OSCODA TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WOOD) — In the year since the Wolverine Worldwide PFAS crisis started in northern Kent County, the likely carcinogen has turned up in hundreds of wells and in the blood of some residents.
It has led to 100 lawsuits alleging cancer, miscarriages, even three deaths.
But 200 miles away, the state’s very first PFAS scare is something that can be seen — PFAS foam forming on a lake and a stream.
The state found PFAS at the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base in 2010. It came from foam used by firefighters to put out jet fuel fires decades ago.
Eight years later, the state still doesn’t know how far it has spread. Residents, some with contaminated wells, are frustrated.
“You can see it floating down the creek here,” Dale Corsi, a consultant working for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, said as he pointed out white foam roiling in a creek near the former air base.
The PFAS foam was first discovered last summer on Van Etten Lake, across the street from the old air base in Oscoda, an area along Lake Huron that relies on tourism — swimming, boating, fishing.
“This is what we see on the lake when it’s windy,” Corsi showed Target 8. “You’ll see these little bubbles and they’ll kind of coalesce into, I’ll call them pads of foam. And when they hit shore, they start accumulating and piling up.”
It mounds up to a foot deep, he said, until a wind rolls it up onto the beach.
It’s ripe with PFAS — up to 160,000 parts per trillion. If it were drinking water, that would be 2,300 times the state’s legal limit.
It’s scaring residents, who want it gone before summer.
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