A Hermiston water tower in Hermiston, Ore., on Jan. 16, 2025.
Antonio Sierra / OPB
The City of Hermiston now has a price tag to stop “forever chemicals” from polluting the city’s water supply: $26 million.
At a Monday meeting, the city council approved both the plan to rid its drinking water system of PFAS, and a state loan application to help pay for the changes. The moves represent a shift in approach. Hermiston officials previously told OPB they had stopped testing for the pollutants and were taking a “wait-and-see” approach to levels detected in water supplies in recent years. But the city now expects federal and state regulations will require Hermiston to address PFAS contamination by 2029.
Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are a group of thousands of chemicals sometimes referred to as “forever chemicals” because of their resistance to degradation. Often associated with manufacturing and industrial products, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says certain levels of PFAS exposure may lead to increased risk of cancers, heart and liver disease, and immune and developmental damage to infants and children.
Testing last year showed that three Hermiston city wells tested positive for PFAS.
“Despite those findings, Hermiston’s drinking water currently meets all EPA drinking water standards and remains safe to drink,” according to the city’s website.
PFAS are currently unregulated by the EPA. The agency is now considering two proposed rules to regulate the class of chemicals in drinking water. The proposals set a timeline for PFAS regulation and define which PFAS could be regulated.
Hermiston’s 2025 water quality report says “chemical compounds used in fabrics, food packaging and cosmetics” are a likely source. At a July workshop to discuss the plan approved Monday, Joshua Lott, an engineer the city hired to study the issue, said no one could determine where the PFAS were coming from.
“To identify a source that’s specific to Hermiston is difficult or impossible,” he said. “It’s in the groundwater and it’s flowing through the groundwater tables, so we don’t have a magic spyglass that you can look through to see down there and see what’s happening.”
The plan the council adopted would decommission two wells, install filters into another well, and draw more water from a regional surface water system, shared infrastructure between the city and its industrial customers that draws from the nearby Columbia River rather than groundwater.
Assistant City Manager Mark Morgan said the regional water system has plenty of capacity and the city has detected no PFAS in that water supply.
“It’s a perfectly good, perfectly fine water source,” Morgan said. “It was just more expensive for us to operate that system than it was to operate the others, and so that was sort of our last option.”
While increasing operations at the regional water system will be more costly, Morgan said, it will be cheaper than PFAS treatment alternatives. He added that there’s also a risk in the city relying more heavily on a single source of water.
The city’s PFAS plan will also be costly to get in place.
To offset the estimated $26 million cost, the city council immediately approved an application to the Oregon Health Authority’s Safe Drinking Water Revolving Loan Fund, which could provide the city with a forgivable loan.
Hermiston joined a class action lawsuit against PFAS manufacturers in April with hopes that proceeds from the litigation could also help pay for system improvements if the city prevails, according to a city press release.
