Testing: Waterbodies Near Facilities

The first stage of testing prioritization for many states involves identifying facilities that are likely to be utilizing PFAs chemicals. This competency question addresses features of enivronmental concern (surface water bodies) that are near potential contamination sources.

• Landfills are sites of PFAS contamination resulting from both industrial usage and prevalence in consumer products that accumulate in landfills.
• Department of Defense sites are frequently on the list PFAs contamination primarily because of the usage of Fire Fighiting Foam (AFFF).

The query could easily be modified to identify other features of concern (water supply wells, streams, etc.) or other potential contamination sources. This query would inform testing prioritization as it would help identify surface water bodies that may be at risk of contamination.

The map was generated by querying the SAWGraph for facilities of the specified type in the state of Maine (that are suspected pfas sources), and then finding the nearby surface water bodies based on the S2 Cell spatial indexing.

The full code is available: here and here