After a decade-long legal battle, DuPont has agreed to a $27 million settlement with the Village of Hoosick Falls.
The company settled with the Rensselaer County community over PFOA contamination ahead of a scheduled trial. Companies 3M, Saint-Gobain, and Honeywell reached a $65 million settlement with Hoosick Falls in 2021.
PFOA, a chemical linked to several ill-health effects including cancer, was first detected by a village resident who tested his own tap water in 2014.
The fight for clean water in Hoosick Falls is chronicled in a new book by Mariah Blake called “They Poisoned The World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals," published by Crown.
Lucas Willard spoke with Blake about her book, which draws parallels between Hoosick Falls and Parkersburg, West Virginia, a community in the shadow of a plastics factory formerly owned by DuPont.
So, back in 2015, a full decade ago, I wrote a story about Parkersburg, West Virginia, and this family of West Virginian farmers, these humble farmers who had sold DuPont some acreage for a landfill. And DuPont operated Teflon plant nearby. And after they sold them the acreage for the landfill, these farmers cows started dying off, and soon they were dying faster than the family could bury them. And the family eventually sued DuPont, and their case wound up exposing this incredible cover up involving the chemical PFOA, which is a type of forever chemical. And so, I wrote a long magazine story about the Parkersburg, West Virginia situation, and it left me with a lot of questions. The primary question being, ‘How was this allowed to happen?’ Because this chemical, PFOA and other similar chemicals at that point, industry knew that they were in the blood of people all around the world. They knew they were highly toxic. They knew that they were contaminating ecosystems in remotest parts of the world. But until these farmers filed their case, regulators didn't know that this entire class of chemicals existed. So, we're talking about a class of 9,000 chemicals. The public didn't know that these chemicals existed, and even academic scientists didn't know that they existed. So, my question was, ‘How was this small group of companies allowed to pollute the entire planet with this class of chemicals without the world even knowing that they existed?’ So, after I published that story, I decided I wanted to write an investigative book that looked at, it was basically an investigative history of the chemical industry, told through this class of chemicals, PFAS, and this one company, DuPont. And I thought that the human story would be Parkersburg West Virginia. So, the residents of Parkersburg, West Virginia and their unlikely victories in their legal battle against DuPont. At the time, there was only, really, a handful of communities anywhere that were known to have drinking water contaminated with these substances. But shortly after I got contract in 2016 and started researching, stories about Hoosick Falls started cropping up in the media. And the thing that really grabbed my attention about the Hoosick Falls situation is that the contamination had only come to light because a resident had tested his own drinking water after losing his father to kidney cancer. And this is a story that will be familiar to your listeners, but I traveled to Hoosick Falls to meet that individual, Michael Hickey, who is also probably well known to your listeners, and he wasn't what I expected at all. And I know you've probably met him, so you know this, but he's, he's an unassuming insurance underwriter with a fear of public speaking. He'd never really taken any interest in environmental issues or politics, for that matter. The first time I met him, he told me that he got his news from ESPN. And yet, he and this local doctor, Marcus Martinez, were spearheading a fight against several multinational corporations and government agencies to get their community clean drinking water. And there were other people who, by that time, were beginning to be drawn into the battle, a high school music teacher named Rob Allen, whose daughter had extraordinarily high levels of PFOA in her blood. And you know, he would eventually run for mayor and become a very effective public servant. A young mother named Emily Marpe, who had put everything she had into a dream home for her family, only to learn that her private well was heavily contaminated. And so, like Michael, these were people who had never really taken much of an interest in politics and environmental issues. They had spent their lives trusting there were systems in place to protect them, and now that trust had been shattered. And that really resonated with me, in part because this was in the run up to the 2016 presidential election. So, this, this theme of loss of trust in government, was something that loomed large. But also, their particular stories. Also, their individual stories were just so moving. These were people who, you know, were utterly devastated, but rather than becoming cynical or resigned, they fought like hell. And very early in my reporting, they started to accomplish some pretty, pretty amazing things. So, I sensed that there was something very powerful happening in Hoosick Falls. And I didn't know exactly what it was, but I decided that I would shift the focus of my book to Hoosick Falls and follow these people basically be a fly on the wall of their lives. And I ended up following them for eight years.
So, let's start off with Michael Hickey, and you actually opened the book with Michael's father, who died before all of this investigation work, and Michael testing his own water kicked into gear. Hoosick Falls, for those who have never been is a small town in a hilly portion of upstate New York with an old chemical mill that's now owned Saint-Gobain, and an industrial past and former mill buildings. So, can you tell me a little bit about maybe Ersel Hickey and the Hoosick Falls that he grew up in, and why you wanted to open the book with Ersel’s illness?
So, one of the things that really struck me when I first came to Hoosick Falls was just how tight knit the community was. It's not just that everybody knows each other, everybody's parents knows everybody's parents, everybody's grandparents know everybody's grandparents and people really look out for each other. And Ersel was just this beloved figure in the community. He drove a school bus and was known for giving gifts to all the children on his bus. If he ran into people at restaurants, he would often randomly pick up their tab. And, you know, I thought this, this is something that I appreciate about the community in general. This, this sort of, this generosity of spirit. But so, Ersel drove the school bus, and then at night, he worked at this Teflon factory nearby, this factory that made Teflon coated fabric, and he wound up in his sixties, getting diagnosed with kidney cancer. And he went through several bouts of treatment, and Michael was very involved in in guiding his care, and felt a lot of responsibility for the outcome, and his father ended up dying a very difficult death of kidney cancer. And Michael harbored a lot of guilt, because he felt that that his decisions may have some way contributed. And so, he began obsessively researching kidney cancer. At some point he started thinking about the fact that he that that it seemed like an unusually large share of people in the community got rare, aggressive cancers. And this is something that people talk about a lot in Hoosick Falls, that there is a lot of cancer, that cancer seems to strike people at a young age, that there are rare, aggressive forms that are more common there than elsewhere. And at some point, after losing another friend to cancer in her 40’s, Michael sat down and googled Teflon and cancer, and he called up the study from West Virginia, the town in West Virginia I was talking about, that involved 69,000 people, and that test had associated PFOA, which is the chemical that we now know is in the drinking water in Hoosick Falls, with six serious diseases, and one of them was kidney cancer. Now, Michael had struggled in science in school. He didn't consider himself much of a student, and so he didn't initially trust his read on the science. So, he spent months burrowing into the research. He would stay up until three or four in the morning reading these complicated scientific studies. And eventually, he felt confident enough in what he was seeing that he approached the village doctor, Marcus Martinez. And Marcus believed there might be something to Michael's theory, because in his own practice, he had documented unusually high rates of rare, aggressive cancers. And so, they approached the mayor who refused to test the drinking water. And that is when their quest began.
So, when the story finally breaks in the newspaper in late 2015 there's a significant effect on the village and also within the executive chamber of the state of New York.
Yes.
What can you tell me about what happened after this story was broken by the Times Union in late 2015?
The Times Union article, that really was a watershed moment. So, I think up until that point, the village residents didn't know whether to take the contamination seriously or not. And the article, I think, was an alarm sound for the village, so people knew that this was truly a serious issue. But I think the other thing that the article brought to light and that subsequent reporting illuminated is the fact that the village government had refused to act, and that the state government had refused to act. So, this came right on the heels of the Flint water crisis, which was a huge national scandal. There were a lot of parallels between what happened in Hoosick Falls and what happened in Flint and there was definitely the same kind of aura of scandal around what happened in Hoosick Falls. And things only grew more heated once people started getting their blood test results, because people were absolutely devastated when they learned that they and their children had very high levels of this chemical in their blood. So yes, the Cuomo administration act very promptly. They summoned Mayor [David] Burge to the capitol for a press conference, and they announced a series of initiatives to address PFAS contamination, not just in Hoosick Falls, but in the entire state. So, they designated PFOA, the chemical in the drinking water in Hoosick Falls, a hazardous substance, which made it possible for the state to require the responsible parties to assess the extent of the contamination and clean up the contamination. And this was really huge, because no state had ever done this, so this was the first time that these chemicals had been regulated anywhere. The Cuomo administration also announced plans to set drinking water standards for PFOA and the other best known forever chemical PFOS. They announced that they would provide Hoosick Falls with an alternate water supply. And this is something that Marcus and Michael and the lawyer that they were working with had been demanding, but that really no other community in the United States that I know of has ever gotten so rather than just drinking polluted water that had been filtered they were demanding that the community tap into a completely new, untainted aquifer. And this has turned out to be a very prescient request, because we now know that a lot of forever chemicals, or PFAS, aren't filtered out by the filters that are most commonly used in communities with drinking water contamination. So, the Cuomo administration announced its intention to do that, and it also began systematically testing drinking water supplies across the state for these chemicals, so that other communities wouldn't wind up in the situation that Hoosick Falls was in, and this was really a major step forward, but it also turned the Hoosick Falls story into a bigger national story, because once PFOA had been designated a hazardous substance, and one of the sites in Hoosick Falls had been named a Superfund site, the story really blew up. And when that happened, it really it took a heavy toll on the community. So, banks stopped giving out mortgages. People were not able to buy or sell homes. There was a heavy economic toll on the community. So, it was a step in the right direction in terms of actually dealing with contamination, but it had some serious fallout for the village, at least in the short term.
At the same time that the Hoosick Falls water contamination story was getting out there, there was a contamination that was discovered in wells in Petersburg and then right across the border in Bennington, Vermont as well. And you also point out in your book that it wasn't till around this time in Parkersburg, West Virginia, in late 2015 that the battles in West Virginia started to get more notice, about at this time.
So, it happens to be that I wrote one of the first stories in August of 2015 there were two major stories that appeared in August of 2015 and then in January of 2016, The New York Times story…The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story about the lawyer for the West Virginia farmers, Rob Billott. And so, there were suddenly a wealth of information. People in Hoosick Falls who googled PFOA could find information that was accessible to them in a way they couldn't before. And I think that changed the equation, as well. So not only the did you have the Times Union story, but you had a series of articles in mainstream news outlets that explained the dangers of this chemical, that explained the cover up of this chemical, you know. And these were things that people like Michael Hickey and Emily Marpe knew because they had been staying up until all hours reading scientific papers, but the rest of the. community did not. And yes, so as I was following the Hoosick Falls story, other communities began to learn that their drinking water was contaminated. So, first it was neighboring communities, and then pretty soon it was millions of people all across the country, and this was partially as a result of what happened in Hoosick Falls. So, as of today, almost half of all Americans are known to be drinking water that is contaminated with these chemicals.
So, I wanted to take a step back just a little bit and look at these moments where you have independent scientific, research spurred by tragedy, trying to turn the wheels of government to address a public health issue, and you also have, at the time, a lack of information about this contaminant, and this seems to be very much driven by community action. And late in the book, you talk about there being a collective paralysis at times, where there's a conflict or…and it's human nature, maybe sometimes for people to not do anything, or to stand back and wait for something to save them. But what can you tell me about the power of this community coming together because of the efforts of the few to inform the many? It seems like you know, an almost impossible task to look back on. It almost seems miraculous that they were able to pull it off and get the information out there with something that's so to so many people was so unknown. That was a long question…
Not only were they able to get the information out there, but they were act. They were able to prompt actual change. So, New York became the first state to regulate PFAS . There was very strict drinking water limits were set. The companies who you know, the companies responsible for the pollution, are being required to pay a substantial sum to provide a new water supply and all kinds of other provisions that most communities in this situation aren't getting. You also have a landmark class action settlement that, this is a $64 million settlement for a community of 3,000 people that provides generous financial compensation but also provides medical monitoring, so people can get screened for the diseases that are associated with associated with this chemical, and get diagnosed early if they do develop these diseases, so they have the best possible chance of recovery. So, this community, really, they, you know, there was a list of things that Healthy Hoosick Water and Michael and Marcus set out to accomplish that list was put together in 2015, and as of this year, they have accomplished everything that they set out to accomplish. And that is really, really remarkable given everything they were up against, because it was incredibly long odds. So, it not only were these powerful corporations they were taking on, you had a culture of inaction in the government. So, the EPA had put on, been put on notice in 2001 that PFOA was probably polluting water supplies all over the country but it wasn’t until Michael tested his tap water and set off this chain of events that the EPA actually began, you know, taking steps to really identify the scope of the problem. So, what they accomplished in Hoosick Falls is really remarkable. And as you know, they recently switched on the new water supply. So, they are now drinking water from an untainted aquifer that…they had a ceremony where they had Michael Hickey call the water plant operator and instruct him to turn on the new water supply.
Recently the Trump administration, the EPA, did walk back protections against PFAS contamination, leaving in place PFOA and PFOS, but there has been some walking back of contamination levels in drinking water for PFAS chemicals within the last couple of months.
So recently, the Trump administration, the EPA, last year, had set strict limits on four types of PFAs in drinking water, and the ones for PFOA and PFOS, the two best studied of them, were near zero levels. And so, the EPA has rescinded the drinking water standards for the four other chemicals, but left the two for PFOA and PFOS in place. And that is a huge setback. There's no denying that. That's a huge setback, but as a result of the slew of state level legislation and litigation…so, currently, there's more than 15,000 lawsuits pending against manufacturers…you have huge swaths of the economy voluntarily moving away from PFAS. So, in the long run, I think that that could be more powerful than anything that happens on a federal level. And I can give you some examples. 3M, the world's largest manufacturer of PFAS, has announced that it will quit producing them by the end of this year. Forty major retail chains with more than $1.7 trillion in annual sales, have committed to eliminating or radically reducing PFAS in their packaging and products. And we're talking huge corporations like Apple, Amazon, McDonald's, Dick's Sporting Goods. And you currently have now litigation engulfing consumer brands. So, the makers of Snapple and Band-Aids have been sued. The maker makers of Trojan condoms have been sued for failing to disclose that there are PFAs in their products and that…the potential liability there is enormous. So, I think that we are potentially reaching the tipping point where the risks associated with using these chemicals are so great that even larger parts of the economy will move away from them. The laws that have been passed on the federal level are just about cleaning up the contamination that exists. They don't actually do anything to turn off the tap, and these are chemicals that persist in the environment for hundreds or even thousands of years. So, the progress that's happening on the state level and in the courts, and also on the EU level, to a degree, it actually has the potential to turn off the tap on these chemicals, or move us closer to turning off the tap, and that is what needs to happen in the long run.
