PFAS

Families in Londonderry are still using bottled water. That could change soon, with new plans to expand public connections.

When we’ve been exposed to something that could harm us, what are we supposed to do — as regulators, as doctors, as company executives, or as people just trying to live our lives?

Former workers at Saint-Gobain’s New Hampshire plant share what they did — and didn’t — know about PFOA and its potential health effects. And how the chemical industry has worked to sow doubt to its own benefit.

We go back in time to Hoosick Falls, New York where a man looks for answers after his father dies of cancer following his retirement from the local Saint-Gobain plant. What he finds changes the course of this whole story: a remarkable kind of chemical once used to help make the Atom Bomb that manufacturers knew could be dangerous for decades.

A New Hampshire town finds out its water has been contaminated by a “forever chemical.” The source appears to be the nearby Saint-Gobain plant. Officials say the potential health effects are unclear, but most people can still drink the water. One resident doesn’t buy it and goes down a research rabbit hole. She soon learns all this has happened before.

Manchester’s wastewater treatment facility received a new permit from federal regulators that requires the facility to monitor for PFAS chemicals, but not to limit their amounts. The Conservation Law Foundation is appealing, arguing the EPA did not do enough to consider PFAS contamination and environmental justice.

A recent college graduate from the town that was once home to the Saint-Gobain plastics facility is working with the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services on an experimental trial in myco-remediation, or the use of fungi to clean up pollutants from a contaminated region — a relatively new area of study.

PFAS contamination, in these cases leftover from firefighting foam used by the military, can be a big public health issue. The timeline for cleanup projects to address that contamination is unclear, after a Department of Defense report that seemed to delay projects.

The company is proposing remediation options that include monitoring pollution and limiting the use of the site moving forward, instead of actively cleaning up the PFAS chemicals present at high levels. State regulators are pushing for different options.

In 2016, PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, were discovered in hundreds of wells in the area surrounding the company’s Merrimack facility and many more have been discovered in the years since.