It first came up during a discussion of toxic water pollutants in November 2022.  

Public Works Director Susie Turner had just briefed Kalispell City Council on her department’s efforts to inventory lead service lines connecting homes to the water supply and offered insight into federal manganese advisories in drinking water.  

Finished, she notified councilors that testing had found PFAS, colloquially known as forever chemicals, in one of the city’s wells. The discovery had come as a surprise to city officials, who were anticipating forthcoming federal regulations addressing the chemicals. 

“There is still a lot of research that needs to be done,” Turner said. “It’s touching the tip of the iceberg I guess is what I’ve heard quite a bit.” 

Still, the level of PFAS in the water was low, she said. Turner expected testing to continue and hoped to loop residents in when the department had a clearer picture of the situation. 

“Once we’ve obtained that new information, we are going to put that out for the public to know that we’ve performed the sampling and these are the sampling results,” Turner said. 

But more than a year would pass before City Hall issued a consumer drinking water notice regarding forever chemicals in Kalispell’s water supply — and only after a statewide news outlet revealed the extent of the contamination.  

What are PFAS? 

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a group of manmade chemicals widely used in the U.S. since the 1940s, notably in non-stick cookware and waterproof clothing. The chemicals can now be found everywhere around the world, contaminating food, water and air.   

The highly resistant compounds break down very slowly and can accumulate in the human body over time. Adverse health effects linked to exposure include decreased fertility or increased high blood pressure in pregnant women, developmental delays in children, increased risk of some cancers and increased cholesterol.  

While the federal government laid regulations on a handful of well-studied compounds in the PFAS family in April 2024, little remains known about the thousands of others.  

While the EPA had been eyeing PFAS for years, City Hall was informed in January 2022 it would be required to test for 29 types of PFAS between 2023 and 2025. The federal agency rolled out similar nationwide testing in 2013 and 2015 but found no detections in Kalispell.   

“Large [public water systems] are responsible for collecting drinking water samples, having them analyzed by a [EPA] approved laboratory ... and notifying the public of the results,” read an email from the federal agency to the city.  

In March 2022, the city opted for an early round of voluntary, state-funded testing through the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.  

Out of 19 systems tested in the state, Kalispell was the only public drinking water system to detect PFAS. 

Five city wells were tested. The Armory Well, which sits near Kalispell Airport and a former armory, tested positive at 2.6 parts per trillion.  

One part per trillion is equivalent to a square foot in the state of Montana, according to Water Resource Manager Joe Schrader. Still, it was unwelcome news.  

“Rule #3 in life, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished...” wrote Schrader in a June 2022 email regarding the positive detection.   

“I was thinking rule #3, never do non-mandated sampling ... the outcome may suck,” Turner responded.  

Turner said the email exchange – obtained by the Inter Lake through a Freedom of Information Act document request -- reflected “a moment of informal email banter between colleagues reacting to disappointing and unexpected news.”  

Another round of sampling was conducted under the same program in June in an attempt to confirm the results. The Armory Well came back positive again for two compounds in the PFAS family: PFOS and PFHxS at 3.3 parts per trillion.  

The levels detected in the well water are higher than the water coming out of the tap, though, because the water entering a home is mixed from several different sources.    

The EPA that same month set aside $1 billion for addressing emerging contaminants, including PFAS, in small or disadvantaged communities. The money came from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, a mammoth spending bill passed under former President Joe Biden in 2021.  

The EPA also rolled out new health advisories at 0.004 parts per trillion for PFOA and 0.02 parts per trillion for PFOS. The advisories were non-regulatory and set at levels below what could be detected in a lab.  

Then City Manager Doug Russell -- who accepted a city manager position in Lakewood, Washington this month -- told the Inter Lake that despite the updated advisories, information was still limited. 

“That was one of the challenges with the EPA is, yeah, they identified these emerging contaminants with zero guidance or very limited guidance,” he said. 

By September 2022, the city was slated for two more rounds of testing for the next year, this time required by the EPA under the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule, which is released every five years with a new list of contaminants to be monitored by public water systems. 

November City Council meeting 

Then came that first public discussion on PFAS in November 2022, where Turner told councilors that the Armory Well detected a small amount of PFAS, less than what could be confidently analyzed in a lab.     

Despite the questionable results, a public discussion was needed, Russell said.  

But finding out that PFAS had infiltrated the drinking water didn't strike Councilors Chad Graham and Sid Daoud as worrisome, the pair recalled.  

“We didn’t know what was safe and what wasn’t safe,” Daoud said. 

The meeting was the first time Daoud ever heard of PFAS, and Graham said he was waiting for more direction from the EPA. 

Both councilors emphasized that the labs running the tests look for an extremely minuscule figure. 

The alarm bells weren’t going off for Councilor Ryan Hunter at the time either, but in hindsight he said he wished he took the discovery more seriously.  

The meeting was intended to bring the public up to speed on what the city knew about PFAS and the detections at the Armory Well.  

“To say that we didn’t share that information is inaccurate,” Russell said.  

He said he didn’t know how many attended or watched the meeting, but Graham said he didn’t think many people were watching.  

“I don’t blame people for not paying attention,” he said. “But it was there, we talked about it, we had a work session on it,” he said. 

Schrader said he received many calls and emails from the public after the meeting, though.

There were no written public comments regarding PFAS sent to City Hall around the time of the meeting, according to the city’s public comment log.  

Federally mandated testing 

Government mandated testing began January 2023. This time all eight city wells were tested. 

But there were no detections.  

The results only led to more questions about the accuracy of the testing, Russell said. To avoid outside contamination, the person taking the sample must avoid their gas tank, new clothing, paper packaging and waterproof items 24 hours prior to sampling. They must also wash their hands with PFAS-free soap and wear a specific type of glove.   

“At the time, the methods for analyzing those types of contaminants at such low limits was quite challenging for the labs nationwide,” Turner said. 

But a second round of testing in July 2023 found PFAS in the two Grandview Wells dug next to Flathead Valley Community College. PFOS was detected at 6.6 parts per trillion and PFHxS at 5 parts per trillion. The Armory Well also detected PFHxS at 3.6 parts per trillion. 

The Old School Well had one positive detection of PFOS at two parts per trillion in July 2023 too. 

The next month, emails to the state Department of Environmental Quality indicate that Kalispell Public Works was considering applying for grants to pay for PFAS mitigation. 

“We received results from our [second] round of UCMR5 testing and may have the need to apply for funding to address emerging contaminants in two sources,” Schrader wrote in an email to the state agency.  

Notes from a meeting between Turner and Russell in September 2023 show that there was conversation over how the public would react to the test results. 

“We anticipate that regardless of [maximum contaminant levels], once our data becomes public, we’ll begin receiving frantic calls about PFAS in our water,” read the meeting notes. 

When asked about it, Russell told the Inter Lake that with any public release, a reaction is expected.  

“I wouldn’t get too hung up on the adjective. But whenever we put information out, we anticipate phone calls coming back,” he said. “We needed to make sure that we had accurate information to give back to the public. And really, at the time, we still didn’t have a lot of great accurate information. There was no rule or guidance on that yet.”   

The news article that prompted a public notice 

Flashforward over a year to Feb. 26, 2024 the Daily Montanan news outlet published an article detailing that Kalispell detected PFAS in its drinking water, turning it into the first PFAS contaminated water system project in Montana.  

Hunter didn’t think the public caught wind of the chemicals until after the article was published.  

“I don’t remember the public catching the awareness of it until that article came out that kind of talks about how bad these chemicals are,” he said.  

He said he didn’t know about the chemicals’ negative health effects prior to the article either. 

Four days later, City Clerk Aimee Brunckhorst emailed Russell urging him to review an advisory to send out.  

“We have been getting calls from concerned citizens and would like to issue this ASAP. Are you able to review?” read the email.  

The notice was released on March 1, 2024, detailing Grandview’s highest PFAS levels, general background on the chemicals, the health risks tied to them and ways to limit exposure. The notice also outlined the options being considered to clean the water, like diluting the contaminated wells or replacing them altogether.  

After the article and subsequent consumer drinking water notice, City Hall began fielding concerned calls and an open house was held later that month for the community to lob questions at their local officials.  

The same month, one of the Grandview Wells came back with its highest detection yet: PFOS at 13 parts per trillion and PFHxS at 11 parts per trillion.  

Why wait?  

Why did the city wait nearly two years after PFAS was first discovered in drinking water to issue a public notice?  

“That question keeps coming up, and I think the answer is still the same thing, what are we supposed to notice?” Graham told the Inter Lake. “We didn’t have hard concrete evidence that we were confident in.”  

No new information had come out since the November 2022 meeting, and the city was still waiting for guidance from the EPA, Russell said. Answering the public’s questions is challenging when the EPA could not answer questions from the city, he said. 

“We were operating, one: out of regulation and two: with unconfirmed data,” Russell said.  

“We still didn’t have a really great data set that pointed that, ‘Oh yeah, you have this in your system,’” Turner said.  

Russell compared the city's response to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

“That is still a large topic of conversation that has still a lot of different opinions. What we did at the city on that is we followed the regulations. We’re not the doctors in that arena. We followed the regulations. We tried to do the same thing here,” Russell said.  

Hunter said it was the city avoiding yelling "fire” in a crowded theater, but believes a notice should have come out sooner.  

“We should have, in hindsight, done a bit more to alert the public even though we had preliminary information,” he said.      

“We’re not going to argue with anyone that wishes that was done differently. That’s a perfectly appropriate opinion for them to have. But again, we had limited guidance from the EPA,” Russell said.  

Public notices are meant to provide guidance, but there was none to give, he said.  

Graham said that in his 12 years serving on Council, he never received a call from a citizen about PFAS. 

“I don’t think people, the vast majority, go through and look at it as something that affects them,” he said.   

The chemicals are found virtually everywhere, he said, and the detections found in the wells are miniscule compared to other everyday products. He highlighted the irony of seeing worried community members come to Council meetings with bottled water, “that literally has more [PFAS] in it than the water coming out of their tap.”  

The U.S. Food and Drug administration released a study in April that found out of 197 domestic and imported water bottles sampled, 10 detected PFAS. None had levels exceeding EPA mandates.  

During his time in the military, Daoud said he was exposed to many harmful chemicals. 

“I’ve been exposed to a whole bunch of junk throughout my life, I think PFAS is one of the least things that I have to worry about,” he said.  

Councilors Jed Fisher, Kari Gabriel, Jessica Dahlman, Sandy Carlson, Sam Nunally and Mayor Mark Johnson did not respond to the Inter Lake for comment.  

EPA issues PFAS regulations 

On April 10, 2024, the EPA announced regulations on six types of PFAS, requiring the city to perform initial monitoring within three years and “provide the public with information on the levels of these PFAS in their drinking water beginning in 2027.”  

The maximum allowable level of PFAS in the drinking water was set at 4 parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS and 10 parts per trillion for PFHxS, PFNA and GenX chemicals, a new group used in a wide array of products.  

The original rule required public water systems to reduce the presence of PFAS below the maximum contaminant levels by 2029, but President Donald Trump’s administration pushed the deadline to 2031.  

The city moved to begin treating the Grandview Wells. By October 2024, a filtration system was installed and effectively filtering out PFAS, putting Kalispell in compliance with EPA regulation years early. 

Daoud was critical of the filtration system, because the leftover residue contaminated with PFAS and had to be disposed of elsewhere.  

“I think one of the reasons the rest of the Council wanted to jump on it right away was ... it made it look like we were doing something about it, right? But the other thing was, we wanted to know how much that treatment was going to affect the water,” he said.  

The system is only considered a temporary measure, as the Public Works Department enters the design phase of replacing the Armory and Grandview wells with new ones built elsewhere in the city.  

The city regularly updates its webpage with current information on PFAS sampling and the city’s action plan at: https://tinyurl.com/y5vecnyv. Anyone with questions can call Public Works at 406-758-720.  

Reporter Jack Underhill can be reached at 758-4407 and [email protected].