, site means the area of interest where there's some contamination that we're trying to either investigate or remediate. Now, the official definition is disposal site. That's the term defined in the MCP, the DEP's regulations on this. And you can see the definition there. I won't bother to read the whole thing. But if you just look at the highlighted words, it's any area where uncontrolled oil or has material has come to be located. It's not just a place where there was some sort of a spill or dumping or some form of release, but it's also everywhere else that that release has affected to a certain degree. And by certain degree, I'm not trying to be vague, but we do want to put some boundaries on what we mean. And typically what we do is we define what a significant impact is, and that's something that exceeds one or more of DEP's official standards that apply to that site. So that's what we're talking about in this case is the disposal site, which I'll just use with a capital S site is the area that's affected by this particular tracking number. Before I go any further, I forgot to mention when I started, we are recording this session. So just so everyone's fully aware that this is being recorded by Wacom. I'm also recording it on my computer and it will become publicly available. So I guess that's a warning to you if you're nervous about anything. I say moving along the phase two comprehensive site assessment. There's certain requirements is actually a very long list. It's a couple of pages long in the MCP and it's, you know, it's a fine print document. So that's a lot of information that you're required to provide. The things that we want to talk about in this context of tonight meeting are what I've highlighted here. We want to talk about the vertical and the horizontal extent of the contamination that we're discussing under this tracking number. We want to talk about the source or sources of this contamination. And we also want to characterize the background. That's the area surrounding the site. Is it providing any additional information or any additional contamination that could be confused with what we're dealing with for the particular site, capital S site? OK, moving along. So the big thing I want to talk about is what have we been doing for the past year and a half or so? And that's been a question I've received from a few different people. Want to know because the last public meeting we had for this particular project was in June of 2025. And that was specifically for the PIP plan that is what we're under now. But we also want to provide information on what's going on there. Why are we looking at this property? What have we found? What else do we need to do and what do we expect to find? So since November 2024, we put in some additional soil borings and collected samples to figure out a little better what was going on with the VOC contamination and metals contamination that we knew were there at the former DPW site. And the big one is the PFAS. And the big one is the PFAS. Per and polyfluorinated alkyl substances for anyone who has not heard of PFAS before. That is the big bugaboo that we're dealing with on this particular project. It's significantly higher concentrations, significantly more widespread than we had anticipated up front. Okay. Next thing is we did install additional monitoring wells in April of 2025. We did a next round of additional monitor wells split between the end of October and the beginning of November of 2025. And then we wanted to obviously collect samples. All of the new wells we've been sampling just for PFAS so far. And we also wanted to get a handle on how does the groundwater flow? How does the water table go up and down? And what does that do to the flow of groundwater, including its contamination? So we thought we'd like to study that for a year. And we thought we'd check it every two months or so. So May, July, September, November of 25. We're going to do January of 26, but we hit with some serious snowstorms. So we had to wait until February and then March. So that completed our one year of groundwater monitoring and got some fairly interesting results that came out of that. I do see Mike Lowry has put up the hand raise. I would ask that we hold the questions till the end of the presentation. I know there will be questions and I will be able to answer them when we get to the end. But if I stop to answer questions as we go along, then it's going to take much longer. So no offense, Mike. I just want to wait for that. So moving along. These are the additional soil borings that we did in November 2024. Now, I hope that this works this time. Last time I did one of these presentations, no one could see my mouse pointer, but I'm circling the area of that former DPW building. And then the small print there that's highlighted yellow. Those are additional soil borings that we did in November of 24. The next thing that we did next field work that we did, it should say, is we installed additional monitoring wells in April of 25. And those are six more wells. And four of them were on the former DPW property. Two of them were on the north of Budding property. That's basically vacant land, but it does have some protected wildlife areas there. And back in 2006, when you were doing some improvements for the roadway going into the Whalen Middle School, there was a bioswale project. And that's where that green shapes are near the top. In October and November of 25, we installed five more monitoring wells. We were hoping to get a sixth monitoring well in, but we actually couldn't get down deep enough when the equipment we have hit bedrock, which was a little surprising. Didn't expect to find bedrock above the water table at this location, but we did. So those again, they're highlighted in yellow. And for this round, we basically circled the middle school because I had some suspicions about that being the source. And then we took some samples. Now, I tried hard to get everything on the screen that's pertinent, but the drawback of that is the print gets pretty small. So it may be difficult for any of you to read that. But this information is in the publicly available documents and a lot easier to read in that format. I guess the big take home on this is right in the middle of this chart here table is the numbers for total PFAS six. Now, the way that DEP regulates PFAS currently is if you're in a drinking water source area and we are. And let me make one aside. Some of you may have viewed or attended the board of select or sub board meeting that I presented at a couple of weeks back, maybe four weeks back. And I misspoke. I said that we were near a zone two. We're actually in a zone two. Zone two means it's an aquifer protection district that's for the happy hollow well fields in this case. So that means we have to pay attention to the drinking water standards. And the groundwater standard is the same as the drinking water standard in these drinking water source areas. Now that I said all of that, back to this table here where you see some blue highlighting that shows that of the 21 samples we've collected from the area for PFAS testing to site, 21 groundwater samples, 19 of them have been have had shown PFAS six above the drinking water standard, which is 20 nanograms per liter, which is a part per trillion unit. It's not very much, but it doesn't take much because it's a relatively toxic batch of chemicals. And the highest concentration we've received so far is 532 nanograms per liter. So that's it's substantially above the drinking water standard at this point. The next thing we're going to talk about here is some of the groundwater flows I'll go through. I have seven of these and I'll go through them fairly quick. But the thing I want you to notice is over here, it's only a small site at this point. It's just the former DPW property and the large blue arrow is indicating the direction of groundwater flow. That was in way back in August of 2022 when we first were looking at this property. Jumping ahead several years, this is the beginning of that every two month sampling event we were trying to do, or sorry, gauging event to check the groundwater flow. And you can see the groundwater flow is substantially more complicated here. The lines of contour are not very straight. They wiggle a lot and the arrows don't all point in the same direction. So what that means is the groundwater flow is still generally to the west. However, it's sometimes a little bit north of west, sometimes a little bit south of west. Moving up next one in July of 25, pretty similar, slightly different, a little bit more extreme for heading to the north. Then we get to September of 25, and it looks like some of it's now heading more to the south. So slight changes, nothing radical. And this next map, though, we have additional monitoring wells now surrounding the middle school. And we show that it's actually flowing in two different directions. Some of the groundwater from the middle school is actually going either east or northeast. And then over here on the 195 and 207 Main Street properties, it's heading generally to the west. The next one we did, February of 26, some of the wells we couldn't get to because there's too much snow to get at them actually this time around. So it was a big year on snow, as you all experienced as well. What we see here is we no longer can demonstrate a flow to the east at the middle school property. But I can't rule it out either because of the elevations are almost identical across that end of the property. So we went ahead in the next month. We're showing that even on the middle school now it's all heading generally to the west. And the reason for all of that seems to be that if you can see this point here where I'm trying to circle where it says B 36, that's a boring that we wanted to put a monitoring well in and we hit rock. We actually tried five different times in that pretty close to that spot within 30 or 40 feet and hit rock every time. So there's a ridge of bedrock that runs probably more or less north and south there. And what we've noticed is that when the water table is fairly high, all of the groundwater is going to the west towards Dudley Pond, which is kind of what you would expect. But when the water table drops, that ridge blocks some of the flow and part of it is actually heading to the east, the other direction. So it's kind of curious. And that's one of the reasons we wanted to test the groundwater flow so many times. So what does this mean? We have all those additional monitoring wells on the 201 Main Street and now the 207 Main Street property. And we've found substantial PFAS in virtually all of them. There's only a couple wells that have not had exceedances of the drinking water standard, which is the standard we have to look at. So when I talk about site capital asset site or in DP terminology, a disposal site under this tracking number, RTN release tracking number 3 dash 3 7 7 5 0. That's just the way that we keep track of what property we're talking about. DP has tens of thousands of sites to keep track of. So they want to make sure they can keep them separated. The area of the site is the area where any contamination attributed to RTN 3 3 7 7 5 0 has come to be located. That includes the VPH contamination or gasoline type contamination we found in soil on the 195 Main Street former DPW. That includes the elevated metals in soil that we found on the former DPW property. We did find soluble antimony in groundwater on the DPW property the first time we sampled well MW5. We resampled it and it was not detected. We're planning on sampling again to confirm that it's not actually there. So that I can't really explain that it was only just above the standard to begin with. And that is not really part of what we're calling site capital S. So we have sufficiently determined the horizontal extent of the gasoline level, excuse me, the gasoline type contamination, the VPH. VPH is volatile petroleum hydrocarbon. And metals contamination that's in subsurface soil at the former DPW property. Sufficiently meaning we don't know exactly where it crosses the line from being a problem to not being a problem. But it's, we know enough to see that it's, we got a good handle on it, put it that way. What we don't know is we don't know the full horizontal extent of PFAS contamination groundwater. Because even though we have wells that are stretched about two tenths of a mile apart at this point, we don't have an end to what we're looking at. So this, the logical thing is we're going to go even further. And I'll get to that as well. But since we don't yet know the answer to the horizontal extent of contamination, especially the PFAS stuff, then we can't yet provide a full phase two report to DP. And that's kind of a concern, but that's what we have to deal with. So here is a map of the, just the PFAS six results. And there's a few wells that we sampled twice so far. So on those wells, I took the average concentration of them. Other ones we've only sampled once. So that's just the one contamination, excuse me, the one concentration number that we have. And those are the little numbers in red underneath, like over here. If you can see, I'm on the far west of, excuse me, far east of the site. I'm showing MW 35 at 23.4. But if we go over here, kind of in the middle of the former DPW property, MW 21, we see 408, 408 parts per trillion of PFAS six. That's an average of the two samples we've taken from that particular well. And then these other dashed lines are ISO contours. So essentially the same concentration is going out. That's done by modeling. It's not exact, but it's the way we can get a handle on it when we only have a limited number of points to deal with. So it seems to be that the worst contamination is on the DPW property. But where is it coming from? We did all that groundwater testing, excuse me, I keep saying the wrong word. We did all that groundwater gauging to get the groundwater flow directions. And we see that for the most part, groundwater flows from east to west most of the time. Some of the time from the middle of the middle school property is flowing the other direction. But that's only when there's low groundwater flow, excuse me, low water table. So we know roughly where the center of the problem is, but we don't know where the edges of the problem are. We also don't know anything yet about the vertical extent of PFAS contamination groundwater. Because all the wells we've installed so far have been shallow overburden wells, which means that we're only testing water in the first five or ten feet or so from the water table down. Now, when we do a phase two, what we're trying to figure out is, we know we have a problem. We want to know what caused the problem. And probably more importantly, how can we fix it? So we have to come up with this conceptual site model of what happened to cause this kind of problem. So again, VPH, volatile petroleum hydrocarbon, that's gasoline type contamination. What we see is contamination above the DP standards, about 14 to 17 feet below ground level. That is deeper than the water table. And gasoline, as you probably know, it comes from oil, it floats on top of water. It also dissolves into the water to some extent. So our hypothesis here is that we know that there was underground storage tanks at the DPW facility. Those tanks have piping under the ground, too, so that you can get whatever's in the tank to wherever you want to go. Some of those tanks held gasoline. Some of them held diesel fuel. There was at least one fuel oil tank and at least one waste oil tank at different times. They also did a lot of vehicle washing at the DPW when it was in operation. And that went into underground piping as well because they had a recycling system to address that. And one or more of those pipes probably leaked. And we believe that is the most likely source of seeing the VPH contamination, mostly because of where we're seeing the contamination vertically. However, horizontally does not really match where the tank locations were. And if you look at this map here, which is a zoom in of some of the former DPW stuff, you can see the outline of the building. You can see up here is where the former tanks were that we know about the gasoline tanks and diesel fuel tanks are all in this area right here. I believe this one here was a fuel oil tank. And then this one here, if you can see my cursor, this is to the northwest of the former building. That one was a septic tank. So this is where, again, I hope you can see the cursor. We have all of this color coding here, which is probably too small for you to read. But these are the different constituents that exceed state standards. And then the curved lines here are where we've marked where the boundary is between it's too high or it's not too high. So, in essence, the contamination is on the west side of where the former building was. Now, moving along, we're talking about the metals contamination. We see metals contamination above standards about five or ten feet below grade, which is roughly where the water table is, all on the DPW property. Now, it's possible it came out of those drainage lines. Again, it's possible it comes from stormwater of some type. It's also possible that when this was a dump back from the 20s to the 50s, that it was 1920s to 1950s should specify. We're in the 2020s now. When it was a town dump, then it's possible that some of the things that were buried in the town dump or burned and then buried released metals into the ground and that moved a little bit. So, here's another figure showing what's going on with that. This pink crosshatch area is where previous consultants to us figured out where the landfill had been based on certain testing that they had done. And I've seen other maps of where the landfill was located. They're not exact matches, but they do overlap to a large extent. So, that's a good indication of that part of the former DPW was used as a landfill. It does continue upward or northward onto the 207 Main Street parcel. And it's possible that it went east far enough that it just barely got onto the 201 Main Street, the Whalen Middle School parcel as well. So, the same kind of thing, if you can see my cursor, at the northwest corner of the former DPW building is where we have some of those isocontour lines of contamination, which shows the elevated levels of barium, lead, and zinc. Those are the three metals that we're concerned about for this particular issue. So, the next one is the PFAS problem. So, our hypothesis on that is that our most likely source was a release to the Whalen Middle School septic system, or maybe back when it was a Whalen Junior High School. It probably is not happening now, and I'll explain that in a little bit. But we believe that sometime in previous decades, there was a release that got into the septic system, and from there, it got into the groundwater. And from there, the groundwater moved, and where it moved was east, excuse me, I said it wrong, it moved west, excuse me, moved west, getting onto the former DPW property, which is where we see it now. I don't think that there's still a significant amount of PFAS coming out of the Whalen Middle School septic area, because we do have a well right into one of their leach fields. It's elevated PFAS, it's high enough to be a concern, but it's not particularly high compared to some of the other points. That is consistent with groundwater flow moving to contamination to the west, towards Dudley Pond, and it shifts the, they call it a plume. The middle of the plume of groundwater contamination has moved to the west, and now it's on the former DPW parcel, where we're seeing the majority of it. We also think it's possible that we're seeing secondary releases from other septic systems in the area, residents septic systems. One of the problems with PFAS is that we don't really have a good handle on what particular product is causing the problem. We can identify all the individual PFAS that we looked at, but virtually every product that has PFAS uses some blend of different PFAS compounds in it. One of the most common ones is Scotchgard. I don't think that's going to be a shock to anybody who's aware of Scotchgard. It's a stain resistor, and the way that it resists stains is it makes cloth pretty much impermeable to certain organic compounds. And most dirts and greases and whatnot are organic, and they keep it off. The bad news is that it does leach out of the fabric. So if you've got clothes that are stain resistant and you put them in your laundry, it gets into your septic system, and then that gets into the groundwater, and then that flows somewhere. At the middle school, we don't think it's Scotchgard, but we do believe that it might have something to do with floor cleaning products that they used in the past. They do not use them currently, but in the past they did use some floor cleaning compounds that had PFAS in them for various reasons. It basically makes them waterproof, so waxes and polishes and so forth to make floors waterproof, they tend to have PFAS in them. At least they did until everyone became aware of how bad a problem PFAS were about five to ten years ago. So those are our hypotheses for how this problem is coming about. Now this is what I was mentioning of the plume of PFAS contamination. This looks a lot like the PFAS-6 plot that I showed you earlier. The difference is this is all of the PFAS compounds that we've measured combined. The same trick that where we have two samples from a particular monitoring well, we average the number to get this and then model the results. And if you can see my cursor here, kind of in the bullseye area of those purple curved lines is where the majority of contamination is now. Over here to the south and a little bit on the right side or the east side of the Whalen Middle School is where their leach fields are. We have one well directly in one of the leach fields. So if the majority of contamination came from here, we'd have to migrate to the northwest, more west than north, but, you know, or west-northwest, to say it that way. And that's consistent with what we found with our one year of groundwater gauging to get the groundwater flow. It probably is more variable than what we measured in a single year because not every year is going to be the same. But in general, we know that the groundwater is flowing to the west. Some of it is flowing a little bit to the north. There's also some stormwater drain lines that are about at the water table level, and they influence the direction that groundwater flows. And they may have channeled it a little bit up to the north, which is consistent with what we're seeing here. The next thing we want to do after we have a conceptual site model is what do we know? And possibly more important, what do we not know? And the fancy way to say that is what are the data gaps? What is it that we don't yet know that we really do need to know? And that's what our document here, the phase two scope of work, is going to address. First and most significant data gap we have, we do not yet know the horizontal extent of PFAS contamination in groundwater. In other words, we don't know how far it goes to the north, to the east, to the west, or the south. And one of the problems in finding that out is all of the abutting properties from this point on, or most of the abutting properties, I should say, from this point on, are going to be private properties. We don't want to bring private citizens into this unless we really have to. So I do have a way around that, which I'll get to in a few slides here. So that is the big problem. What are we going to do to figure that out? The second most significant one is what is the vertical component of groundwater flow? That's a technical way of saying it. But sometimes groundwater is upwelling. In other words, it comes upward as it flows. And that's what causes springs and seeps where you see water come up out of the ground. More often, groundwater goes down. And that's just as water, rain and snow melt lands on the ground. It goes downward until it hits the water table. But more rain falls and more snow melts. And that additional water pushes on it and it continues to push down. So that's more common. But it also changes a lot depending on how close you are to surface water. So as you get into a wetland area that's discharging into a pond, which is exactly what's going on at Dudley Pond, then the groundwater flow changes from downward to upward. And we don't know exactly where that happened. We don't know how strongly it changes yet. So that's something we need to figure out. The third significant data gap is hydraulic connectivity. And that's a fancy way of saying how easy or how difficult is it for water to move through the dirt out of the ground. So as you can imagine, if it's all sand and gravel, then groundwater goes through it pretty fast. If it's all really tight silt material, it does not go through it very fast at all. And if it's what people commonly call hard pan or officially call glacial till, that's soil that's been compacted by the weight of a glacier sitting on it for several thousand years. And that soil is almost as dense as concrete. We see that a lot in New England, usually just above bedrock. But we don't know if there's a till layer that might be influencing what's going on here. So there are ways to figure out what the conductivity is. And that's important to know because if you figure out the groundwater flow gradient, which is a technical way of saying how steep is the slope of the water table. And we know the conductivity of the soil, which is a fancy way of saying how fast can water push through it. Then we can use some math and figure out how fast is that groundwater moving. And the contamination that is in the groundwater is going to move along with it, generally not as fast as groundwater because it absorbs to the soil and then the soil lets it go. And then it happens again and again. And that's called retardation. It slows down how fast contamination moves. Contamination never moves quite as fast as groundwater does, but sometimes it moves almost as fast. We also have a few other questions we'd like to answer if we can. We'd like to get a more accurate answer on the extent of the volatile contamination and the metals contamination at the 195 property. We don't need to know it in great exhaustive detail. I'm not going to waste a lot of the town's money figuring that out. But as I said, we know it well enough right now to know what we need to do to address it because that contamination does not appear to be moving. Now, if the groundwater, vertical groundwater flow is upward, meaning it's upwelling, then I'm not too worried about what it's doing to make the PFAS contamination move. If the groundwater is going downward, then it is more important because that could push it down deep enough that it could get into bedrock. And if it gets into bedrock, it can move a long ways. It's kind of counterintuitive, but the speed of water moving through rock is a lot faster than the speed of it moving through soil because it can only move through some very tiny channels in the rock. So it's squeezed into them. And it's just one of those forces, mass acceleration. The more force you have on it, the faster something accelerates. So that, like I said, it's counterintuitive. But if it gets into the ground, bedrock, excuse me, I'm talking ahead of myself. So if the contamination gets into bedrock groundwater, it can move substantially faster than if it hadn't. The third thing that we'd like to figure out is exactly where is this PFAS coming from? We have some ideas. I think a lot of it is coming from former use of floor cleaners at the middle school or the junior high when it was that. Some of it may be coming from people doing laundry and getting into their septic systems in the area. But we don't know for sure which is which. There are some ways to figure that out. They require some high-level statistics, which we will do. But I don't have an answer for that yet. So what are we going to do to figure out these data gaps? How are we going to close those data gaps? This is the additional work we plan on doing at this point. We're going to put in another round of monitoring wells even further out so that we can hopefully find the edge of at least where PFAS contamination in groundwater is at that magic 20 nanograms per liter number. That's the drinking water standard. It's also the groundwater standard we have to watch for. So we're trying to figure where that boundary is. We want to put a deep couplet well. Couplet means that there's two wells side by side. But we're going to put a deeper well on that former DPW property and next to a shallower well. And that will help us measure, is the groundwater going up or is the groundwater going down? We're going to do some hydrodic conductivity testing. Probably get a couple of monitoring wells that are already in place to see how fast the groundwater is moving. We have to do some math to get that number, but that's the reason we're doing it. And then here's a big one, is we're going to collect another round of groundwater samples. Once we put these additional monitoring wells in, we would like to collect PFAS samples from every well that we have available at the same time. Because the information we have now is spread over time. And that's useful, but it would be more useful if we can figure out what's going on in one snapshot. So we're going to try to do that. I mentioned earlier, just almost trivial compared to the rest of it, but the soluble antimony question, we want to lay that to rest by retesting that well MW5 and see if it has any soluble antimony again. I suspect it does not, but we want to check to make sure. If it does actually have antimony and that level is above the state standard, then that becomes part of our site problem. So we want to, we'd like to rule it out, but we need to check to make sure. A couple of other things we may be doing, may not be doing. We might take a lip, a liquid sample from the middle school septic tank itself, just to make sure that there's no PFAS going into the ground at the moment. I don't think there is, but that's, that's how we would conclude that. We may want to check surface water on Dudley Pond, which has been checked for PFAS in the past. But when I say adjacent surface water, I mean the closest point of Dudley Pond to the former DPW site, which is that wetland area address of 200 Main Street. It's a town on property. And that's, that's where the surface water drains into Dudley Pond. And that's also wetland where we believe the groundwater is flowing into Dudley Pond. So this is where we're planning on putting the next monitoring wells. And as I said, we don't want to go on private property. So my conclusion is let's stick to town owned properties. And one of the things that the town owns is the right of way on private streets, excuse me, on public streets. And so we're looking at putting some of these wells, one will be on the dead end of Leahy Street, the north end of it there. Another one will be at the turn around on Keith Road, the south end of that. Another one will be at the the east dead end of Willow Lane is another one that we plan on putting on the other side of Main Street on that town on property, the wetland property number 200 Main. So that could be a little tricky to get access onto. But we don't want to put it in a state highway if we can help it, because then you have all kinds of state issues to deal with as well as town issues. So we'd like to avoid that if we can. Hint, we're going to put another couple of wells onto the 201 Main Street property. One of them up here, which is just north of the middle school, is to try to get a well in that area where we couldn't get a well in before. And another one down here on the south side of the property is just to figure out the extent. But again, that's another town on property. We're trying to push out to the furthest that seems reasonable so that we can see if we can find an edge to this PFAS contamination. So what do we need to do for the public involvement plan, which is why you're all here? The concerns, the comments from the public, we need to solicit the comments. So that's what I'm doing tonight. I'm asking for comments and we are going to answer those questions and comments. We do answer all of them when we receive. And if it makes sense, you may be able to give us some information that we didn't have previously. And that may adjust some of the places we're going to be looking. So that's that's the biggest reason for that I'm interested in finding out what's going on. And you have questions, we would like to be able to answer them to the best that we can. The other requirement there is DEP says you have 20 days at a minimum to comment, so three weeks. The PIP plan that we have for this particular site says that we're going to give you 30 days or a month to address that. So after tonight, for the next 30 days, we're open to receiving any public comment on what we've got so far. The actual public involvement plan, I'll paraphrase a little bit, but this is directly from the plan. CMG, my company, invites the public to provide commentary by email or in writing on any reports that we may prepare for any of the following reports we may prepare. Now, I'm just saying one of them. The plan itself says that, excuse me, the plan says that if there is a revised phase two scope of work, well, I said that backwards, let me try again. The plan says if there's a modified phase two scope of work. We're actually calling it a revised phase two scope of work. It's just semantics. They mean the same thing. But since there was no original phase two scope of work document, it's not really a modification of that. But it is a revision of what we gave as a conceptual phase two scope of work way back in 1983. So, God, wrong, wrong century, 20, 2023, when we provided the phase two report, phase one report. Sorry, I'm talking too fast. Now, this is where you can locate that particular document we're talking about, the revised and modified phase two scope of work. We did provide a paper copy of that to the health department, and you can go look at that if that's your preference. If you're one of those people that prefers online, which is mostly likely all of you here because you're online now. We have a direct link that will get you to, we have one direct link that will get you to all of the documents for this tracking number. And then if you just want to pull down the phase two scope of work, we have a specific link that will pull down that report so you can have a copy of it. That link is also available on the town website so you can get it from there also. As I said, then we have a 30-day public comment period. It starts tomorrow, runs through August 30th. Please send the comments to me. You can send them by letter if you would like. I prefer if you do it by email. It just makes it easier. But either way works, we want to make it as available as possible. So that is the presentation that I have. I'm going to try to get this to work now. Unmute. Nope, I can't do all. Sorry about that. I thought I could unmute everybody at once, but I can't. So we do have a couple options here. There is a chat option that says you can just chat back and forth. There's a Q&A section. If you've got a question, you can put a question into that. And there's an option for raise your hand. And I did get one from Tom Siaca. So I'm going to go to Tom first if I can. I'm trying to. Thanks, Ben. So I have a number of comments and questions. Starting with the middle school, I'm curious how you know that the cleaning products in the past had PFAS. Were you able to track down actual brands and materials which were used to confirm that? It's obviously easy to look at what they're using right now. But I'm wondering how you confirm that. And the other major obvious culprit as a source would be food packaging. And you haven't mentioned that. And I'm wondering why not have you ruled that out? So let me ask all my questions and then you can. Okay. Or do you want to take them one at a time? Let me take it one at a time. Okay. If this was a court of law, I would not be able to say that we know for sure that it was floor cleaning products that caused the PFAS contamination. I have a high or very strong suspicion that's what it is, mostly because that's what the town had founded earlier. Previous consultants for the town found earlier of the high school problem when they had PFAS. And they're substantially closer to the Happy Hall and Wellfields. So that is where my reasoning comes from. I have not verified it, but common sense tells me that the town will probably be purchasing products for all the schools at the same time. So if they were using it at the high school, they almost certainly were using it at the junior high school and the middle school. So that's how that comes about. So do I have definitive proof that they had PFAS cothamia compounds? I do not. Do I have a strong suspicion that they did? I do. Okay. I was involved in those earlier investigations at the high school and I don't remember any confirmation that they were actually the cleaning compounds. I think that's an open issue. Okay. And again, the food packaging is another possibility I think really needs to be investigated, but your proposal is to check that there's actually current flow of PFAS into the septic tank, as I understand it. And that's obviously the right thing to do. Right. See, that's the reason for testing a septic fluid. You're absolutely correct. If anybody didn't catch that, the idea is if there's still PFAS going into the septic system, the easiest way to test it is to check what's in the septic tank before it gets into the leach fields. That'll tell us what's gone into their system in the past few days to a few weeks. Okay. So, second comment. Again, when I was working with the DPW and Board of Public Works about looking at the PFAS around the happy hollow wells, and what was found definitively was that the source of the PFAS into the wells was the groundwater flow, not the surface water flow. So, your attempts to look at the vertical groundwater flow, and especially near the pond, I think are critical, because if most of the stuff is winding up in the pond itself, that seems to be a whole lot less threatening to the wells than if it's winding up in the groundwater under the pond heading toward the wells. Right. So, I think that's, again, an excellent move. And then my third comment is when I look at the metals, they strike me as components of batteries. And I'm an even older timer than you are, I think, and I wasn't quite old enough to actually use the dump at the middle school site. But I think it would have been regarded as completely normal for people to leave old batteries there as a part of the dumping process. So, I guess I don't find that very surprising. You can comment on that if you like. Okay. Well, I won't ask you how old you are, but I'm 66. So, I'm old enough to remember burn dumps. And when I was young, I went to the dump with my dad, and it was on fire. And it was kind of fun to see that as a little kid. So, I know the process, what it went through. And, yes, in the timeframe that that was a whaling town dump, nobody was terribly concerned about whether you had a battery thrown away, a car battery or something like that, thrown away at the dump. That's sort of what they were for. It's a place to put all this stuff you didn't want. And a lot of it went there because it was corroded. It was broken. It was leaking. And, you know, that's what we'll deal with. So, yes, I agree with you. Lead and zinc, and to some extent barium, are battery constituents, and it's consistent. Okay. Now. By the way, I'm trying to lower my hand, and it doesn't seem to be working. So, just ignore my raised hand here. Now, I can't see everybody at once, but I think Marsha Berger was the next one. So, nope, that became the wrong screen. Sorry. Ben, don't forget that Mike Lowry had a question really early on, and then you postponed him. So, he needs to be back in the queue. Okay. Thank you. All right. Now, can I get to, not the best at this. Not my specialty. All right. Did I, did we lose Marsha? Oh, there you are. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm just not getting the right thing. So, I can see. Oh, there. Can you hear me? I can hear you. Good. Go. So, one of my questions was, I was wondering how much you looked at floor drains from the old DPW building to see if maybe some of those points of concentration were associated with that. I went there the other day and was looking, and it seems like the two, there's two floors that seem to be slanted towards a middle, maybe a possible old trench drain that might have been there. And I was wondering if maybe they'd been mixing some chemicals there that had the PFAS in it. Okay. I have other questions too, but that's. Okay. So, I'll try to answer them as they come. So, I've gone back to this slide. It's just soil borings November 24. And if, again, I hope you can see my cursor. But there are several sink drains that are connected by these gray dash lines that led to this long trench drain here. And then there's a recycling system that was in this part of the building, and that drain went to follow the same line, basically, and got to the east end of that trench drain. So, as far as I know, the trench drain went then southeast to this oil and water separator, and then onto the leach pit initially. But that was disconnected at some point. And it got rerouted to this other drain line up here, which was the storm drain system line. So, that's what I'm aware of for the, I know that they did have floor drains in the facility. They had some problems with those, with substances getting into the floor drains in the past, to put it that way. So, yeah, we're aware of them. And if you can see where we put all our soil borings, we did try to figure out a little better what was going on with the drain system. But we found more problems outside of the building footprint than we did inside. So, I was wondering if you were aware that they used PFAS compounds in Dudley Pond, as shown in their website for the Pond Association. And I was wondering if any research was done to see if that, if what they used to use directly in the pond had any contribution to the PFAS-6. I was not aware of what you're discussing there. So, that would be excellent if you could provide some kind of citation to me in a written comment or email comment, something like that. Okay, and I was wondering if maybe even the PFAS in the, since PFAS works by attacking plant pigments and the algae that's growing now in all the surface water has a different kind of pigment. And maybe, I mean, it's not been proven, but maybe it has something to do with the, with the chemicals they were putting in the water to control the Eurasian milk foil. Maybe, just a theory. Maybe, just a theory. But I was, we were, I am wondering, I have, I can sort of see what you're saying that it could be from the, from the leach field from the high school, from the middle school. But it's not very satisfying since you usually think of the sources being much higher concentration. And to have a somewhat of a point source lower down near the DPW is, kind of lends itself to the possibility of doing a spot removal there. And I was wondering if you'd thought of, instead of just looking to see what the full extent was, if you'd also been looking at some remedial options. Like, to me, it's like, almost like an emergency to see that high a concentration in the groundwater, if it's potentially headed to the, to the town wells. And I'm wondering, because it's going to take so much time to put all those monitoring wells in, if there's any thoughts of doing some kind of a spot removal. And in the process, perhaps doing a lot of soil testing as you dig down and, and remove some of potentially contaminated soil, you could get a better understanding of whether that's a point source. It's, it almost seems like, it almost seems like from a few of your hydrogeologic maps, it almost seems like that area had a, that area might have been a, an area where there was some kind of a contribution of some kind of water to that area, like maybe a drain, because it seemed like it was a high point there. All right. Yeah. I don't know how much of the history you're aware of, um, back in the 1800s, this was a sand and gravel pit that crossed, uh, between 195 and 207 Main Street. Um, so the subsurface is clearly pretty porous. And then the town used that area as a dumping area after, you know, they filled in the pits basically from the sand and gravel operation. And, um, um, so that, that, that could be easily be a point source. However, the, the landfill closed or the town dump closed in 1958 and PFAS were not generally widespread, um, at that point in time that Teflon was, uh, if I remember the dates, right, it was, it was actually serendipitously invented in 1936, but it didn't become publicly, um, um, there's no public, there's no marketing of it for awhile. And the first consumer products were 1946 that they had Teflon, which was the first of any PFAS compound to be out there. Um, the, the, the, the Scotch Guard, I believe it was 1955 or 57 or so that it became, uh, commercially available. So that's just barely within the timeframe that the dump was in operation. Given that it seems highly unlikely that trash in the landfill itself would be a point source. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it doesn't seem like the most likely suspect. Unless the, maybe there was, the DPW was preparing some solutions there, like some, uh, maybe some pesticides that add PFAS in it, either intentionally or inadvertently. Yep. And, and I do believe that, um, again, I got the screen is, I still have that slide up on the screen, um, where that stormwater line runs, um, a little bit north of the former DPW building. Um, I don't show all of our monitoring wells on this particular figure, but the highest concentrations are only a little bit further north than that. So I believe that that is a preferential pathway. And it's consistent when you look at the groundwater flow patterns that in times of high groundwater table, um, we're actually seeing flow away from the stormwater system. And in times of low water table, it's definitely heading right to it, which means it's probably acting as a drain, uh, in times of, uh, low groundwater flow. Um, so we were talking about maybe coming up with another effort, uh, to try to see the connection between, um, what you're finding there in the town wells. Um, is there an effort, uh, encompassed in your own scope of work to do something like that? Okay. I'm going to back up to where you said, you know, this might be sort of an emergency situation because of proximity to Happy Hollow Wellfields. Um, we are hydraulically upgrading of Happy Hollow. There's no question about it. The flow path, um, to get there, groundwater would have to go into Dudley Pond. Dudley Pond, um, of course is, is the Happy Hollow Wellfield is, is adjacent to the other end of Dudley Pond. So it would presumably have to flow through the surface water body and then get pulled in, um, from that part of it. Just lost my leg. Um, that's, uh, if I remember my numbers right, I did measure it. It's like a, a mile in a, in a quarter through surface water. And currently there's no problem with the Happy Hollow Wellfields because the town is installed or the water department has installed a treatment system. And I looked it up just yesterday. There has not been any detections of PFAS 6 and the actual supply coming out of Happy Hollow Wellfields since 2022. So, uh, I, I, I'm discounting the emergency part of that. Now from a DEP perspective, yeah, we're, we have a, a site that's upgraded of a public water supply and we need to address the problem. But until I know how big the problem is, I'm not sure what we might be able to do about it. And your, your points will take, and it could be a point source that removal will, will drastically reduce the levels. I'm not seeing my conceptual site model is, is different than yours on that. I'm, I'm seeing what. I don't have a conceptual site model. Well, off the top of your head, you do, uh, from what you just said so far. My thought process is that, um, for several decades that ended a few decades ago, there was a PFAS input that got into the leach fields of what is now the Wayland Middle School. And the plume resulting from that has migrated across the 195 Main Street property that's adjacent to it. And the heart of that plume is, is now what we're seeing as the, what looks like a hotspot in the middle of, of the north, north middle of the former DPW parcel. All right. Right. Which is what you said in your presentation, basically. I mean, it's conceptual and it's hypothesis. That doesn't mean I'm right, but it's, it's what the evidence leads me to believe at this point. All right. I'd like to give other people a chance to ask questions. So. Thank you. Um. I don't disagree with you. I just, I'm just wondering. If anybody doesn't know, Marsha Berger is an LSP and former past president or past president of the LSP associations. No, no, no, you weren't. Yeah. I thought you were president at some point. But you're on LSP. I'm president of my own company. Yeah. Yep. Okay. Um, so the only other hands raised, I see. Um, I see Annette Lewis. So Annette, you, if you want to unmute yourself and ask away. I thought I could unmute, but can I do this? I'm having a hard time running the tech part of this presentation. Thought I could unmute you, but I can't. I don't know how to do that. Okay. You're here. You did. You're unmuted. Okay. I don't know how to use teams. Um, I have two questions, uh, or statements anyway. For the Dudley Pond, um, even when you're looking for things, there are, everyone's on a septic system there. Yep. And, um, septic and, and, uh, cesspool. Um, so that it could also be feeding things into Dudley Pond. So the look that you're going to take would not be definitive at all. Okay. That's one of the reasons why it's, it's something we may do, but I'm not making it a priority. Um, and on the map that you showed with a new, uh, where you're going to be putting new wells, you have an MW, I think it's 11 D. And I was wondering if you can explain specifically why you're doing that one. There it is. Yes. MW 11 D D stands for deep. That is the couplet. Well, I, I didn't, I didn't explain that, but that it's going to be a couplet well to MW 11. So 11 shallow overburden in a deep overburden well at that spot, which will let us measure the vertical gradient. And what's, what is the depth of the shallow and what's the proposed depth of the, of the deep? Okay. Um, I can look the numbers up, but I'll give you, um, what I, what I can remember. Um, the depth at MW 11 is in the range of. Eight to 10 feet or so below grade is where we find the, uh, water table. Now that will is only about 17 feet deep. I think. And the, the screen interval, the open interval that we collecting water from would be from seven to 17 feet down. Okay. Um, the, the proposed well of 11 D I'm planning to put a 35 foot well there with a five foot well screen at the bottom. So screened open interval 30 to 35 feet. That'll give us enough separation to get a reasonable measurement of the vertical. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Um, another person here. Um, it just says J A N O T. I don't know if that's Jenna. Thank you. Okay. Yeah. Um, so I, um, I'm wondering if you, um, if you understand what is the exact location of the, the former that were used, um, as the dump, even though it was closed in the late 50s. Um, I am old enough that I, I mean, I was quite young, but I do remember, um, going to that dump and my recollection is that, um, we used to throw stuff over a cliff into a pit, but, um, but I think it was roughly between the old DPW building in the middle school and I would not discount, um, the possibility of, uh, lots of old Scotchgard containers, um, in that dump. I know my father was crazy for Scotchgard when it came out. And, um, I'm also concerned about, um, other contaminants that are definitely in those. I don't know whether, um, you know, whether they would have all been volatilized, burned, but I know that my father cleared eight, eight, over eight acres of poison ivy using a product that he purchased at the town line hardware store and put in a backpack sprayer and later came out, um, under the trade name agent orange. Um, so, I mean, we know that, you know, dioxins had a colloidal, you know, structure, bond in soil, and all of this, and I also know that, um, carpenter ants have been a problem in Wayland throughout the development because we live in the woods and, um, there was a lot of chlordane used. And though, you know, all those chlordane and all, I mean, it's now banned, but those, you know, chlordane shaker containers. I mean, I remember my father shaking it all around the perimeter of our house, and I can almost still smell it. I think it's why I developed migraines in middle school. So, you know, there are, I mean, there, there are whole classes of chemicals that were going into that dump before it was closed, and I just wouldn't discount that, you know, that spot. And if you can identify the location, I think that could be very helpful to you. And I heard recently that, um, DPW was investing in lidar, and I'm wondering if, you know, the lidar drone, and I'm wondering if that might help you just to identify exactly where those gravel pits, um, that were, that were used as the former dump may be. Okay, um, our best source of information for where the pits were, are historic aerial photographs. I've got a 52 photograph. I've got a 57 photograph that, um, show that the resolution is not very good on, but it does show pretty much where they are. And as you kind of suggested, there was a, the burn area, the, the darker area shows up on, on the aerial photos, um, is towards the boundary where the, where the middle school is. Um, but the actual gravel pit itself, it, it clearly extended all the way on to 207 Main Street. And, uh, that was the part that, like you said, throwing over the cliff into the pit. Um, so that's all, all part of the, the process. Uh, we have not looked for the pesticides that you mentioned. Um, so it's, it's possible that there's pesticides involved as well. We've been so focused on what the PFAS problem is that we haven't looked at some of the other things, but yeah, there's, it's certainly possible that there's lots of other pesticides present there. And my dad had a bag of Chlordane that I inherited. So I'm well aware of it. Um, yeah, I, it, it does work really well in carpenter ants and termites. Yeah. And the, uh, Agent Orange, the dioxin, you know, was great. The poison ivy didn't come back for about 40 years. Well, Agent Orange was affected because it's really strong defolion. It takes the leaves off of anything, but it's not healthy. Um, okay. Um, Mike Larry has been waiting for a while, so if you can unmute Mike, I, or you are unmuted. So I'd like to hear from you if you can. Uh, Shirley, I just left some comments and questions, uh, in the Q and A. Okay. They don't need to be answered now, but I want to make sure they're in the record. Okay. Okay. One thing I do want to say though, is that, uh, uh, Procelicor compound that I believe, uh, Ms. Berger referred to is not, uh, it's active ingredient is not generally referred to as a PFAS compound. Also, I think to correct something that she may have misstated, the DPW itself did not prepare any chemical treatments for Dudley Pond. They were all done by, uh, commercial, uh, licensed applicators. All right. And I am looking at your comments and I will, I will count those as comments that we should address for the, for the, uh, public record. So good. Thank you. Thank you. Was there anybody else that I'm missing here that needed to speak or ask questions? If there is just unmute and we'll go from there. Hearing none. Um, so then, um, yeah, I guess I'm unmuted. So I was, uh, really interested in your, your notion of, of a migrating plume. Um, are the characteristics of PFAS contaminated waters such that, uh, a plume would retain its structure that, that way to migrate as a, as a lump, um, and be observable the way you're proposing? Okay. PFAS compounds are moderately soluble. Uh, so when they have contact with groundwater, they do dissolve into it. The shorter the PFAS chain, the more soluble it is. Um, we're seeing, um, one of them, PFBS has only got four carbon chains, four carbon atoms in its chain, which is pretty small for an organic molecule. And, uh, that is quite soluble. And we are seeing quite a bit of that compound. It's not one of the PFAS six, but it's, it's present in a lot of, a lot of what we're looking at. So, um, there are other PFAS compounds that are much longer chains that are only barely soluble. And those don't migrate the way we've suggested, but the, what we're seeing that the actual six PFAS, PFAS six compounds are moderately soluble. And there's a few others that are even more soluble. Those are the ones we're picking up mostly. So it all suggests that we're looking at a soluble problem. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not questioning the solubility of the PFAS. I'm, I'm wondering about, about it's retaining that concentration structure as it moves through this file. Well, you've probably heard them called the forever chemicals. Um, then the problem compounds are all, they have a carbon backbone. So they have a carbon chain, um, surrounded by fluorine atoms instead of hydrogen atoms. Most organic things that we deal with are hydrocarbons where you've got hydrogens attached to the carbon chain, but these have fluorines attached to the carbon chain. Fluorine is, I'm going to get technical here. Uh, it's the most electronegative of all the chemicals, all the elements, um, which means that once it bonds onto something, it's extremely difficult to get it off. That's the whole problem with PFAS. They do not, they're completely synthetic. There are no bacteria that I'm aware of that can defluorinate a molecular compound. There's some that can dechlorinate to get rid of chlorine atoms, but fluorine is substantially more electronegative than chlorine. Meaning it's when it bonds, it bonds even stronger. And since it's not naturally occurring, um, there's no evolutionary force that produced microbes that are able to digest this stuff. So that's why it hangs around forever, as they say. Um, nothing is actually forever. Um, but I don't think we want to wait for 5 billion years in the sun to go red giant for, for, for the problem to go away. So, um, it's, um, it's a very difficult problem to address. And the, the, the ones we're looking at are not going to transform as they move through the subsurface. There are some PFAS compounds that are kind of a hybrid. They have additional, we call it functional groups attached to them. Those functional groups can come off rather easily, relatively easily, I should say. Um, and they do change from one to another, but it's still a PFAS compound. So what we're looking at is sort of the end line PFAS compounds, the ones that are left after any of the easy chemistry happens. Well, I look forward to your developing this. This is, I mean, it's a hard problem, but it looks like a really interesting problem too. It's, it's, it's kind of scary. It's, it's a very difficult problem to address. Um, there are ways to treat PFAS, but they all involve concentrating it and then doing something that's very violent, either chemically or physically or both. Um, you can burn them at, at, uh, over a thousand degrees centigrade. Um, and they will dissociate because at that temperature, everything goes into a plasma. It's not even molecules anymore. It's just ions. Um, there are other processes where they reacted with very strong, um, peroxides under high pressure and high temperature and basically pressure cook them to pieces. Um, but that's not something you can do on groundwater and it's not something you would try. And even, even the highest concentrations we have, um, they're, they're not what those techniques are designed for. So the, even though they're high compared to the drinking water standard, there's still fairly low concentration. And in order to do anything with PFAS to get rid of it, you have to concentrate it a lot higher than that, which can be done, but it's, it's not practical. This, this, this part of the discussion goes towards phase three, uh, remedial alternatives. We're not there yet. Uh, first thing is to find out how big the problem is. Um, I am thinking about what to do about it, but it, it, it, we're not to the point of, of discussing what we're going to do about it yet. Thanks, Ben. Yep. Okay. Is there anyone else? Sheila Carell. Uh, it was just a thank you. Thank you, Sheila. You're welcome. Okay. We also got a comment from, or a chat comment from Carol Plum. Um, question in it, is the PFAS, or during a low water situation, the potential middle school ridge, is the PFAS contamination possibly flowing east or south and away into groundwater further away? Um, it's the groundwater that's flowing, so PFAS is in the groundwater, and yes, it is flowing east. And, um, it's a little bit northeast rather than southeast. But yeah, it eventually will find its way probably into Lake Contituate. All right. Um, I think that I will conclude our meeting at this point. I'll go back to the last slide here. And, um, again, reiterate, um, please provide any comments and questions you have to me. I prefer by email, but letter is fine as well. And we have through August 30 to do that. I'll respond to all of them. And then we will finalize our phase two scope of work and move on to the next thing we will do. Thank you all for coming in. Thank you for your interest in town of Wayland's problems.