JUST INSIDE THE rolled-up door of a pumphouse garage, Cole Benak pulled on a pair of black Nitrile gloves. Outside, morning sunshine warmed the quiet wooded hillside. From the room next door, three massive water pumps whined, pushing thousands of gallons per minute of Vancouver, Washington’s drinking water toward a reservoir another mile uphill. Benak, a city engineering technician, checked his watch and marked the time on a plastic water sampling flask.
He turned and knelt behind a four-foot-wide panel fitted with gauges and valves and four tall, narrow cylinders — like a miniature pipe organ of plastic, each tube filled with water and a different type of filtering material. The water that enters these cylinders, like nearly all of Vancouver’s water, is contaminated with common but dangerous chemicals called PFAS — perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances. What flows out will help city officials determine which material is best at removing them.
