It took me a moment before I realized what she meant.

*

In our town, Labor Day is marked by the placement of American flags all around the town, a patriotic gesture provided by the local Rotary Club. It’s a nice nod to all the workers out there — the people who stock our grocery shelves, the workers who pave our streets, the teachers who guide our children, the doctors and nurses who tend to our health. All those working people who make the American engine run.

It’s been over a decade now since I left my career as an environmental scientist. It almost hurts to write that down. I remember feeling panicked when I hit the 5-year mark — like I had fallen from the train and would never find my way back in. You can infer from that how I’ve been feeling about it lately.

Sure, I’m a writer now, and sometimes I even earn a little money. But most of the work I do — writing, volunteering, caregiving — is work exchanged in the gift economy, which is not to say that it’s unimportant or unfulfilling work, but rather un-accounted, or at least un-celebrated.

So I’ve been missing my old career. I miss the science, the urgency. I miss the intellectual and political stimulation. I miss the people I used to serve.

Sometimes, when I’m away from my children and allow my mind to wander the pastures of what might-have-been, I question the decision I made years ago to leave my career and stay at home to raise them. I had tried my hand at being a working mother, but found it too burdensome in the context of my husband’s demanding cardiology career. The ultra-marathon days, the call. That mother-fucking pager. I didn’t want to hire it out, so instead I gave my employer notice.

When I told some of the people whose wells I’d been monitoring for the state that I was leaving my job, they asked, “Who will make sure our water is safe?”

I told them that someone else would fill that role. But I couldn’t tell them that because our regulations reflect our cultural value of profit over health, that even if someone is doing the work of monitoring their wells, things can (and sometimes do) slip through the cracks.

*

I miss my former work enough that I’ve been following the environmental stories of my newly adopted state. For the past year or so, I’ve been obsessing about perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in drinking water wells in the southwestern corner of Vermont, caused by the former activities of Teflon-related industry. I have written about this before.

I think a lot about the people impacted by this issue: the families now struggling in the face of an uncertain future, the parents laboring to cook their family meals with bottled water. These are exactly the kind of people I used to serve.

Back in the late 19th Century, when manufacturing laborers were gathering strength to organize and fight for worker protections against unsafe working conditions —and back when the federal Labor Day holiday was first officially sanctioned— this area of Vermont was a hub of industrial activity. The Walloomsac and Hoosic Rivers provided ample hydropower to run dozens of factories and textile mills, several of which were known to have used child labor.

In 1910, photographer and sociologist Lewis Hine documented these practices in the factories of Bennington and Pownal, Vermont:

Now, over a century later, children of the same ages as those who worked in the mills are laboring to metabolize PFOA from their bodies. Mothers have unknowingly nourished their babies with the chemicals from their spouse’s or neighbor’s former employer.

*

Happy Labor Day, she said. As in, Happy Anniversary of the day you delivered this child safely into the world. Who will he or she become? What will he or she do for a living?

*

What little we do know about the health impacts of unregulated chemicals like PFOA we owe completely to the industrial workers of the past — men and women who have been acutely and chronically exposed to toxins over the duration of their careers. Occupational exposures provide the very foundation of our epidemiological knowledge of toxic substances in the marketplace, from coal miners to the Radium Girls to the more recent cases of DuPont workers injured from the manufacturing of Teflon.

Consider the story of Sue Bailey, a former DuPont worker at the Washington Works plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia — who was repeatedly exposed to PFOA while pregnant and then delivered a baby boy with severe facial deformities.

Upon her return to work, Sue discovered a company memo in the women’s locker room, which cited a study that had been conducted by 3M (the company that supplied PFOA to DuPont for the manufacturing of its Teflon product), detailing the occurrence of eye deformities in the offspring of lab rats who were fed PFOA during gestation.

Sue confronted the Washington Works facility’s medical doctor and asked if her exposure to PFOA had caused her son’s condition. The doctor denied any causation, but within a year, the company prohibited any women of child-bearing age to work around PFOA, per the expert opinion of DuPont’s chief medical director.

Sue continued to work for DuPont until her son, Bucky, was five years old. He would undergo dozens of surgeries to address his medical problems, and Sue needed the income to cover the expense. She didn’t file a lawsuit against DuPont at the time, because she couldn’t find an attorney who was willing to take her case. Everyone was afraid to confront one of the region’s most important employers.

*

According to the United States Department of Labor, Labor Day “…is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.”

I interpret that concept broadly, the well-being of our country.

*

To this day, DuPont denies any connection between Sue Bailey’s prenatal PFOA exposure and her son’s facial abnormalities. And just like the United States Radium Company did with the Radium Girls, DuPont has spent decades and millions of dollars downplaying the toxicity of the key ingredient in its market centerpiece.

It should come as no surprise then, that Michael Dourson —founder of the consulting firm that DuPont hired to evaluate the toxicity of PFOA, and a DuPont-paid expert witness in the first of 3,500 lawsuits brought against the company for PFOA-related injury — has been nominated by Donald Trump to head the Environmental Protection Agency’s chemical safety office.

Indeed the very same division charged with determining federal drinking water standards for PFOA and other emerging contaminants. The standards that are supposed to protect us and our children, the workers of the future generation.

*

 Happy Labor Day, she said. It took me a moment to realize what she meant.

*

Ready yourselves, fellow mothers. The work has just begun.

Photo & Art credits:

Cover Image: The New Yorker, cover by Art Spiegelman, May 11, 1998

Vermont Child Laborers: Lewis Hine, National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress

Photo of Newborn Bucky Bailey: Bailey Family, from Delaware Online, “C8 Suspected in Birth Defects: One Woman’s Story”

Photo of Masked Bucky Bailey: Bailey Family, from Delaware Online, “C8 Suspected in Birth Defects: One Woman’s Story”

Photo of Bucky Bailey & News Article: Maddie McGarvey for The Intercept/Investigative Fund

The post Labor Day appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

But no one’s had it as bad as the 1,200 residents of the West Calumet Housing Project in East Chicago, Indiana — whose homes are actually located within the boundaries of the USS Lead Superfund site — and who have been told to relocate their households on short notice, due to critically unsafe levels of lead in neighborhood soil.

It’s been reported that two-thirds of those residents are children. Many of them are now lead-poisoned children. Nearly all of them have brown skin. I scroll through article after article, photos of black kids sitting on front steps, next to big EPA yard signs warning, “DO NOT play in the dirt or around the mulch.” With an illustration of a brightly-colored ball on fresh green grass, just to make the message clear.

What is it, exactly, that I want to say about all this?

My first impulse, just an echo of what has already been said: This never should have happened. Of course it shouldn’t have happened. We (they) should have known better.

Except that the West Calumet neighborhood was developed in the 1960s and 1970s, when the EPA was in its infancy, and before Superfund even existed. And I can tell you from personal experience in environmental remediation that stupidity was a pervasive problem in historic land use decisions. (Who builds a residential neighborhood on a former lead smelting site? The same type of planners who build a school and residential neighborhood over a filled, toxic canal that has been purchased for a dollar.)

But there’s more to this case than just the 20-20 hindsight of spackling over industrial blight. What I’m trying to say, is that when I read about 29 children with blood lead concentrations significantly over the CDC’s level of concern, all because they are living and playing in yards with lead levels containing as much as 227 times the lead limit allowed by the EPA, and then I think about how long this hazard has resided in the soils of this community, and how long that soil has been kicked up into dust by Goodwill-purchased sneakers, and tracked into hallways and wiped onto hand-me-down shirts tossed onto the backs of kitchen chairs before those children rifle through the pantry for something good to eat — when I think about what has happened here, and how long it’s really been happening, it triggers the same visceral anger I felt when I first started learning about PFOA.

Here’s why: Because both public health catastrophes reveal the same dysfunctional premise upon which our environmental health practices seem to rely (especially in low-income areas). Which is to say: Action need not be taken until harm has already been caused.

The EPA is quick to mention that action has, in fact, been taken. And yes, approximately 90 of 1,200 properties in the neighborhood were sampled during a three-year investigation started in 2003. Roughly half of the sampled properties contained lead-contaminated soil above the EPA’s standards, and 15 of those were contaminated enough to require time-critical removal action by the agency in 2008. These data were used to justify the neighborhood’s designation as a Superfund site in 2009, and an additional time-critical removal action was taken in 2011 for 16 additional properties. So yes, action was taken for some properties… sporadically, over a long period of time. My oldest daughter was born in 2003. A lot of childhood development happens during a 12-year period.

So one wonders what action was taken for those whose properties weren’t tested, or whose soil was tested but didn’t meet the threshold for emergency removal. A flimsy pamphlet on how to reduce your lead exposure? A recommendation that you wash your children’s hands and toys when they come inside from play? And one wonders how much action was taken to educate new residents of the neighborhood and housing project over that 10+ year period. A public notice for a public meeting?

Widespread testing to determine which soils needed removal was not initiated until 2014. In response to the shock and outrage recently expressed by residents of the West Calumet Housing Project over the sudden urgency of lead contamination in their neighborhood, Robert Kaplan, acting administrator for the EPA’s Great Lakes Region, told The New York Times that EPA “had in fact warned West Calumet residents for at least a decade to avoid the soil with public notices and community meetings.” Clearly a statement in the agency’s defense, but one which also implies that not only should residents have known about the lead, but that their ignorance about the matter may have played a role in their family’s health effects.

I can think of no greater insult beyond the trespassing of an industrial contaminant across the boundaries of my own cells and those of my children, than the suggestion that its preventable harm was solely my responsibility.

Kaplan’s remarks stink of a patriarchal you-should-have-known-better mentality, a scorn typically reserved for a scantily-clad sexual assault victim found in her pitiful shredded clothes.  What did you expect, living in the projects? You knew that there was lead.

Let us be clear. They were warned for at least a decade to avoid the soil. Not “We regret that it has taken this long to take full action on this issue.” Or simply, “We’re sorry, we didn’t know it was this bad. We are working on fixing the problem.” The sad irony of Kaplan’s subtle judgment is this: Even if West Calumet residents had been scientifically knowledgable enough to deduce the hazards in which they lived, or civically savvy enough to be fully engaged in the Superfund public process, what could they have done? Where would they have gone? The state and federal government certainly wouldn’t have footed any bills on the possibility that they might be harmed. They would have certainly wanted some proof.

Proof which requires routine blood lead testing and consistent funding of such programs — an issue in Indiana, I suspect, considering its less-than-stellar commitment to public health funding. It’s quite the lesson in environmental injustice, on the interconnectedness of environmental degradation, public health, race, politics, and urban American culture. An ugly, despicable lesson, but one that must be dragged into the light.

Photo credit: nbcnews.com

Works consulted: Final Feasibility Study Report, U.S. Smelter and Lead Refinery (USS Lead) Superfund Site

The post Bloodletting/Blood-lead-ing appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

Blood testing results ranged from 0.3 micrograms/liter (or ppb, parts per billion) to 1,125.6 micrograms/liter or ppb, and the geometric mean of PFOA in blood among the sampled residents was 10 ppb — five times higher than the geometric mean of PFOA believed to be present in the blood of most Americans (which is 2.1 ppb, a figure likely resulting from our ubiquitous exposure to Teflon chemicals that were present in everyday consumer products: nonstick coated cookware, stain-resistant carpets and upholstery, water-resistant clothing, paper and cardboard food packaging, and fire-fighting foam). The health advisory went on to list the known health effects reported with exposure to PFOA, and requested of my husband: “If you have a patient that you think is experiencing health effects due to PFOA exposure, please call us at 1-800-439-8550.”

In general, the higher the PFOA concentrations in drinking water, the higher the PFOA concentration in blood. Some studies have even shown that PFOA levels in blood serum can be up to 100 times higher than the levels found in drinking water — meaning that if someone has 2,000 ppt (parts per trillion) in their drinking water, the anticipated level of PFOA in their blood might be as high as 200,000 ppt (or 200 ppb), an order of magnitude difference.

Why? Because PFOA is like, well, Teflon… resistant, persistent, hard-to-break-down. The half-life of PFOA is between 2-4 years, which means it takes up residence in the body and accumulates faster than the body can expel it — doing what exactly, we’re still not sure, except perhaps, as suggested by the limited epidemiological evidence compiled so far, wreaking havoc on the thyroid, the kidneys, the intestines, the liver. In other words, a baby born with PFOA in its blood has essentially become a chemical harbor until it grows up to be a toddler, or even a preschooler, before PFOA can be completely evicted from its system. Assuming, of course, that the exposure has been removed.

When my husband was first studying to become a physician, he was required to take a class on the history of medicine. I can remember him showing me a graph of total fatalities mapped over time, and pointing to a distinct drop in the curve — a place where something had caused some miraculous reduction in deaths from infectious disease. What was it? Antibiotics? Vaccines? Nope. It was sanitation. Removal of waste from drinking water resources. According to an article on longevity published in Slate.com, “Clean water may be the biggest lifesaver in history. Some historians attribute one-half of the overall reduction in mortality, two-thirds of the reduction in child mortality, and three-fourths of the reduction in infant mortality to clean water.” The discovery of penicillin appeared to yield but a relative blip on the graph my husband showed me, as did the proliferation of vaccines (not to diminish the importance of either to the improvement of public health), but nothing impacted public health with such magnitude as the removal of waste from water. “The garbage man does more to save lives than I ever will,” my husband said.

In Parkersburg, West Virginia, a place considered by many to be ground zero for PFOA-related contamination and injury, DuPont dumped thousands of tons of PFOA into the Ohio River, unlined ponds and beyond, causing widespread contamination of surface and drinking water resources in Parkersburg and surrounding communities. In Hoosick Falls, New York, mishandling of PFOA at the Saint-Gobain plastics facility around the corner from the water supply well on Water Works Road has resulted in contamination of the community water supply. Investigation of the former ChemFab facility will do doubt yield similar findings about disposal of PFOA materials, and during my latest trip to Pownal, Vermont, I was shocked to see that the proximity of the former Mack Molding plastics site to one of the community’s water supply wells was a mere 1,000 feet.

Contamination of drinking water from industrial waste is not a new issue, but these latest developments with PFOA raise the issue yet again, that in this day of modern medicine and sophisticated cancer treatment technologies, we continue to ignore the basic, most fundamental premise of medicine: that the most significant positive impact on human health is the separation of waste from water.

Of course, the implementation of Superfund laws and clean-up programs, and the cradle-to-grave hazardous waste regulations provide some measure of protection, but the exemptions are plenty and the funding is not. Too many waste disposal sites are left festering due to insufficient funds and political commitment for investigation and remediation, and too many water supplies remain in harm’s way.  I keep wondering, after each new discovery of contaminated drinking water wells, of impacted populations whose ailments will likely be traced back to what they drank — I keep wondering if we are ever going to wake up to this fundamental premise of public health.

The post Public Health Advisory: On Water and Waste appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

The air smells green here in this valley, like the mountains on either side. Green, like the algae-coated edges of a river walk, the smell of freshly cut clover. Like the heavy limbs reaching over railroad tracks, like the chain-linked fence choked with vine.

At the entrance, by the retention pond, two boys who look to be about my oldest daughter’s age are circling each other on their bikes. What is it with kids and abandoned sites? My presence seems to have thrown them — my Subaru, the camera around my neck— perhaps making them pause, wonder if maybe they shouldn’t be here after all. I’m wondering the same thing myself, my American ethic regarding private property so ingrained that it almost eclipses my right-to-know.

One of the boys raises his hand in a reluctant wave, testing me. I wave back, which somehow gives them permission to proceed. They ride by quickly, trespassing out of curiosity, perhaps, or just to get to the other side. I like to think that my reasons are a bit more principled than that.

Muscle memory leads me to the usual suspects: the loading dock, and what I assume to be part of the main production floor. It’s only after I’ve peeked in windows that I notice the sign warning me that video surveillance is in use — a witness to my witnessing.

The site investigation has already begun: I find a monitoring well, and the asphalt is freshly crumbled from Geoprobe borings recently completed around the building. I’m careful not to go too far, not to snoop too much, but I have a pretty good hunch about what they’ll find. The contaminated supply well, which serves roughly 450 people in Pownal’s Fire District #2, is close by. Too close, I think — only 1,000 feet away.

One thousand feet. What is this distance, really? Not quite the length of three football fields. A solid golf drive by a pro. One thousand feet is roughly the length of a soapbox derby race, something else whose outcome appears to depend upon gravity and luck.

If you Google “1,000 feet” you’ll find links to the 1,000-foot rule, the geography of punishment for registered sex offenders. In many communities, one thousand feet is the minimum distance a molester must live from a school, park, or day care center — a policy the merits of which I certainly don’t intend to debate here. But one wonders… is distance is the only factor? Is distance is the only thing to fix?

Here in Pownal, one thousand feet is the distance between a Teflon site and a contaminated well. One thousand feet is all it took for 450 people to be exposed. A lot can happen in time and space.

Map of Pownal Fire District #2. Supply well is located in northwest quadrant, roughly 1,000 feet from the former Warren Wire Manufacturing facility located on the corner of Lincoln Street and Route 346. The facility’s retention pond is indicated on the map. Source: WCAX.com

The post Trespassing: Witnessing appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

In most of those cases, when I had inherited the files and reviewed the history of the site, I reserved a sliver of compassion, an acknowledgement that for many of these sites, the atrocities I was seeing were a result of the history — of regular people mishandling materials for which the long-term environmental consequences were not yet known. They were unintended outcomes, began as honest industrial mistakes, where the long-term damage may have been mostly unforeseen.

“There was a different standard of care back then,” I remember telling some of the people whose drinking water wells I sampled. They’d pause and think, and eventually convey their understanding by sharing some anecdote about how when they were kids, they used to get x-rays of their feet at the department store, to make sure their back-to-school shoes really fit. Or how they’d played with mercury from a broken thermometer in science class, rolling the liquid ball around in their palms. We’d shake our heads and sigh about all the things we used to do that are no longer considered safe, at all the things we didn’t know.

In environmental law, there has always been an element of forgiveness for these matters, an acknowledgment of the things previously legal and unknown. Compliance with new rules to address newly discovered hazards borne from old industrial practices is usually dosed over time, the regulated community enjoying the benefit of things “grandfathered,” of phased regulation, of clemency for past mistakes. But rule-making is still a slow, contentious process, and there is always a lot of fighting along the way.

Last week, finally, the EPA issued drinking water health advisories for PFOA and PFOS at 70 parts per trillion (ppt) — this number based upon peer-reviewed scientific studies of the compounds’ toxicologic properties. The decision was no doubt triggered by the discovery of PFOA in several public drinking water systems, perhaps most notably in the communities of Hoosick Falls, NY, Merrimack, NH, and North Bennington, VT.

Indeed, this is movement in a positive direction, but what’s upsetting to me is the timing of it all. Over 10 years ago, EPA settled its PFOA case against DuPont, assessing a record $10.25 million in penalties for violations of the Toxic Substances Control Act and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. According to the EPA’s press release, “The violations resolved in this settlement consist of multiple failures to report information to EPA about substantial risk of injury to human health or the environment that DuPont obtained about PFOA from as early as 1981 and as recently as 2004.” In other words, they knew. They knew a lot for a long time, but pretended not to know.

And now we’re halfway through 2016. DuPont knew about the health hazards of exposure to PFOA since at least 1981, perhaps even earlier, and more than a decade has passed since the EPA’s administrative response to that crime.  Meanwhile, companies like Saint-Gobain continued to manufacture Teflon products with PFOA, and the people of Hoosick Falls, of Merrimack, of North Bennington filled their baby bottles and bathtubs, water pitchers and coffee mugs with PFOA-tainted water. And nobody knew a thing.

Except that’s not exactly true, because the EPA knew something, and they should have known enough to look. Or at least required others to look.

Here’s the thing we all remember about environmental atrocities, about places like Love Canal: It wasn’t just that the drums were buried and covered up, and that the houses and school were built on top — the thing we remember most, the most damning detail of all was that the land was sold by Hooker Chemical to the Niagara Falls School Board for $1, with a liability limitation clause.

The crime was in the knowing. The crime was in the knowing and doing nothing. The crime was in the suppressing of the knowing as an excuse for doing nothing.

Photo credit: Times Union

The post On Knowing and Not Knowing appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

The day is bright, cold spring. Wind gusts around the corners, flapping and twisting municipal door hangers into indecision. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth they dance. I lean in for a closer look:

Village of Hoosick Falls Water Users 

WATER UPDATE

Information about Temporary Filtration and Flushing: 2/25/16

It’s late March now, months after the news about contamination of the village’s water system with perfuorooctanoic acid (PFOA) went public. The likely culprit, Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, a manufacturing facility that uses Teflon to make coated plastic film, tape, and insulated wiring — one of the few remaining companies that still employ people in this town.

This town, like so many other former mill towns in northern New England and upstate New York— a place of 19th and early 20th century prosperity, now faded into a shadow of its former self. You’ve been to a town like this, perhaps even lived in a town like this. Grass-filled, uneven sidewalks between old Victorian homes. The lovingly maintained, brick bungalow library sits around the corner from a house with a crumbling porch. Faded plastic toys accumulated in the yard. Buds emerge on the trees after a long and difficult winter. The sign in front of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church reads, Please pray for our town to get through this water crisis.

The Saint-Gobain facility peeks through the trees from the Little League fields on Waterworks Road, where parents, probably grateful for the work, may gather after their shifts to cheer on the batter poised over home plate. The fields are empty now, except for a father pitching balls to his son. He lifts his head and watches me pass by. I wonder if he’s the kind of dad who would lean against the chain-linked fence and brag about his tough Teflon kid.

This morning, before I left home, my children wanted to know where I was headed. “Hoosick Falls?” my daughter said, “Who’s sick? That’s funny.”  It is, until it isn’t.

Just like all the other towns that have lived through a water crisis, it was the amount of cancer that made people wonder. Michael Hickey, the Hoosick Falls resident whose inquiry set current events into motion, lost both his father and grandmother to kidney cancer. He worries about his son. The water in both of their homes contained concentrations of PFOA well above the initial 0.4 ppb threshold limit set forth by the EPA, and since that testing, the EPA has revised its recommended limit to 0.1 ppb. Meanwhile, public health officials in Vermont, in response to a similar water crisis in nearby North Bennington, have used the same toxicologic studies to justify a 0.02 ppb PFOA standard.

The sluggish, inconsistent response must sting, like a reported case of domestic abuse that won’t be believed. And this is a matter of violence — just ask any cancer survivor about what the body must endure. I can’t help but think: if this crisis had been an act of terror, if someone had knowingly added PFOA to a public water supply, it would have been considered an act of war.

Later, when I am standing in the foyer of the Hoosick Township Historical Society building, studying photos of the community’s fallen soldiers from the Second World War, I will remember that Teflon’s inaugural application was for the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb. I will remember that Teflon’s commercial utility was born from the science of intentional destruction, much like modern-day pesticides born from military nerve agents, and I will marvel at how intertwined the fingers of commerce and war have always been. I will mourn the dull, persistent echo of their intergenerational casualties.

But now, I wait outside the Armory on Church Street, where officials from the New York Departments of Health and Environmental Conservation stand behind tables with flyers containing information about how little we really know about the health effects of PFOA. A young woman walks by on the sidewalk, pushing a stroller with a little boy, maybe two or three years old. She doesn’t go inside. Is she worried about the water that is dwelling inside his cells? Is she worried about his future? Maybe they’ve already been inside to talk with the experts, given samples of their blood. Maybe she’s just looking ahead, soldiering on, accepting their new normal.

The building is beautiful inside — an old gymnasium with a mile-high ceiling and light brick walls, that appear to have been dressed up for a reception. I am impressed by the art, the optimism of this space. Brightly colored quilts line the front of the gym, and everywhere I turn are hand-painted owls with the slogan “Hoosick Rising” — a redevelopment-focused antonym to the downtrodden Hoosick Falls.

Across the room from the make-shift phlebotomy lab, where citizens may get their blood sampled for PFOA analysis, is a little wishing tree with positive messages from Hoosick Falls residents, about why they love their town. Here is where I find the soul of this place — neighbors expressing love and support for one another in the face of challenging times. You’ll never find a place with friendlier people, one postcard reads. Another card touts the value of the history of Hoosick Falls. The one that makes me pause: I ❤︎ HF because we have a great pool for kids to swim in. Love, Raegan.

When I meet the DEC officials, I tell them that years ago, I used to be an environmental regulator myself. They relax into a comradely stance. We exchange technical details on the contaminant of concern. Yes, PFOA appears to be very soluble in water.  No, they don’t yet know how quickly it’ll break through the activated carbon filters — they will be monitoring them frequently, and there’s a feasibility study being conducted to identify alternative sources of drinking water for the area. No, they don’t believe there are any break-down products, but they’ve heard that several different perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) can degrade into PFOA. They are just now learning about these chemicals, which industries use them, how they behave when they’re released. There are probably multiple sites — Teflon-related manufacturing was the industry du jour. The agency is doing the best it can with the resources that it has.

I can feel the tension against resignation to the absurdity of the situation, how difficult it will be to get their horse to catch up with this runaway cart. It’s really a failure of the Toxic Substances Control Act, we all agree. Teflon has been in commercial use since the 1940s, its toxicologic profile held in secret by DuPont from early as the 1960s, and even now, ten years past an historic $10.25 million settlement between the EPA and DuPont, concerning DuPont’s failure to report the risk of harm that PFOA presents to human health and the environment — even now, the EPA lacks sufficient data to confidently adopt appropriate exposure standards for this ubiquitous synthetic compound.

One DEC official shares with me that earlier in the week, he received a request from the Commissioner’s Office, probably for the purpose of briefing a politician in the wake of this water crisis: “They said, ‘Please identify any public water systems in New York that are at risk of becoming polluted by any regulated and/or unregulated contaminants.’” He looks at me, shaking his head. All of them.

The woman from the Department of Health informs me that about 2,500 of the town’s 3,500 residents have requested to have their blood tested for PFOA. I ask her if there is a certain threshold concentration of PFOA in blood, above which residents will be referred for more rigorous medical monitoring. “We aren’t yet sure what the long-term plan for bio-monitoring will be,” she admits. “I guess it depends on what we find.”

But she doesn’t know what they will find. No one does. They can only guess, based upon the epidemiological studies and exposure data they have gathered from previous PFOA contamination cases in Ohio, West Virginia, and New Jersey.  I leave the Armory a little shaken by the sense of bearing witness to another accidental experiment.

On my way out the door, I notice a poster for the Hoosick Has Heart community blood drive. Donate blood. Save a life. Monday, April 11, at the Hoosick Falls Community Alliance Church.  The bright cold and piercing wind send shivers down my spine. I hope they get their sample results before then.

The post A Walk in Hoosick Falls appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

I guess that’s what makes the recent drinking water catastrophes in Flint, Michigan, and Hoosick Falls, New York so upsetting — because technically, both of those systems appeared to be in compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act. Technically, water sampled from the City of Flint’s water treatment plant met drinking water standards for lead, even though that same water was corrosive enough to erode lead-bearing private and municipal infrastructure and produce (in some homes) tap water samples high enough in lead to be qualified as hazardous waste. Technically, the Village of Hoosick Falls Water Department appeared to have a flawless performance record, producing water of such quality that the Hoosick Falls Water Treatment Plant was once honored by the New York Rural Water Association as Rural Water Treatment Plant of the Year. In fact, Hoosick Falls’ water was named the best-tasting water in Rensselaer County in 2013, and did well enough in regional competitions to make it to the finals at the New York State Fair. And yet, until recently, water distributed from that perfectly compliant, award-winning plant contained alarming concentrations of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), exposing thousands of unsuspecting residents to a chemical whose toxic health effects are just beginning to be understood.

I’m neither a resident of Flint nor Hoosick Falls, but I can imagine that the betrayal cuts deep, the violation of trust like a swift punch to the gut. It’s as if you asked a trusted friend to babysit your children, but when you got home, you found a stranger with a history of violent criminal behavior watching them instead. How did this even happen? How long has this been going on? What does this mean for the future of my family’s health and well-being?

When water hurts, your understanding of the world gets turned upside-down. The very essence of your cells and those of your children have been violated, their walls trespassed against by chemicals that may or may not hold your bodies hostage, that may or may not, at some time in the coming years ahead, commit some type of unspeakable harm. The anxiety is both tangible and intangible, acute and everlasting. When water hurts, the harm is real — even if the physiologic manifestation of that harm is not diagnosed for many years.

As a former environmental regulator, I have had the unfortunate experience of informing someone that their water has become contaminated — that their private well intersected a petroleum or solvent plume and their water was no longer safe to drink. There is little to say to dull the blow, little that can be offered to calm the fears of what might happen later on. So we focused on the solution. Our course of action always included bottled water as a temporary fix, in-situ treatment systems and monitoring plans as an acceptable long-term solution, but the holy grail for solving a potable water problem in our line of work was to connect them to  public water. Public water was the life boat, the safety net, the thing that delivered you unscathed to the other side.  It was the solution to the problem, not the problem itself.

But it seems this is no longer the case. Or rather, perhaps it never was. The unsettling discovery from the past few months is that the systems designed to safeguard and monitor our public drinking water systems are un-protective, incomplete.  We are vulnerable to a national crisis of antiquated water infrastructure, and we are limited by the narrow scope of authority that our regulatory agencies have.

To that point: the most contaminated public well in the Village of Hoosick Falls is reportedly located a mere 500 yards from the Saint-Gobain facility — a facility that has handled PFOA in the manufacturing of Teflon products since at least the 1960s. Though a clear hazard to a public source of drinking water, plant operators were never required to report releases of PFOA to the EPA, because the chemical wasn’t regulated, and the Village was never required to look for it because it wasn’t on the list. Why? Under existing chemical policy, compounds are considered safe until proven otherwise, and the EPA is granted neither the time nor the resources to adequately study the toxicity of the 85,000 industrial chemicals currently in use. PFOA is just one of those compounds.

The municipal water systems of Flint and Hoosick Falls are not the first public drinking water systems to become contaminated in this country, nor will they be the last. But one would expect our public health and environmental agencies to at least be equipped with the authority to handle the emergencies that arise. As long as chemicals for which human health and environmental impacts are not yet known can be incorporated into consumer products and released into soil, air, and water — as long as these compounds can loiter in our drinking water resources, unmonitored and unaddressed, our current rules are not enough.

The post When Water Hurts appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

PFCs have been the subject of intense debate for many years, after research confirmed the persistence of long-chain PFCs both in the environment and in people’s bodies, potentially increasing the risk of cancer and other health issues.  As a result, and under pressure from regulatory agencies, DuPont removed one of these chemicals, perfluorooctanoic acid (or PFOA, also known as “C8”), from its Teflon product line, and has since replaced C8 with other chemicals.

Now the spotlight is on these replacement PFCs, known in the chemical industry as poly- or perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs).  At issue is whether manufacturers should be allowed to use these second-generation PFCs in consumer products, without knowing the full-scale environmental health effects of this “new crop.”  While the American Chemistry Council argues that the new generation of PFCs are safer alternatives to the chemicals they have replaced, many toxicologists anticipate negative effects from these alternative compounds, on the basis that they reside in the same family, and exhibit many of the same properties as the original toxic compounds.

The rush to replace one class of harmful substances with another “less harmful” alternative is nothing new to the American marketplace.  Exhibit A: the replacement of environmentally persistent organochloride pesticides (such as DDT, aldrin, and dieldrin) with a new class of pesticides called organophosphate chemicals.  Exhibit B: the replacement of tetra-ethyl lead in gasoline with methyl-tertiary-butyl-ether, or MTBE.  And most recently, the phasing out of bisphenol A (BPA), in favor of bisphenol S (BPS) in common plastic goods.

But the extent to which “less harmful” is known before unleashing substitute chemicals on the American public has been, and continues to be an unfocused concept.  Consider: years after their pervasive use on American food crops, organophosphate chemicals (which were derived from military nerve agents used in chemical warfare) — the supposed “safer” class of pesticides — are now being implicated in the increased incidence of neurodevelopmental conditions, as well as the increasing incidence of childhood brain cancers.

And MTBE — once hailed as the “environmentally friendly” gasoline additive used to reduce emissions of smog-producing air pollutants — turned out to be a rogue replacement as well, a compound so soluble and mobile in the subsurface that it quietly knocked out 70% of Santa Monica, California’s drinking water wells before its toxicologic properties were really even known (see the original “60 Minutes” feature on MTBE here.)   In fact, the health effects from exposure to MTBE are still being investigated, and though the EPA has identified the chemical as a possible human carcinogen, the agency has yet to establish a Maximum Contaminant Level for MTBE in drinking water.

In my own environmental remediation days, MTBE was known as a “runner” — a chemical that traveled so quickly in soil and water that its addition to gasoline pumps in the 1990s significantly lengthened the geographic footprint of gasoline plumes from leaky underground storage tanks.  Perhaps the most frustrating aspect was the predictability of the scenario we saw playing out in the field.  Anyone who understood the chemical properties of MTBE should have anticipated what could happen when you put a chemical like that into an underground storage tank located above a drinking water aquifer…

We have yet to understand the impacts of BPS, currently standing in for the BPA that recently leached from our baby bottles and plastic food containers, let alone the environmental health consequences of this new generation of PFCs.  But we can make some educated guesses.  Based upon our current modus operandi, we can be sure that we will find them in our environment, our food, and our bodies before we really know.

It’s all too easy to look at the presence of these chemicals in our environment, in ourselves, as some kind of cosmic event over which we had no control, like Pandora’s Box. But in so doing, we conveniently excuse ourselves from acknowledging the active role we are taking in our own self-destruction.  By blaming Pandora, we abstain from the responsibility we have as intelligent human beings to anticipate these outcomes based upon 1) documented history, and 2) scientifically possible outcomes.  We know damn well what can happen because we have already seen what can happen.  By turning a blind eye and allowing replacement chemicals to enter the market without sufficient study, all we are doing is continuing a legacy of non-consensual experimentation.  On ourselves, on future generations.

The post The Myth of Blaming Pandora appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.