[A] year after officials found that perfluorooctanoic acid had contaminated wells in Bennington County, lawmakers are pressing ahead with reforms to state toxic chemical regulations.
The legislation is meant to prevent what happened to Reg Jones, a Bennington resident who moved into his home in the 1980s.
“I always loved my well,” Jones said. “It had extremely hard water.” So hard, he said, that his plumber once told him it was the hardest water he’d ever seen.
“So, it’s got a good, mineral-rich flavor, and I’m thinking, ‘Boy, how lucky I am, it’s nice and rich, and it tastes good,’” Jones said. “Now we know they’ve been putting chemical pollutants in there, and I’ve been drinking who knows what all this time.”
Jones’ water contains perflurooctanic acid, which is found in more than 100 Bennington wells near an old factory once owned by a company called ChemFab. The state’s regulatory limit for PFOA is 20 parts per trillion; Jones’ well has a concentration of 27 parts per trillion. Friends down the road have wells with concentrations as high as 2,000 parts per trillion, Jones said.
His blood contains 10 parts per trillion. PFOA has a four-year half-life in the human body.
“You can’t go to the doctor and say, ‘Please, give me a pill, or do what you need to do to take this out of my blood,’” Jones said. “They don’t have a means of doing that.”
When PFOA was discovered in water supplies in Bennington County, the state did not know how widespread the contamination was because officials didn’t know where the chemical had been used.
While state officials quickly homed in on the ChemFab factory, they had to test nearly a dozen other sites around the state because no one knew what companies had used it.
New legislation would create a statewide, electronic registry requiring industries to list the harmful chemicals they use.
The House and Senate companion bills, S.103 and H.268, would expand the legal rights of Vermonters harmed by toxic and hazardous materials, allowing residents to recover the cost of medical monitoring and groundwater testing from companies. The legislation would also allow residents to sue the Secretary of the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources for failing to uphold legal protections against harmful pollutants.
In addition, lawmakers want to ban PFOA or certain closely related chemicals from dental floss and food packaging. The legislation would require businesses and others to develop plans for reducing the use of toxic substances. Well testing would be required for all homes sold.
The legislation, introduced by Rep. David Deen, D-Putney, and Sen. Brian Campion, D-Bennington, was developed by a working group that formed last year in response to the discovery of PFOA pollution Bennington wells.
Campion said S.103 is a priority for the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee.
“Some industries might say it’s expensive to put these things in place,” Campion said. “I’d counter that with … it’s very expensive when people get cancer, and it’s expensive when a household loses a parent because of cancer.”
Businesses are lining up against the legislation. Bill McGrath, president of Randolph-based LEDdynamics, says the regulations would be burdensome for companies.
“Sure, we could give a list of the chemicals we use,” McGrath said. “But we already have to do a lot of things here that make me less and less interested in doing business in Vermont.” McGrath listed several other state mandates that cost his company money, including health care requirements and a relatively high minimum wage.
LEDdynamics employs 70 people, and the company’s been in business since 1999. It’s at a point, McGrath said, where he’s thought of opening another factory.
“I have the potential to locate a factory in another state, and I definitely think about that,” he said.
Shaina Kasper, Toxic Action Center’s Vermont state director, said the reporting requirement would simply bring current regulations up to speed.
“Industry does have to already report what they use, but it’s an incredibly outdated system,” she said. “You have to fill out physical pieces of paper. One goal is just to consolidate the reporting processes into one computer database or atlas.”
Lauren Hierl, of Vermont Conservation Voters, said the registry would have helped the state identified sources of PFOA early on.
“It became clear to the working group that we don’t have a sense of how toxic chemicals are used, and where,” Hierl said. “It’s not data that, if you’re a community member, you could say, ‘I wonder what that facility’s using, and can I get my water tested for it.’”
The state’s swift response to the PFOA contamination in Bennington County stands out compared to recent efforts by the state and federal government, Kasper said.
“We treated this contamination as a crisis, which is not the response we’ve seen anywhere else,” she said.
Residents whose wells are poisoned with the chemical have received water filters, bottled water, and other assistance. But permanent solutions, such as new municipal water supply lines to replace homeowners’ well water, have been slow to implement, she said.
The company responsible for the Bennington PFOA contamination, French multinational corporation Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, was initially praised by state officials for assisting Bennington residents with tainted wells.
Since then, however, the company has sued the state, alleging the state lacks a proper scientific basis for legal limits on PFOA pollution.
Saint-Gobain has even issued court summons to residents who have been affected by the toxic releases.
The legislation would assign strict liability to toxic chemical releases. That means any company that releases a toxin would be held liable for any harm caused by the chemical. The injured party would not need to prove the company was negligent, or had intent to harm, in order to win a settlement.
The expanded legal protections also give citizens the right to sue anyone who has endangered human health or the environment through toxic chemical use. This includes people or companies who transport, store, handle or dispose of toxic chemicals.
Under the legislation, citizens can also sue the secretary of the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources for failing to perform required actions against toxic polluters.
