The new Environmental Protection Agency declaration that PFAS chemicals are unsafe in drinking water at any level confirms that residents of Hoosick Falls who sounded the alarm about contamination were right — and officials who initially ignored them were terribly wrong.Â
The announcement, then, is a victory for people like Michael Hickey. Concerned about an unusual number of cancer cases in the Rensselaer County village, he began prodding state officials to investigate the water supply and demanded they act when dangerous levels of contamination were confirmed.
Without the attention Hoosick Falls received — and the outrage generated when former state Department of Health Commissioner Howard Zucker and other officials downplayed the danger — it’s unlikely the EPA would have gone against powerful corporate interests to declare per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances unsafe at any level.
The ramifications of the move, if it holds, could be momentous.
But it’s a Pyrrhic victory in Hoosick Falls, for sure, given that residents for years drank water polluted by PFOA, which is a PFAS variation. Their experience raises infuriating questions about why such potent chemicals, used in thousands of consumer products and still in use today, escaped regulation for so long. Why wasn’t more done to protect the public?
“It is vindicating, there’s no doubt about it,” Hickey told me of the EPA decision. “But we were kind of the guinea pigs to get it to that level.”
To be clear, the EPA is not saying that any amount of PFAS in drinking water should be illegal, as that standard is considered unenforceable. Instead, the federal agency is calling for a legal limit of no more than four parts per trillion.
That’s still a significant step. Consider that the proposed limit is less than half of what’s allowed now in New York, where the minimum allowable amount is 10 parts per trillion. And it’s way…
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