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The Zone 7 Water Agency completed the construction of two new monitoring wells at the Ken Mercer Sports Park in Pleasanton in early January that representatives said will help the agency detect PFAS contamination before it spreads any further.
While there haven’t been any contaminants found in the area around the sports park along Hopyard Road, having these two wells will help warn the water agency before any contaminants seep into any wells with actual drinking water.Â
“Installing this multi-zone monitoring well allowed us to fill a data gap in our regional water quality monitoring network,” Zone 7 General Manager Valerie Pryor told Embarcadero Media Foundation. “It will help us monitor groundwater quality in general and PFAS in particular. In addition, this new well will give us forewarning should the western edge of the existing PFAS plume migrate further west.”
Zone 7 has been monitoring PFAS, otherwise known as forever chemicals, in the Livermore Valley groundwater basin and how the plume of these different contaminants has been moving from east to west over the last couple of years.
According to Zone 7 project manager Colleen Winey, the PFAS plume has impacted the Stoneridge, Mocho and Chain of Lakes supply wells, making the Hopyard wellfield the only one that has not been affected, which is why she said these new monitoring wells are so important.
“Right now, what we’re trying to do is just assess the movement of the PFAS plume and just make sure that the plume doesn’t reach those wells,” Winey told the Weekly. “If it is going to reach the Hopyard well field, we (will) know ahead of time so that we can be prepared.”
Zone 7 currently monitors over 200 wells, but Winey said that for now the water agency will be keeping a closer eye on these new wells.
“This well we might monitor a little bit more often … just because it has a more specific task than just general water quality,” she said.
She said that the new wells were strategically placed in the parking lot to monitor three different zones in that area to detect contaminants before it hits any other wells, Winey said.
“Since our drinking water is coming from deeper zones, we wanted to have wells that matched the zones that we’re seeing the PFAS moving in,” Winey said.
She added that the new wells go as far as 800 feet down into the ground in order for the agency to really look at the geology of the area, which will give the agency more information about the movement of the PFAS plume.
She said that because the agency usually takes water level samples twice a year, had Zone 7 waited and not installed these new wells, they would have run the risk of not detecting any contaminants at the other monitoring wells until it was too late.
“If we waited, if we got hits in the monitoring wells that (exist), it would be too late because it’d be at the production well,” she said. “This one is gonna give us a little bit of a heads up.”
After construction was finished, the water agency had sampling teams go out on Jan. 23 to begin collecting data and PFAS samples from the two new wells.
Winey said that the water agency is hoping the results come back clean, they are going to have to wait until the data comes back and that the information wouldn’t be made public for a while.
She explained how Zone 7 complies all of this sort of data and submits it an annual report out to the California Department of Water Resources every April. However, the data being submitted this year will be reflective of 2023, which means that whatever data and sampling being gathered from the two new wells at the sports park won’t be made public until April 2025.
The work that goes into analyzing the data includes sending samples to labs that have the equipment to detect things in the water down to parts per trillion. Those labs then have to analyze that information before sending the data back to Zone 7.
“There’s a certain amount of time that it takes for us to get that data back,” Winey said. “I’m not sure exactly how long it’s going to be before we know.”
