Most households and businesses in the rural community of Gustavus rely on septic systems. For years, a private company from Juneau ferried over to pump them out.
But the City and Borough of Juneau stopped accepting septic waste from the community of fewer than 700 residents last March due to concerns over the impacts of PFAS-contaminated sludge.
PFAS are known as “forever chemicals” since they don’t break down naturally. They’re toxic, known to cause severe health problems and they’re everywhere, including in human waste. High concentrations of PFAS afflict the City of Gustavus after firefighting foams containing the chemicals were sprayed at the airport, upstream from neighborhoods.
Now, many people living in Gustavus worry about what to do when their septic tanks fill up. Norma Fleek is one.
“I don’t know,” Fleek said. “I really don’t have a plan for it.”
She spends around half the year in Juneau and the other half in Gustavus. Her Gustavus property has been in her family for generations. Before they had a septic tank installed in the 1990s, she said they dumped waste in a large hole on the property. She said she might have to dig another big hole if Juneau won’t reconsider taking her waste.
“If there are places in Gustavus that are PFAS-free, it would seem to me that at least they can allow those properties to be collected and accept that septage,” Fleek said.
She said her drinking water well has not tested high for PFAS, unlike some others in town.
An open secret
Juneau Engineering and Public Works Director Denise Koch said she only found out about the longstanding septic shipping practice in 2025, when the City of Gustavus began looking at long-term ways to deal with its waste stream. The contractor doing the study reached out to Juneau city staff.
That’s when Juneau’s Public Works Department sent a letter to the City of Gustavus telling them to stop sending their septic waste.
But it was no secret that Juneau had been processing septic waste from Gustavus. It had been going on since the Alaska Marine Highway System brought ferry service there in 2011. The City of Gustavus even installed two 10,000-gallon underground holding tanks in 2023 to make it easier for a private company to pump and transport waste.
Sally McLaughlin, the mayor of Gustavus, said the holding tanks were meant to be somewhat temporary.
“This is just supposed to be, you know, a stop-gap measure until we could figure something out,” McLaughlin said.
Trevor Richards co-owns Juneau Septic Services, a company that pumped septic tanks in Gustavus for more than a decade. He said 2023 was the company’s biggest service year in Gustavus, when pumpers ferried over trucks that emptied the holding tanks multiple times. The City of Gustavus reports that the company hauled 72,550 gallons of waste to Juneau that year.
“But it had been because they hadn’t had service for a few years, and so there was a big backlog,” Richards said. “So we did quite a bit, and then the following year, it was a little bit less. So I think, as we had caught up to servicing, my guess is it would be in the range of 25 houses that we might do in any given year.”
Richards said that’s a drop in the bucket for Juneau’s wastewater treatment facilities, which also processes greywater from sinks and showers.
“What we dump into the system — it’s a few thousand gallons in a system that’s treating millions of gallons,” he said.
Juneau’s treatment plants process around 3.3 million gallons of wastewater per day.
In an interview with KTOO last month, Koch said Juneau stopped processing septic waste from Gustavus because the city’s wastewater treatment plants have to comply with permits issued by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, which restrict toxic contamination in treated wastewater that’s released back into the environment.
The permits require the city to conduct toxicity testing.
“In our permit, we have to do something called whole effluent toxicity testing, otherwise known as WET testing,” Koch said. “We know that PFAS is an emerging contaminant. We don’t know if Gustavus’ septage would cause a problem with those whole effluent toxicity tests.”
Those tests help ensure wastewater facilities meet federal Clean Water Act standards. PFAS tests last spring show solids in Gustavus’ septic holding tanks contained some forever chemicals, including a specific type called PFOS at 40 parts per billion.
But Sam Dapcevich, a spokesperson for DEC, wrote in an email to KTOO that there are currently no regulatory limits on PFAS in wastewater effluent, and there’s nothing in the city’s permits that would prevent them from taking septic waste from Gustavus.
“At this time, Juneau’s wastewater permits do not contain numeric PFAS effluent limits,” Dapcevich wrote. “As a result, PFAS does not currently affect Juneau’s wastewater discharge compliance.”
In correspondence between Juneau city staff and DEC, which was provided to KTOO, city staff said the state gave Juneau conflicting guidance. Koch said the city is planning to meet with state environmental regulators to discuss the issue soon.
Kathy Leary, the city administrator for Gustavus, said the small town is not equipped to manage the septic waste on its own. She said Gustavus doesn’t have the authority to set up its own wastewater treatment facility since it doesn’t have a public works department to oversee it.
“There’s not a whole lot we can do, short of what we were doing, and maybe trying to work with Juneau and ADEC to come to terms with, you know, allowing the small amounts that we have to be injected into their system,” Leary said. “We’re not there yet.”
Leary said that since no one is coming to pump, some residents are thinking about other ways to deal with the waste. She said some have installed elevated leach fields to try to prevent E. coli and fecal coliform from contaminating shallow drinking water wells, and others, like Norma Fleek, are talking about digging a hole to dump it in.
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