OBSERVER Photo by Anthony Dolce

By CAMERON HURST

churst@post-journal.com

MAYVILLE — Days after enacting a “Do Not Drink” order for residents, Mayville Mayor Ken Shearer said the village’s response is “going as well as could be expected.”

The village has been under public health orders not to drink or use village water for drinking, cooking, food preparation, tooth brushing or for animal consumption since Thursday after a water test on Wednesday evening found a chemical called perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA), detected at levels between 75 and 330 parts per trillion.

A water project had been ongoing in the village to change water lines and build a new water tank, Shearer said. That process has been expedited since Thursday, with the department of public works working to drill a new well.

“It’s really going better than to be expected,” Shearer told The Post-Journal and the OBSERVER on Monday. “The village’s Department of Public Works has really gone above and beyond. They’ve turned a well that was just drilled and that was it. They got it tapped with electricity, put the road to it, put piping to it, built a house around and heated it. They finished all that and now we have our first round of testing happening with the state.”

Shearer said the New York State Department of Health and the state Department of Environmental Conservation had not been planning on testing water for the chemical until the new year.

“They just happened to find it in one of our current tests and thankfully they did,” he said. “The earlier the better.”

During a Friday town hall held live on Facebook with county and state officials, Gary Ginsburg, who directs the state Department of Health Center for Environmental Health, said the chemical is “a cousin of a family of chemicals that New York state has recently brought about drinking water standards for.”

“These are all considered emerging contaminants that are still being studied both in animal studies and in the human populations,” Ginsburg said. “We’re learning more about them but we do want to be very precautious with the exposure because we know that they have a long residence time both in the environment and in humans and it’s important to stop exposure when there is an unusual or significant source, once we know about it.”

“This is not a new change to the water,” Shearer added during the town hall on Friday. “This is a little different than other water emergencies. Nothing spilled into our water program. This is a new test and something that has not been tested for before. That’s where this is emerging from. It’s nothing changed from the water overnight.”

He also noted that the state and county “have been great.”

“They’ve stepped up to the plate big time,” he said, also directing praise at the community. “We’ve been handing out water non-stop. When you deal with people that are used to dealing with cities, they’re expecting panic. But people are helping their neighbors, checking on their neighbors and sharing water. We’re grateful in terms of fresh drinking water. They’ve been super to work with.”

County Executive PJ Wendel also praised the county Health Department and emergency response teams for helping to respond to the situation quickly.

“The information came out at a very inopportune hour,” Wendel said. “Our team assembled the information and the data was out. We had our plans set forth and that’s what we’ve done. We get our team together, we look at all the data and execute that plan.”

“It’s a lot of moving parts,” he added. “Imagine waking up that you can’t consume the drinking water. We had to make sure our information was correct, points that needed to be made were made and all those things were all done in a manner that we didn’t create panic, made sure there was calm.”

Shearer said the village was able to procure 43,200 bottles of water from the Walmart Foundation to help those who need water. Distribution sites also took place on Monday at the Town of Chautauqua DPW Garage and at Tops Friendly Markets in Mayville.

Village officials will also be providing canned and bottled water for pick up at the garage at 50 Patterson St. today through Friday from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. An update for the weekend will be developed and announced later this week.

“The village will not be without water,” Wendel said. “This is our own Operation Warp Speed, making sure the testing is happening and that there is a system ready to go. Different agencies are working around the clock.”