Hoosick Falls polluters should be held accountable

As a licensed public health nurse skilled in the assessment and care of environmental illnesses, I am outraged at what is happening to our drinking water.

Hoosick Falls is just one in an ever-growing list of municipalities with contaminated water supplies. In no uncertain terms, it’s an assault on public health by a chemical industry indifferent to the effects of their products.

New York state officials recently pressed federal authorities at the Environmental Protection Agency to designate Hoosick Falls a Superfund site. Now, for the first time, the chemical culprit – perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) – has been designated a “hazardous substance,” a critical step in addressing this pollutant’s dire consequences.

This chemical is found in everything from household cleaning products to fast food wrappers, and is used to make Teflon, a water and oil repellant. But when PFOA makes its way into wells, aquifers and reservoirs that feed our drinking water, the result is a public health emergency. This chemical travels from factories in various ways, most directly through dumping in landfills or storm drains adjacent to water supplies or through smokestack emissions that are part of the manufacturing process.

PFOA has been found in water supplies in 29 states. It is linked to a number of illnesses, according to the state Department of Health, including testicular and kidney cancer, thyroid disease and birth defects in infants.

This is part of a pattern in which companies pull out of upstate neighborhoods leaving nothing but harm behind. They take jobs, revenue and infrastructure with them, and leave environmental problems in their wake.

Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, part of a Paris-based global conglomerate, bought the plastics factory in Hoosick Falls in 1999. It conducted tests in the summer of 2015 and reported a PFOA level of 18,000 parts per trillion in groundwater under its plant – more than 50 times the acceptable level – 500 yards from the village’s main water wells.

A handful of companies were makers of PFOA, chief among them the chemical giant, DuPont. These companies racked up very large profits from PFOA production, while blanketing communities with this dangerous chemical.

DuPont entered into a consent agreement with the EPA in 2005, which referenced “the movement of PFOA from pregnant women to their babies (and) the contamination of drinking water supplies.” Still, the effects of this chemical in water supplies will endure for many years.

For now, Saint-Gobain is providing free bottled water to village residents and has pledged to install a $2 million carbon filtration system. The company should know that these efforts are just a start.

My colleagues and I in the health care field see the damage and pain caused by pollution on a daily basis. We join with the many sickened and those living in fear in calling for companies to be held responsible for the release of PFOA into water supplies.

Those companies must be held liable for damages and for cleanup under the law. New Yorkers deserve nothing less.

Wendy Czajak, RN, BSN, PHN is a member of the New York State Nurses Association and a public health nurse working for the Onondaga Health Department. She chairs NYSNA’s Local Bargaining Unit in the Onondaga Health Department.