Vermont environmental officials are pausing to reevaluate a stricter state standard for certain harmful forever chemicals after a change in stance by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency earlier this week.

Barely one year after the EPA passed historic rules to reduce the amounts of certain harmful forever chemicals in drinking water, the agency is now considering reversing some of those regulations and pushing back the timeline for drinking water systems to comply with others.

When the set of federal regulations passed under President Joe Biden, they set allowable levels of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, even lower than Vermont’s existing standards, which had been in place for five years. The stricter rules meant an additional 30 drinking water suppliers in the state needed to remove PFAS.

Now, the state’s progress on formalizing those rules is on something of a pause, as officials wait to hear more information about the federal decision.

“The amount of information we have as a state, is about the same as what the public has been receiving,” said Bryan Redmond, the director of the Drinking Water and Groundwater Protection Division in the state Department of Environmental Conservation. “We are waiting to schedule some time with the EPA to learn what the details of this mean.”

Wednesday’s announcement from the EPA keeps the Biden-area levels for two chemicals in the sprawling PFAS family. There can be only 4 parts per trillion or less of PFOA and PFOS chemicals detected in drinking water.

However, the agency has now added two more years on the deadline for meeting those levels — meaning municipalities now have to comply by 2031, instead of 2029. The agency is also announcing a federal exemption framework for some communities struggling to remove the harmful chemicals from drinking water.

The existing rules had also set a limit of 10 parts per trillion of four other types of PFAS chemicals. The EPA announced it now intends to rescind and reconsider the regulations for those other four regulated chemicals.

There are more than 12,000 chemicals in this class of compounds.

PFOA and PFOS are some of the most commonly occurring compounds in the PFAS family, and those are the two chemicals that typically drive the contamination issues in Vermont, according to Redmond.

The chemicals in high doses are linked to a litany of harmful health effects, largely because they are suspected of interrupting hormone chemical signaling in the body, and thus can lead to a range of maladies, from cancers and reproductive health problems to cardiovascular challenges and weakened immune systems.

Disclosure: Bryan Redmond is married to VtDigger CEO Sky Barsch. This story was republished with permission from VtDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To support this work, please visit vtdigger.org/donate.