Within just days of each other, new reporting and official updates have revealed three very different — but interconnected — stresses on the city’s water systems: air microorganisms, PFAS poisoning in the Ohio River, and oil-filled runoff from a catastrophic UPS plane crash in south Louisville.
In a conversation that originally aired on WAVE 3 and was later published by Louisville Public Media, meteorologist Tawana Andrew led listeners through what’s been drifting above Louisville for hundreds of years.
“There are thousands of species of microbes and fungi that make up our clouds and our atmosphere and our rain,” she told Louisville Public Media in an interview with Bill Burton.
She explained that researchers have found “more than 800 million viruses are dropped per square meter above our planetary boundary layer,” and some microorganisms have been found “five to 10 miles above the surface of our planet.”
Her explanation connected those microbes to real weather impacts.
“Scientists have found some of these microbes can mimic ice crystal structure, which allows ice to form on top of them, eventually building into clouds, and then you end up with all of these ice crystals really forming at warmer temperatures and at lower altitudes. And once they get too heavy, they’re falling to the ground as precipitation. So it’s raining viruses.”
“A lot of these viruses are not the ones that typically get us sick.”
Louisville Water detects a spike in GenX — and tracks it upriver
Louisville Water Company scientists recently found an unanticipated surge in a kind of PFAS known as GenX in December 2024, according to a different investigation that was released by NPR and Louisville Public Media.
“A part per trillion is like one second in 32,800 years. Put your head around that, right?” Louisville Water’s director of water quality and research, Peter Goodmann, told NPR.
The utility located Chemours’ Washington Works site near Parkersburg, WV, 400 miles upriver. This plant has a well-known history of PFAS pollution linked to previous DuPont operations.
Goodmann told NPR he wasn’t alarmed for customers’ immediate safety, explaining, “Because you get a lot more of these pollutants from packaging, from prefixed food, cake mixes, weird things, you know, popcorn boxes.”
He also said Louisville’s treated water remained under federal limits.
But the regulatory landscape is shifting. Following the Trump administration’s return to the White House, new EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced he would maintain limits on PFOA and PFOS but “drop the restrictions on the other four types, including GenX,” NPR reported.
Environmental advocates called the notion of “safe levels” misleading.
“Environmental regulatory permitting is a license to pollute,” said Nick Hart, water policy director for the Kentucky Waterways Alliance to NPR. “You’re permitting someone to put something into the atmosphere, into water, into soil that would not be there otherwise. And so when we talk about the safe levels … stop using the word ‘safe,’ right? This is the maximum allowable limit.”
After a deadly UPS crash, oil contamination spreads through south Louisville creeks
On Nov. 4 a UPS cargo plane crashed after takeoff, killing 14 people and spewed both jet fuel and petroleum waste into neighboring rivers.
Louisville MSD warned in a statement that the potential contamination primarily affects “Pond Creek, Northern Ditch and Southern Ditch.”
At a press conference, MSD executive director Tony Parrott said, “We ask folks to avoid touching, swimming, fishing or kayaking or interacting in those waterways in any fashion, and keep your pets away from the water as well.”
“In some places where the crash occurred, oil was two, three or more feet deep at the time,” said Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg.
The mayor also credited MSD, adding, “They have helped stop 30,000 gallons of oil from going into our groundwater.”
The EPA reported that crews have “recovered more than 286,000 gallons of oil-water mix” and that contamination initially stretched across “about a 4.5-mile stretch.”
Still, officials stressed that the city’s tap water remains unaffected unless Louisville Water Company has contacted customers directly.
Whether it’s microbes drifting through clouds, forever chemicals washing down the Ohio, or oil working its way through local drainage basins, Louisville is contending with threats that emerge from every direction.
Goodmann put it bluntly when speaking to NPR about PFAS risks: “So what we do is manage risk, and we start that at the river. It sounds weird, but source water protection – keeping the stuff out of the river – is a big deal.”
This article appears in Nov. 1-30, 2025.