One of the experts Frederickson enlisted to help chart that path was James Tinjum, the director of the geological engineering program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In addition to helping the city develop an easy-to-understand guide to PFAS for residents, Tinjum and some of his graduate students also launched research in Rhinelander, putting together a map of how water flows and interacts in the water table beneath the city and its surrounding areas.
“It’s a way to draw analysis to what types of compounds are contributing to the ‘fingerprints’ of the wells, whether it’s an organic sludge, (firefighting foam), or a more dispersed pattern of PFAS typical of landfill situations,” Tinjum said. “If we don’t have this information, we don’t know how to fix the problem.”