New payouts on a settlement over removal of PFAS from Dunkirk drinking water gave the city another chance to tout its water system.

City Department of Public Works Director Randy Woodbury sent a press release about the two payouts totaling more than $40,000. “The city water treatment plant has been removing PFAS and other organic legacy contaminants using filtration by granular activated carbon (GAC) since the 1990s,” he stated.

PFAS is a group of man-made “forever chemicals” that was “used in many items from fire-fighting foam to non-stick cookware, and it is now widely still around – in the soil, in the water, and in the air all around us,” according to Woodbury.

He called the GAC system “the state-of-the-art mechanism for removing PFAS and other organic chemicals and heavy metals, even though now in zero-to-low concentrations in Lake Erie, a truly great lake that has greatly revived from the 1960s when it was considered to be dying.”

Woodbury continued, “The GAC filters also remove micro plastics from city drinking water. The monitoring of the clarity of Dunkirk water is continuous using sophisticated laser particle counters and other instruments running full-time to assure the clarity of city water is more than 10 times more clear than regulations require, with a normal turbidity level about 0.04.”

The PFAS money comes from a class-action lawsuit that Dunkirk joined. Woodbury wrote, “The PFAS settlement checks to the city will be ongoing for years to come as the manufacturers of PFAS were court-ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to places like Dunkirk, which entered the court case under the guidance of Mayor Kate Wdowiasz, City Attorney Elliot Raimondo, Public Works Director Randy Woodbury, and Water Plant Chief Operator Kyle Schuster.”

Woodbury stated that Wdowiasz wants all of the city’s PFAS settlement money “to be deposited in a dedicated account to keep the city’s water treatment plant in top shape.”

He added, “The City of Dunkirk is proud, and humbled, to be the sole provider of potable and reliable drinking water to the North County Water District, to our many fine industries that rely on great city water for their products, and to our residents to stay healthy and hydrated.”

With the water district about to add a big-ticket customer — the village of Fredonia — Woodbury pointedly closed his release with an open invitation.

“The city currently produces about 3 million gallons of great water each day, with a capacity at its plant to produce as much as 10 million gallons per day,” he stated. “The city will assist all neighbors and industries and institutions that may wish to grow using the extra capacity of great water that the city of Dunkirk has and pledges to maintain.”

There have been occasional arguments from “Save Our Reservoir,” a group of Fredonians opposed to joining the North County Water District, that Lake Erie water is hopelessly contaminated with PFAS. Fredonia currently draws its water from a reservoir, not Lake Erie.