White House official visits Tartan High School, visits ‘gigantic, toxic’ Lake Elmo

A gaggle of young boys fished off a Lake Elmo pier on a perfect sunny Monday afternoon, seemingly oblivious to the White House official standing nearby. 

White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Brenda Mallory was talking to county and state officials and environmental advocates about the chemical contamination that lay beneath the surface.

Mallory took a tour of what she called a “gigantic, toxic lake” that’s part of a 150-square-mile east metro area where the drinking water has been contaminated by “forever chemicals,” or PFAS. Maplewood-based 3M has made the chemicals — used in everything from non-stick pans to medical devices — since the 1950s and for decades dumped its toxic waste in Washington County, where it seeped into the groundwater. The company dumped waste in the Washington County Landfill in Lake Elmo from at least 1971 to 1974.

That means communities must filter the chemicals out of the drinking water, which is about to get more difficult given the Environmental Protection Agency’s new regulations banning even trace amounts.  

There must be something in the water

Mallory highlighted the Biden administration’s first-ever national drinking water standard for PFAS and the “historic” $1 billion devoted to help communities upgrade their water facilities nationwide. Minnesota, which settled a lawsuit with 3M for $850 million in 2018, can attest that $1 billion for the whole country won’t be nearly enough. 

She called it striking that “This is a beautiful site, and the idea that there’s this gigantic toxic lake that people aren’t able to actually fully take advantage of is sobering.”

Before touring the lake and talking to reporters, Mallory visited Tartan High School in Oakdale, where residents drank contaminated tap water for years before the discovery of PFAS. A 2018 state health department report found elevated rates of childhood cancer in Oakdale from 1999 to 2014, compared to the rest of the state. Premature births in Oakdale dropped after the city began filtering water in 2006. The report found Washington County was also home to 28% more cases of chronic lymphocytic leukemia than the rest of the state from 1999 to 2013.

3M paid $10 million for a water treatment system in Oakdale in 2006 and helped Lake Elmo provide municipal water service to two neighborhoods.

Tartan High School graduate Amara Strande spent the last few months of her life lobbying state lawmakers in 2023 to crack down on the chemicals. They did, passing a sweeping new Minnesota ban on products containing the chemicals. She died of a rare type of liver cancer at age 20, and legislators named the law after her. 

Beginning next year, Amara’s Law bans all non-essential uses of the chemicals in 11 product categories, and in 2025, companies must disclose the chemicals’ presence in products. By 2032, all use of the chemicals will be banned in products unless the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency deems them essential.

Toxic: 3M knew its chemicals were harmful decades ago, but didn’t tell the public, government

Amara’s family, two of her friends, two current students and some former students attended a private meeting with Mallory and the school superintendent and principal at Tartan High School earlier Monday.

Among the former students at the meeting was Derek Lowen, who had a tumor the size of a baseball removed from his brain when he was 14 years old. He also lobbied lawmakers last year to more strictly regulate the chemicals. Lowen said he told Mallory about how he was part of a “cancer kids” group at the school.

“I don’t have a whole lot of memory from back then,” he said, likely because the tumor affected his brain.

A 3M dump site is a couple of miles down the road from where Lowen grew up, on the other side of the block from Tartan High School. His mother remembers trucks dumping 55-gallon drums of waste in the area.

Mallory said they talked about the chemical contamination’s impact on the school, and how to take what the Strande family “had to endure” and turn it into something positive. She called Amara “an incredible advocate.”

Amara’s father, Michael, said Superintendent Christine Tucci Osorio acknowledged the issue, which was a positive change after some past school officials refused to talk to journalists about it. Amara’s mother, Dana, said Tucci Osorio, a friend of the family, talked about wanting to develop curriculum about the chemicals.

At least some of the boys at the Lake Elmo pier were already well aware of the contamination, and said they were catching and releasing the fish — not eating it. The state advises that people not eat fish from the lake.

Hudson Lee, 14, said his mother battled breast cancer and believes it was caused by contaminated water she drank growing up near Tanners Lake, which is across the road from 3M headquarters in a tiny town called Landfall.