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Sunday: Battling tainted water treated on the site. Page 4 of 7 "What is being drawn out of the wells now probably was dumped in the 1950s and later," said Mike Fix, director of the Army installation. The plant last produced ammunition in 1975. The filtered water is considered safe to drink, and all the pumping helps shrink the underground plume. Levels of TCE have dropped. Even so, TCE levels last year in one well were 600 times higher than the federal standard. So far, the Army has spent $186 million cleaning up pollution from the plant, more than half of that to deal with chemicals in groundwater, Fix said. The work probably won't be finished for another 20 to 40 years. In Woodbury, 3M has mounted a continuous battle since 1968 against groundwater pollution at one of its old dumps. The company operates four wells that act like giant wet-vacs at the dump. For almost 40 years, they've sucked out enough groundwater to fill six Olympic-sized swimming pools -- every day. The system is supposed to halt the chemicals' underground movement. The extracted water is piped to 3M's plant in Cottage Grove, where some is used in production. It eventually ends up in the Mississippi River. Regulators long believed such systems were slowly remedying the groundwater problem near the Woodbury site and two other disposal areas used by 3M in Washington County in the late 1950s and early 1970s. That optimism has faded since 2004, when state officials began testing residential wells for 3M's perfluorochemicals, once used for nonstick cookware, stain-resistant fabrics, fire-suppression foams and film coatings. PFCs have been found in drinking water wells near the disposal sites, raising the question: Did the chemicals slip past the pump-out wells? "It's soluble, it gets into the water and it goes," said Douglas Wetzstein, Superfund unit supervisor for the state Pollution Control Agency, which is still investigating how PFCs spread. "... We don't have all the answers, and the thing about PFCs is that every week or month that comes along, there seems to be some other angle that needs to be investigated." One possibility is that PFCs escaped into Washington County's groundwater before any cleanup efforts began. 3M, the Maplewood-based manufacturer of Scotchgard, Post-It notes and thousands of other products, says it phased out PFCs by 2002 because the chemicals don't break down and had been detected in people and animals around the world. High concentrations of some PFCs have caused liver, thyroid and developmental damage in httn•//www ctartrihnne_c~m/1(1~~7/v-print/~tnrv/1471 E,45.html 9/21/2007