Transcription
We hope that we can reassure people, at least as far as that we're doing everything we can to find out what's going on. So what is PFOs? I'm not even going to try and say it. It was the key ingredient in Scotchgard. 3M pushed it out all over the place. It was in firefighting foam. It was the lining of pizza boxes so that your tomato sauce didn't soak in. It was Scotchguarding carpets. It was the water-shedding agent on clothes. It's used in metal coating processes, and it was a wonder substance. And it is now being withdrawn because it is a very persistent chemical, and it's even been found in the Antarctic. So that's what we're dealing with. It's also used in commercial aviation in Skydrol, which is apparently an aviation hydraulic fluid.
What have we found? Well, middle of December, we were asked to look at a borehole. One of the residents and some pizzas were thought their water looked a little strange, so we sampled. We can't test for it here; there's only a couple of labs in the UK that test for it. We send that back, and it came back and it had PFOs in it—very small trace amounts—and in an area that we wouldn't have expected to find it. It was nowhere near the end of the airport where we had the fire training ground incident when I was probably still at school.
What have we found? Well, in terms of PFOs, what happened next? We then went out and said, "This is strange; we need to sample some more. Is it a one-off or other borehole?" So we widened the circle, and we went out and sampled some more, and we found similarly very low amounts in those as well. It takes about two weeks from sampling to courier it to the UK for them to test it and then to get the results back. Any results we've had back have been shared with the person that uses the borehole, as far as we're aware. We hope we've done that, and we will continue to do that. It's important that you know what we're finding. We've got—there's a department—we've got nothing to hide here. We need to work with you.
So the two things that were being tested for are PFOs and a metabolite PFOA, which is what it breaks down to and sometimes what it comes with. So the highest that we found so far is 0.0590 micrograms per liter in terms of PFOs. The guideline at present is one microgram, so it's significantly less. In terms of PFOA, it's 0.0235, and that limit is five, so again it's considerably less. It's still far more than we'd like—those to be zeros. We don't want to be finding it in there. We also tested some surface water to see if we could find out where it was coming from, and we were somewhat surprised to find the surface water levels were coming in actually higher than the borehole, which is very strange. You'd expect the surface waters to be clearer generally and it to be in the groundwater. So there is no guideline for service—for surface water. So again, we've got up to 1.24 and 0.454. So that's what we found so far and in an area away from the one that was traditionally known as the plume area, which Tim will talk about in a minute. So this is a new area where have we found it? That's for Tim. [Music] No substance whatsoever, and we've already seen it. We assumed things just to be about theories, so we get out there. So we've got the survey, the airport's the main runway. We've got to believe Bill coming down the village. Okay, so the whole lives Stuart mentioned that they have a concern, and we went to sample was in that collection there. What you see here on the map, all the red dots, and you probably know the National Registry of [Music] [Music] We then went out and we sampled this area here; that was the next phase and was on the other side where this phase you can see all these horrors of the motors would go through all of these [Music] So you will probably also remember there's a historical pollution down towards St. Aubin's Bay, which we've all known as the plume. It's sensible if we're doing this sort of research also to make sure that we are confident that we know where that plume is. The best way of doing that is to go down there and test it, so we will do that. We've already had tests from some of the bodies of water down there, but rather than using theory and using other ideas of where it might be, we're going to go and test these. So we've ordered another hundred bottles, and we'll probably need another hundred after that in order to get a really good idea of what's going on. Tim mentioned some of these others; we need to control; we need to make sure that we're not finding a background level. We actually hope that we're not finding a background level; we'd prefer not for it—for it not to be ubiquitous. Certainly in certain parts of the world it is, and the founder in Antarctica, which is not really good for the planet.
So talk about international standards, and these are a moveable feast, and they will move. I've been talking to John Fol, who is employed by WHO, owned by EU, to set these standards, and he's fairly sure that they're gonna come down significantly. So WHO suggests it comes down PFOs 2.4 micrograms per liter. Not surprisingly, as it's the same guy, the EU. We're going to do that now. WHO hasn't confirmed those. The EU, the WHO has guide values because if they have targets, many of their members would miss, particularly in the third-world countries where it's less easy to control pollution at the moment. The EU has standards which have to be met, and again it's not updated, but there was a draft out at September last year, I believe, and these are the suggestions; they're coming 2.4 micrograms per liter and 4. And at the moment these are the highest that were found, so again it's orders of magnitude less, even though the standard is coming down tenfold. We'll still really got another ten—tenfold till we get down to those. At the moment, the UK Drinking Water Inspectorate, which is what we follow—our own one—so it's quite a reduction and on 5. So that's where it's going. The latest suggestion we've had from Denmark is it goes to 0.1 and less than three, so they will no doubt be a bit of a debate in the EU about which one of those they follow. We will be led by their experts who know far more than we do.
The other thing we should say is that Jersey Water carry out their own sampling as well to make sure they know what's going on, and they share their results with us because that informs our overall picture of what's happening. They are particularly interested in the historic pollution down towards St. Aubin's because they had some boreholes there that they would love to be able to use, obviously, and obviously what's going into—into the streams that will end up in the reservoirs. So my guess is we're going to end up somewhere between three and four for PFOA and 0.4 probably as well, and I doubt it'll go there, but if it is, we would clearly use that in our regulation, and again we're still significantly below that. So advice on boreholes—this was sent out in the end of 2015, I believe, although some people say they never got it. That may be the case. There are copies—say this evening—that is being revised and will be reissued to everybody on a registered borehole. I know from my own experience that some things come through the letterbox and don't get read. I'm not saying that's the case; you may not have received it, but this is being revised, and we will send it out again, and there are copies here today should you want them. The nice thing about Jersey Water is they've got many reservoirs, and they've got a desalination plant, so they can blend to reduce pollution should they find it, and they usually blend it so it's no longer detectable should they wish to do that. You can't do that with a borehole. As with food, which we regulate, as with everything else, we need to be sure what we're putting in our bodies. There are all sorts of things might be in the borehole. What we want to say is if you're using a borehole and you're expecting—best not to drink the water; if you're a nursing mother, best not to drink the water; and if you've got kiddies under three who love drinking water, best not to use the borehole unless you know what's in it. If you get it tested regularly, that's fine, but it can vary; it could be fine yesterday; in six months' time it might not be. So adults, it shouldn't be the same sort of problem. We can—we can give advice about having it sampled; we can point you in the right direction for having it sampled and for the things you should sample it for.
So perhaps whilst we're on that, something that Alex's team were already on where there was something that one of our new moms on the team was doing before she went on maternity leave, which is revising the advice that our nurses and midwives and hospital departments give the mums and nursing mothers because the one that goes out at the moment is—is very old and is probably not as accurate as it should be. And I believe that's with your team now, and again as soon as that's available, that will be going out through family nursing, through midwives, and everything else, and really it pretty much says this, but it also gives further advice on bottled water. So if you're using bottled water for kiddies, make sure it's not high sodium, and—and that is on the label. We need to make sure that we take care of little ones because the little ones' bodies are growing quickly, and they tend to absorb things rather more quickly than old decrepit ones like mine would.
So what happens next? Tim's touched on it—a little bit further testing of boreholes and surface waters and comprehensive testing. We're talking about, I would guess, another 200 and 250 plus samples because we need to know what's there. We don't need to guess what's there; we don't need to have theories; we need to go out and measure it and find if it's there or not. Be great if we could rule out great patches of the island, but we need to do that. We need to find out what's there, so we're going to go right around the airport. For years it's been believed it was only at the end where the fire-training ground—this clearly that's not the case; we've found it elsewhere. So let's go right around the airport and either rule those areas in or rule them out. We'll take control samples well away from the airport to see if the levels we are getting are ubiquitous. We hope they're not, but in certain states in—in the United States, if you sample, you'll find people's wherever you sample around the area originally de-identified after the incident. So we need to go back and revisit that to make sure the historical data is right or to prove it wrong or to prove exchanged to see if that plume area is right, to see if people are taking water from within the plume and irrigating from outside the plume that might be making other effects. So again that would be surface water; that will be boreholes; that would be springs; that will be lakes, and we've done some of that already, but we need to do a lot more to get a better picture. The other thing is as we get results in that—my—that evidence might make us change where we need to go. We can't just blindly say we're going to do this. If the evidence that we're getting—the scientific evidence—suggests we need to do different samples in different places, we'll do that because what we're trying to find out is what's going on as opposed to sticking rigidly to something that we think might be going on.
Really, the advice to users of private water supplies—the boreholes—we've mentioned that revision and reissue of advice for expecting and nursing mothers and parents and guardians of kids under five. We will do that, and we are charged by John Young, Minister for the Environment, that he will have an interim report by the end of April. Bearing in mind it's a two-week turnaround, there's a lot of really hard work going on there. I don't see my staff a lot apart from when they go out early in the morning when they come back muddy in the evening having—having sampled, and it's really important we do that. When we get out there and do that, the next session is questions and answers. We might not have an ounce of it. If we don't, we can—we can say we don't. We've got nothing to hide here; we're trying to find out what's going on, and then we can make our report to the minister.