As the sun set Wednesday evening, a small group gathered across the street from the Saint-Gobain manufacturing plant in Merrimack, holding signs.
“In Merrimack, it’s people over profit,” said the one held by Rep. Wendy Thomas. In smaller font, “See ya!”
The French manufacturing company has been at the center of concerns over contamination from PFAS – a group of harmful man-made chemicals – for years. They announced the closure of their Merrimack plant Wednesday morning, citing a larger restructuring effort.
But the advocates, lawmakers, and local residents gathered had a different idea of what shut down the facility.
“We are the mouse that roared,” Thomas said. “We made a difference.”
For those gathered, the announcement came after years of work to bring to light the science behind PFAS chemicals and the concerns of local residents.
Laurene Allen, who founded Merrimack Citizens for Clean Water and co-founded the National PFAS Contamination Coalition, said she’d filled up her Google Drive and her G-mail memory with pages of reports on the chemicals.
“I have volumes,” she said. “I have a book for every year with notes of every meeting, every call.”
For Thomas, who ran for office because of contamination concerns and has been working to bring attention to the issue since water pollution was discovered in 2016, the years since have been spent watching neighbors get sick and die, along with animals in the area.
She has breast cancer, which she attributes to her exposure to PFAS. She doesn’t have family history that would indicate risk, and genetic testing has come back negative, but she says blood testing shows she has 12 PFAS chemicals in her blood over toxic limits. Environmental toxins are listed as a reason for her cancer in her medical records, she said.
“I'm sick. My husband is sick. My kids have illness,” she said. “ It might be too late for us. But with them bugging out of this town, it means that our kids’ kids have a future in this town.”
Thomas said she’s planning to call a meeting this weekend for lawmakers working on environmental toxins to brainstorm legislation that could ensure Saint-Gobain is responsible for remediating the contamination.
“It permeates all aspects of living in this town,” she said. “I don't think there's ever going to be economic justice. I don't even know what that looks like. But if I had a wish list, I would say: medical monitoring, health issues being taken care of, clean water, stopping exposure by air and general clean up.”
The company has been providing bottled water and working to provide permanent alternative water solutions for properties through a variety of agreements with the state of New Hampshire. Most recently, Saint- Gobain agreed to provide alternate water to more than 1,100 properties in the area around its Merrimack facility. But advocates have said the boundaries set on the company’s responsibility for pollution – laid out in a 2018 consent decree – leave other households that have PFAS contamination out.
In the statement announcing the facility’s closure, Saint-Gobain said they would continue working with state regulators on ongoing investigation and remediation.
On the issue of medical monitoring, the New Hampshire Supreme Court decided in March that people exposed to toxins in the state cannot try to recover the costs of medical testing if they’re not currently sick.
Other states, like Vermont, have taken a different approach. In Bennington, where Saint-Gobain had a facility until 2002, residents exposed to PFAS in the area are eligible for compensation for medical monitoring through a class action lawsuit.
Rep. Nancy Murphy, another Merrimack legislator who ran for office to address the PFAS contamination in her town, stood next to Thomas, waving at cars as they passed. Murphy and Thomas pointed out their similarities: they each have six children, their families have multiple people with health challenges, and they both live near Saint-Gobain.
“The fact that the polluter is going to shut down this facility is huge,” she said. “[It] doesn't stop the harm. Doesn't fix the harm. But we know at least there's going to be an end to the PFAS coming out of those stacks.”
Merrimack has still been left to pay for much of the remediation on its own, Murphy said. In 2019, the townvoted to spend more than $14 million to treat four public water wells. Saint-Gobain had already agreed to install filtration on two separate wells in town.
Murphy said the announcement of the plant’s closure was a relief, though not the end of her work.
“We’ve got miles to go before we’re going to be finished,” she said. “But we can take a breath. It’s been seven years just to get a breath.”
