In October, 2018–after months of asking the city, county, and DNR to test fish in Starkweather Creek–we posted this article asking why nobody would test the fish.
We had known since we saw the super-high levels of PFAS at the Truax Air National Guard base in May 2018 that the creek, which runs right through the base, would be chock full of PFAS. But DNR didn’t measure it till summer 2019 and didn’t share the data publicly till October 2019.
In fall 2018, at our urging, then Alder David Ahrens proposed a city budget amendment for $5000 of city money to test some fish. It was unanimously approved by the Common Council in late 2018.
The money then went into a black hole and we were cut out of any decisionmaking about the fish testing. Eventually the testing was done by the Wisconsin DNR, not the city, because Public Health Madison Dane County and other city agencies said they didn’t know how to do it. Testing was not done till 2019. Results were just released on January 15, 2020.
Not at all surprisingly, very high levels of PFAS were found in the limited number of fish tested in summer and fall 2019–up to 180 parts-per-billion (ppb), which is a 180,000 parts-per-trillion (ppt).
See the full report with data here. MEJO feels that the advisories issued based on this data are not adequately protective of sensitive groups such as women of childbearing age, infants, and children (over half the population).
For more information, and MEJO’s comments about this, see the January 15 article in the Wisconsin State Journal by Chris Hubbuch and the January 16 article in the Cap Times by Steve Elbow.
