On March 12, 2026, the EPA added the Gelman Sciences site to the Superfund National Priorities List, the federal list of the country's most contaminated properties. The company used the solvent 1,4-dioxane in medical filter manufacturing at its Wagner Road plant from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s and dumped the wastewater onsite. Offsite contamination turned up in groundwater in the mid-1980s, and the plume has been migrating under Scio Township and Ann Arbor's west side ever since, tracked today by more than 250 monitoring wells. A 2005 court order created a Prohibition Zone that bans new wells inside its boundary, and the entire zone sits within city limits. Ann Arbor already required every property inside those limits to connect to municipal water regardless of the zone, so there are no private wells left to worry about within the city itself. The city's own priority is protecting its drinking water intake at Barton Pond on the Huron River, and it has run a self-funded sentinel well at the plume's northern edge since 2020 for early warning.
That plume sits on top of a treatment plant that is already unusually candid about what it has to do to its own water. Ann Arbor draws 85 percent of its supply from the Huron River and the rest from wells south of the city, blends both, and runs the mix through an excess lime softening stage because the city's own page says outright that the water needs it. No hardness number in parts per million gets published anywhere, so none appears on this page, but the process itself, calcium oxide stripping calcium, magnesium and iron before ozone disinfection and carbon filtration, is real and sourced straight from the utility.
Underneath both of those stories sits a housing stock that predates most of the plumbing conversations happening around it. The Old West Side, 250 acres bounded roughly by Seventh Street, Main, Huron, Pauline and Crest, filled in between 1845 and World War I with houses that are still about 85 percent frame construction today, clad mostly in clapboard. German immigrants settled the original subdivision; a preservation group formed in 1967 to keep the district intact, and the National Register listed it in 1972. A plumber working that footprint is working inside a neighborhood that has spent sixty years actively protecting its original character, pipes included.
Layer a university on top of all of it. The University of Michigan enrolled 53,488 students in 2025, in a city of roughly 123,000 residents, and the housing immediately surrounding campus is dominated by rental stock built to turn over year after year. That is a lot of plumbing running through a lot of leases in a small footprint.
Two vendors already run pages against this exact search, one for the city directly and one built around the 734 area code, which makes Ann Arbor a more contested market for this than Grand Rapids or Appleton but less crowded than Lansing. Winning it comes down to answering a caller's real question about the plume, the plant, or a hundred-year-old supply line, faster and more accurately than the phone lines already running against it.
