Burrillville Town Council Gambles on Public Health for Sake of Fake Field
By Frank Carini / ecoRI News columnist October 17, 2024
BURRILLVILLE, R.I. — Seven years after a village water system was contaminated by some nasty compounds that have been linked to cancer, town officials are eager to install a synthetic athletic field that will likely leach some of the same toxic chemicals.
Make that make sense. Isn’t there an alternative to fake grass? I seem to recall mowing it is our national pastime.
At home, where we should plant native trees, shrubs, and flowers, we grow grass. Where we should grow grass, we plant artificial turf.
Stupid: “having or showing a great lack of intelligence or common sense.”
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — a group of manufactured substances better known as “forever chemicals” that have been tied to several types of cancers, developmental delays in children, and other health problems — have been found in artificial turf. PFAS are used during the production of artificial turf to prevent the machines that extrude the plastic from clogging.
FieldTurf, the company hired to install a plastic field at Burrillville High School, has told the Town Council that it can’t guarantee forever chemicals won’t wash off its product. An expert hired by the town has noted that tests meant to mimic weathering on the fake field had positive results for trace amounts of PFAS.
In 2017, the Oakland Water District tested positive for PFAS at between 88 and 114 parts per trillion (ppt). At that time, the Environmental Protection Agency considered a PFAS concentration higher than 70 ppt a heath risk. Less than a decade later, the EPA has significantly reduced that number, setting enforceable maximum contaminant levels as low as 4 ppt for some PFAS chemicals. (There are some 15,000.)
About 175 people in the village of Oakland depended on water from that still-closed well. They had to rely on bottled water handed out by the state to drink and cook with until most of the homes in the area were hooked up to the Harrisville Water Department system. The project cost about $3 million. The Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank covered the project’s main costs, but most families paid out of pocket to hook their homes up to the Harrisville system.
Two years ago, John Wheeler spoke to ecoRI News about the impacts the poisoned well has had on his family’s life. A year before the Oakland well was found to be toxic, Wheeler was diagnosed with bladder cancer. A few years after his diagnosis, his daughter was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. His wife has had several nodules on her thyroid. Two of the family’s dogs have died from cancer.
Mr. Wheeler, 72, died less than a year after he spoke to ecoRI News. Cancer was the cause.
Firefighting foam from the Oakland Mapleville Fire Department, which sits a few hundred feet up the gradient from the well, is to blame for the well’s closure.
Having seen firsthand the damage PFAS can do to a water system and a community, one would hope the Town Council would show an appropriate level of concern.
Instead, dozens of worried residents — who, after hearing about the plan to install an artificial field at the high school, stormed a July 10 Town Council meeting — get a sexist wisecrack from a council member.
The turf field issue wasn’t on that night’s agenda. Following the public hearing part of the agenda, the meeting proceeded with other business, and after it adjourned, council member Justin Batalon said, “I haven’t been yelled at by that many women since I was married.”
The Harrisville Fire District, where the high school is located and which includes the fire and water departments for the village, has written a letter to the Town Council citing concerns over possible drinking water contamination.
(After the town of North Smithfield upgraded an artificial turf field three years ago, the level of PFAS in a well downgradient from the field doubled. Data collected by the Rhode Island departments of Environmental Management and Health at North Smithfield Junior-Senior High School “suggest that the artificial turf field (first constructed in 2007 and upgraded/replaced in 2021) may be partly or wholly contributing to the contamination of nearby private and public drinking water supply wells,” according to an Aug. 15 letter sent to the Burrillville Town Council by state officials. FieldTurf installed North Smithfield’s refurbished artificial turf field.)
Council president Donald Fox told ecoRI News after the July 10 meeting was over that the town is in the process of gathering more information about the turf and potential PFAS issues.
“Right now, the town is doing and conducting its due diligence and that involves working with experts that we hired, conducting tests, and doing a whole slew of things that we feel are appropriate to protect the town and the townspeople,” Fox said. “That takes time. I am not sure that any of us are prepared to, you know, offer changes on opinions at this point. We’re still waiting to hear back from our own experts. There’s a lot of hyperbole out there.”
If poorly notified residents hadn’t found out about the fake field and didn’t crash that July Town Council meeting, there would have been little due diligence, since construction had already begun.
The project has been stalled by a lawsuit filed by a member of the town’s Conservation Commission.
Fox recently told ecoRI News the lawsuit’s complaints were baseless and that he was frustrated to see taxpayer money spent on defending the project. He pointed to testing by an engineering firm hired by the town that showed the field wouldn’t pose a threat.
“Based on evaluations performed to date, it has been demonstrated that the detection of very low levels of a very limited number of PFAS in the artificial turf does not represent a human health risk to those using the artificial turf ballfields and it does not pose a risk to the environment, the groundwater, the surface water, and the aquifer,” according to the firm’s 19-page report.
A little bit of toxins here. Some poisons there. No big deal.
Two-plus decades ago, the water supply in the village of Pascoag was poisoned, from leaking underground tanks at a Main Street service station, by the now-banned gasoline additive methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE).
The level of toxic MTBE in Pascoag water climbed from 340 parts per billion on Sept. 1, 2001, to 600 ppb by Sept. 17. Levels measured in a bedrock aquifer near the Pascoag well reached concentrations up to 1,100 ppb — some 1,000 times higher than approved drinking water limits.
With two sources of drinking water already poisoned, perhaps the town’s elected officials should be more concerned about the health of their neighbors and the environment in general and go natural at the high school.
Note: Artificial turf is a multi-layer plastic product used as a surface on athletic fields. It often consists of a top layer of fibers made from plastic (nylon, polypropylene, and/or polyethylene) and infill made from recycled tires. An average 80,000-square-foot field contains 40,000 pounds of plastic. Fields average a 10-year lifespan and then need to be disposed of, which is either done via landfill or incineration.
Frank Carini can be reached at frank@ecori.org. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.
SOURCE: https://ecori.org/burrillville-town-council-gambles-on-public-health-for-sake-of-fake-field/
