A Well in East Bay Tested at 380 Times Michigan’s PFAS Limit. A Standard Well Inspection Would Never Have Caught It.
One drinking water well in the Pine Grove neighborhood of East Bay Township came back at 3,050 parts per trillion for PFOA. Michigan’s limit is 8. The federal limit is 4.
That’s not a rounding error or a margin call. That’s a private well sitting at roughly 380 times the number the state says is safe — and the household drinking from it had no idea until somebody finally ran the right test.
Here’s the part that should stop every Northern Michigan buyer cold: a standard well inspection would have passed that water without blinking.
What the Well Test on Your Offer Actually Checks
The well water testing your lender or your purchase agreement asks for up here almost always covers two things: total coliform and E. coli bacteria, and nitrates. Sometimes a flow test on the pump gets thrown in.
Those numbers tell you whether the well is mechanically sound and whether there’s an obvious septic or agricultural problem nearby. They’re worth doing — run them every time.
But none of them looks for PFAS. A well can be bacteria-free, nitrate-clean, and pump like a champion while still carrying the exact contamination that cost Pine Grove its drinking water.
Where the PFAS Up Here Actually Comes From
PFAS isn’t a farm runoff problem or a septic issue. The big plumes in Grand Traverse County trace back to firefighting foam — AFFF — used and tested for decades at Cherry Capital Airport and the U.S. Coast Guard Air Station in Traverse City.
The Navy was operating that site and using that foam as far back as the 1940s. Every time crews tested the equipment, some of it soaked into the ground and kept going.
Groundwater moves. That’s how a foam sprayed at an airport ends up in a residential well a neighborhood away. In the East Bay investigation, nine of the eighteen wells sampled exceeded the criteria, and all eighteen homes ended up connected to municipal water back in 2021.
The Numbers Are a Moving Target — and That’s the Point
Michigan set its own PFAS limits in 2020: 8 ppt for PFOA, 16 ppt for PFOS, plus five other compounds. For a while, those were the strictest standards in the country.
Then in 2024 the EPA went lower still — 4 ppt for both PFOA and PFOS — and the tighter federal number now governs.
Translation for a buyer: the bar keeps dropping. Water that “passed” a few years ago might not pass today. If you’re leaning on an old report or a seller’s reassurance, you’re leaning on a standard that may have already moved underneath you.
Active Cleanup Started This Year. Your Well Isn’t On the List.
This is not ancient history. In January 2026, EGLE handed out about $9 million to nineteen Michigan airports for PFAS cleanup, with more than $6 million of it going to ten airports up north. Cherry Capital’s share was around $1 million.
For the first time, that money pays for actual remediation — pulling contaminated soil out of identified hotspots and scrubbing the residue out of the fire trucks — instead of just monitoring it.
That’s encouraging for the long game. It does nothing for the private well on the property you’re about to buy this summer. Soil removal and municipal hookups happen on the government’s calendar, not your closing date.
The Fourth Water Test Nobody Puts in the Offer
Here’s the simple framework. When you’re buying a home on a private well in Northern Michigan, there are really four tests worth thinking about: bacteria, nitrates, a basic mineral-and-flow panel, and PFAS. Almost everyone runs the first three and skips the fourth.
PFAS well water testing uses a specific lab method — EPA Method 537.1 — that screens for eighteen separate compounds. EGLE keeps a public list of certified labs and a home-sampling guide, so this isn’t exotic chemistry. It’s a phone call and a sample kit.
Write it into your inspection contingency the same way you’d write in a septic inspection. The cost of the panel is a rounding error next to the cost of discovering the problem after the deed is in your name.
Who Should Actually Worry About This
The honest answer is that proximity matters most. If the property sits anywhere in the East Bay corridor toward Williamsburg, near the airport, or on the wells closest to the Coast Guard station, PFAS well water testing moves from “good idea” to “non-negotiable.”
But contamination shows up in spots nobody predicts, and the only way to know your specific well is to test your specific well. We see this pattern a lot up here — buyers assume “rural and pretty” means “clean water,” and the two have almost nothing to do with each other.
If you’re shopping the west side around Elmwood Township or anywhere on a private well, the logic holds. The map of where PFAS has turned up keeps growing — mostly because the testing keeps growing.
Don’t Fear the Well. Test It.
None of this is a reason to walk away from well water. The overwhelming majority of wells up here are perfectly fine, and good well water is one of the quiet luxuries of living in the Traverse City area. The point isn’t fear — it’s testing for the one thing the standard inspection was never built to catch.
If you’re under contract or about to be, send me the address before your inspection period locks in. Two minutes looking at where it sits relative to the known plumes tells us whether the PFAS panel is a “nice to have” or a “do it this week.”
Browse what’s currently on the market here, and we’ll make sure the water underneath a house gets the same scrutiny as the roof over it.
Taylor Brown, Realtor
(231) 360-1510
