The Three Rivers City Commission approved a resolution to purchase a property and lease it to the county for temporary veteran housing, and a general fund request to cover additional water testing costs Tuesday.
Water quality
As tribes establish their own water quality standards and permitting programs, some experts believe they could play a critical role in fighting pollution and ensuring that the resources they depend on for subsistence and cultural values are preserved.
The City of Three Rivers recently found more lead service lines while conducting a test of tap water in homes for lead and copper in accordance with the Michigan Safe Drinking Water Act. In the first round of collecting first and fifth liter samples from 47 homes, six homes had results over 15 parts per billion (ppb), the federal limit for lead contamination.
Three Rivers High School students studying Applied Physics are conducting a large scale study of the town’s water quality. Led by teacher Joe Graber, the class will be using commercially available water testing kits. The students are asking for the public to obtain water samples from their homes to aid in the database they are building with collected results.
The U.S. House Wednesday passed bipartisan legislation that would regulate toxic chemicals found in drinking water, as well as designate two types of those toxic chemicals as hazardous substances that would spark federal cleanup standards. The bill, H.R. 2467, also known as the PFAS Action Act of 2021, passed 241-183, with 23 Republicans joining Democrats in voting for it.
“Michigan has gone farther than other states in dealing with the toxic legacy of PFAS contamination, [but] unfortunately, these chemicals are so persistent and so widespread that they are literally accumulating in our own human waste.”
– Christy McGillivray, political and legislative director at Sierra Club Michigan, commenting on a new report from the Sierra Club and the Ann Arbor-based Ecology Center of Michigan