Tainted-Water Worries Spread to Vermont Village
For
others, it was an eyesore and a nuisance, its smokestacks choking their
homes with an acrid smell that seemed to cause headaches, sore throats
and nosebleeds. But since the plant shut down more than a dozen years
ago, few had given a thought to its environmental legacy.
In
recent weeks, however, several private wells near the ChemFab plant
have tested positive for an industrial chemical that has been linked to
cancer, thyroid disease and serious complications during pregnancy,
making North Bennington — better known for its bed-and-breakfasts and
Bennington College — the latest in a growing list of Northeastern
communities unsettled by a contaminated-water scare.
It started across the New York border in the village of Hoosick Falls, where the discovery of the chemical,
perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, in the public drinking water has
prompted residents to rely on bottled water amid charges that the state
took far too long to respond. It was found in public wells in
Petersburgh, N.Y., the site of a plastics factory south of Hoosick
Falls.
And
last week, as environmental officials in Vermont and New York mounted
statewide searches for other potentially contaminated areas, officials
in Merrimack, N.H., home to yet another chemical plant, announced that
the chemical had cropped up there, too.
“From
an environmental perspective, we kind of fell asleep at the wheel when
it came to those components,” said Kiah Morris, the Vermont state
representative whose legislative district includes Bennington. “There’s
things we didn’t know, and there’s things we hoped we wouldn’t find
out.”
The
number of people found to be drinking water tainted by PFOA is almost
certain to grow. PFOA was once used to manufacture a legion of modern
conveniences including nonstick pans, microwaveable popcorn wrappers and
Gore-Tex boots — practically anything that is nonstick, stain-resistant
or water-repellent — but its health effects and the way it spreads are
not well understood. But even as the chemical continues to contaminate
water across the country, scientists say, government agencies at all
levels, from local health departments to the federal Environmental
Protection Agency, have yet to grapple with the full extent of the
problem, or with what it will take to clean it up.
“I
think when people look,” said Arlene Blum, the executive director of
the Green Science Policy Institute, “they’re going to find it.”
The State of Vermont is now sampling 185 private wells in North Bennington, all of which fall within a 1.5-mile radius
of the ChemFab plant, which closed in 2002. Bottled water has been
distributed. Carbon-filtration systems, an imperfect and temporary fix,
have been installed on some wells.
“Every
time I think about it, I just feel like crying,” said Virginia Barber,
64, who since 1977 has lived in a house no bigger than a trailer at the
end of Scarey Lane, overlooking the factory. Hers was one of the first
few wells in the village to test positive for PFOA.
Ms.
Barber, her husband and their two dogs are drinking bottled water; she
is unsure whether she should bathe the dogs in it, too. She keeps her
showers short. She does not know whether to rinse pasta in the well
water. She keeps reminding herself that she cannot use the ice from the
automatic ice-maker.
Her
husband, David Barber, 67, worked at the plant for 21 years, coating
fabrics in the Teflon material. He recalled seeing small specks of the
material get stuck on the ends of co-workers’ cigarettes and turn to ash
as the smokers inhaled that, too. Within a couple of hours, they would
get chills and sweats, as if they were coming down with the flu.
“We
were kind of young and foolish,” Mr. Barber said. “We never really
talked about it; we never really thought too much about it. It paid
good, and they treated us fairly well.”
An
analysis earlier this month by the Environmental Working Group, a
nonprofit organization that has urged the E.P.A. to lower the level at
which it says water with PFOA is safe to drink, found
that the chemical had been detected in 103 water systems, serving
nearly seven million people in 27 states. (That does not include smaller
water systems like those of Hoosick Falls or Petersburgh, which were
not covered under the agency’s testing program.)
The
E.P.A. does not have a formal regulatory standard for the chemical,
relying instead on a provisional health advisory level for drinking
water, which it has announced it will update this spring. Some states
lack even that.
Trying
to beat back criticism that New York State’s response in Hoosick Falls
was, at best, blinkered — the state repeatedly said its water was safe
last year before declaring it a Superfund
site in January — New York officials have suggested that the fault lay
with the absence of strong guidelines from the federal agency. Gov.
Andrew M. Cuomo again called on the E.P.A. to release a long-term
advisory level for the chemical on Sunday, when he visited Hoosick Falls for the first time after its water was deemed unsafe.
“We’re going to continue to find situations like this all throughout the state, all throughout the country,” he said.
In
Vermont, the Health Department did not issue a health advisory level
for the chemical — at 20 parts per trillion, it is well below that of
the federal guideline set for Hoosick Falls, which is 100 — until state
environmental officials began testing wells in North Bennington last
month. They, in turn, had become aware of the possibility of
contamination there only after one resident, alarmed by the news from
Hoosick Falls, contacted local elected officials.
Tests
have shown that the public water supplies of both Bennington and North
Bennington, which serve a vast majority of residents, are free of PFOA.
“We
didn’t really know about it, we weren’t testing for it, but now we know
about it, we’re testing for it, we’re starting to look at where else it
may be,” said Chuck Schwer, the state environmental department’s
director of waste management and prevention, who has begun identifying
other industrial sites across the state that may need testing. “We’re
still in the very early stages, but now that we know, it’s like, we
can’t have another North Bennington situation catch us off guard.”
There
were some here who were concerned that the ChemFab plant was not
following regulations, like Annette Griffith, 51, who worked there for
five years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ms. Griffith said she
brought her concerns about smoke and workers’ health problems to
managers several times, only to be ignored.
Now
she wonders whether she should have been even more outspoken. She was
eight months pregnant when she left ChemFab, and her son was born with
learning disabilities.
“There’s no way they didn’t know,” Ms. Griffith said.
A
spokeswoman for Saint-Gobain, the company that owns the plants in
Hoosick Falls and Merrimack, and took over the ChemFab plant in 2000,
said she could not comment on “what happened before our tenure.” The
spokeswoman, Dina Silver Pokedoff, said Saint-Gobain had offered to pay
for bottled water and filtration systems for those affected.
When
Andy Beckerman, 70, and Carol Poppe, 65, moved into their home near the
ChemFab plant about 18 years ago, they noticed a nauseating odor
seeping in at all hours, as if something sugary had burned in the oven.
Their next-door neighbor, Sandy Sumner, 63, and his wife often woke up
with sore throats, migraines and nosebleeds.
“Here
we are, organic everything, and now we’re blasted with PFOA,” said Ms.
Poppe, laughing ruefully at the thought of the organic soil they had
brought in for their vegetable patch.
Many
residents also worry about the values of their houses, which are likely
to plummet with the mere mention of water contamination. “We’re middle
class; we don’t have a ton of change,” Mr. Sumner said. He said he and
his wife were planning to use the proceeds from the house to retire.
“But now,” he said, “we’re going to have to stay here until we can’t
stay here anymore.”
In
the nearby rural village of Petersburgh, where Taconic Plastics’s plant
on Coon Brook Road is by far the biggest employer, PFOA was found in
public wells that serve dozens of families after Taconic notified New
York officials that the plant’s water had tested positive for the
chemical.
Taconic had found high levels of PFOA
in its water a decade ago, officials said; it was apparently concerned
enough to provide filtration systems and bottled water to homes by the
plant. But though it informed the state in 2005, the discovery did not
raise alarms at the state level until recently because PFOA was, and
remains, an unregulated contaminant, state officials said.
Rory
Lynch, whose private well in Petersburgh is being tested, said she had
thought about leaving the home that has been hers since 1976. One
option, she said, was to move near her son in Colorado. Then came a
caveat.
“I don’t know if they have PFOA, too,” she said.
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