BENNINGTON — Sandy Sumner and his wife live in North Bennington in a mint green house he built in 1990, on a hill almost directly above the smokestack of the former ChemFab plant. They have lush perennial flower beds in their backyard overlooking Mount Anthony and used to have a large vegetable patch in front of their house.
But the Sumners have let their vegetable garden return to grass. They are afraid to eat anything grown on their property.
“When you look at my flower gardens, and my beautiful vegetable garden, you had to remind yourself that the soil and groundwater is for the foreseeable future contaminated with chemicals that are very harmful,” Sumner said. “We don’t eat our cherries anymore, we don’t eat our apples anymore.”
When the Teflon coating plant on Water Street was still operating, Sumner and neighbors complained to the federal Environmental Protection Agency and factory management about the acrid emissions from the smokestacks.
“My wife and I, we were constantly sick,” he said. “We couldn’t keep our windows and doors open. We got headaches, migraines, sore throats, nosebleeds.”
Then, almost 15 years after the plant closed in 2002, the Sumners found out from the state that their drinking water well was contaminated with 580 parts per trillion Perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA — more than 29 times higher than the state’s new drinking water standard.
[Read Teflon Town, VTDigger’s investigation of PFOA in Bennington.]
This April, the state reached a final agreement with Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, the current owner of the former factory, to pay for access to clean municipal drinking water for hundreds of residents with contaminated properties.
Water-line extensions were completed at roughly 200 houses on the western side of the contaminated area, including the Sumners’ house, last fall. A couple of weeks ago, New York-based Gallo Construction started laying pipe along Willow Road, kicking off the extensions in the eastern part of Bennington.
“This is a good day for the folks of Bennington County, this is a good day for the state of Vermont,” Attorney General TJ Donovan said during the April press conference announcing the settlement.
But, Bennington residents impacted by PFOA contamination are still dealing with potential long-term health impacts, costs of water bills and resignation that their properties will be indefinitely contaminated.
A lawsuit Sumner and eight other residents filed against Saint-Gobain, seeking to make the company pay for property damages and long-term medical monitoring for PFOA-related illnesses, took a step forward last Friday when a federal judge allowed the case to advance as a class action.
“We’re not happy to be involved in the class action.” Sumner said. “It’s stressful. But I wouldn’t shy away from it — it’s too important.”
He hopes the lawsuit will help pressure chemical companies to prevent contamination like this from occurring.
“Because they’re not going to do it on their own,” he said. “We know why they don’t do it on their own.”
Both Sumner and his wife have PFOA levels in their blood on the order of hundreds of micrograms per liter; the background level for the U.S. general population is 2.08 micrograms per liter. Two of the Sumners’ neighbors have been diagnosed with types of cancer linked to PFOA contamination.
“I want to live as long as I can. I want the option of living a natural life without this interruption,” said Sumner. “We feel like our freedom has sort of been taken away from us.”
He feels grateful to the state for negotiating with Saint-Gobain to pay for municipal water line extensions. State officials were clear from the outset that the settlement would not cover medical monitoring costs or property damages, Sumner said.
“They fought the fight they felt they could afford and win,” he said. “And they did win.”
In Hoosick Falls, which sits about 10 miles west of Bennington in New York, state officials came under fire for waiting months after PFOA contamination was discovered to tell residents not to drink their water.
While attending a PFOA summit last summer held by the EPA, Sumner heard from residents of Massachusetts and New Hampshire dealing with PFOA contamination who were inadequately helped by their states.
Response to water contamination questioned
Rosemarie Jackowski lives in a pine cabin in North Bennington that she designed and had built in 1985. Jackowski, now 82, moved up from Pennsylvania so that her daughter could live with her while she went to Bennington College.
She regrets capping her well and hooking up to municipal water because of PFOA contamination, as many residents did. Her municipal sewage and water bills are now 10% of her fixed income, and she is stressed that she has fallen behind paying them.
“I paid many thousands of dollars to have a well drilled,” she said. “The well is now gone, destroyed, capped and now I have to pay for water. Why is the billing for the water not going to the people who caused the problem?”
Where there used to be a large cedar tree and a lilac bush on her property, there was now a large strip of dirt like a second driveway where the pipe connecting her house to municipal water had gone in. Water now seeps into her basement, which she said did not used to happen.
“About a month ago, we had quite a bit of rain,” Jackowski said in an interview in mid-August. “And I was…up and down the steps, every half hour for four days. I now have a very damaged knee.”
Jim Sullivan’s family built their spacious North Bennington house, which sits on a hill overlooking the Green Mountains, after the nearby ChemFab plant had closed.
But testing in 2016 revealed their well was contaminated with 293 ppt PFOA. His family had been drinking bottled water and using a filtration system for two and a half years before they were hooked up to municipal water.
“It was a tough process to deal with, (you don’t) really appreciate how fundamental clean water is to your daily life until you don’t have it,” he said.
Sullivan, who watched the slow response from the state of New York after PFOA contamination was discovered in neighboring Hoosick Falls, began talking to neighbors and attorneys he knew about options for remedies.
It’s hard to know whether health issues he has dealt with, including a rare form of a heart attack a few years ago, are linked to the PFOA contamination.
“It’s much more for us, anyway, (seeking) monitoring so that we can get appropriate treatment if something does appear,” he said.
A survey of 443 former and current residents of Bennington, Hoosick Falls and Petersburg, NY — which all recently discovered PFOA-contaminated drinking water — found 31 instances of kidney cancer, 71 cases of ulcerative colitis, 231 residents with thyroid diseases and 35 cases of pregnancy induced hypertension.
The airborne PFOA contamination in Bennington differs from, say, an industrial spill, where the focus is on cleaning up a particular site, said Sullivan.
“But in this case, the contaminated site is right here, we’re living on it,” he said. “And everybody who’s had their property contaminated is living on the contaminated site.”
Detection of problem was not a certainty
One thing that concerns Kiah Morris, a former state representative for Bennington, is that the state could easily not have detected that PFOA had contaminated drinking water.
The situation in Vermont came to light after Carol Moore, a Bennington resident, reached out to the Bennington legislative delegation about the Hoosick Falls contamination to point out that the same company had a plant in North Bennington. Morris said she then reached out to local leaders, including Sullivan, about possible contamination in Vermont.
A short time later, Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation started testing water supplies around the factory for PFOA.
“Had that person not reached out, we might not have started that inquiry,” Morris said. “It’s very possible that we might not have ever put those two pieces together.”
Chuck Schwer, director of DEC’s waste management and prevention division, said that the state considered seeking Superfund status for the Bennington area PFOA contamination, which provides access to federal money for cleanup.
“But in this case, in Bennington, we ended up having a cooperative responsible party in Saint-Gobain, which made the process go quicker and provided the funds we needed to do the appropriate remedies,” he said.
The state is requiring long-term groundwater monitoring in case the contamination spreads.
Except for right at the Water Street factory, the levels of PFOA in the soil in the Bennington area are not high enough to pose a risk to people who come in contact with it, said Schwer. The soil contamination is so widespread that the state “can’t imagine how you would” clean it all up, he added.
The real threat is the toxin leaching into groundwater and contaminating wells.
“Well, that’s already happened and we’re dealing with the effects of that,” said Schwer.
The DEC is continuing to work with Saint-Gobain about what to do with the contaminated former factory site and other areas with elevated PFOA levels.
Feds have been reluctant to regulate PFAS
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or “PFAS,” do not break down in the environment and are used in a wide array of manufactured products, from rain jackets to cookware to firefighting foam. Scientists have linked exposure to certain PFAS compounds to increased risk of developing kidney and testicular cancers, thyroid diseases, immune system impacts and developmental effects.
While PFOA and PFOS — two of the most toxic PFAS compounds — have been phased out by industry, chemicals used years ago persist in the environment.
The EPA has been slow to regulate PFAS, leaving states largely on their own to figure out how to deal with contamination. Both the EPA and the White House sought to block release of a federal health study on PFAS contamination last year, fearing it would cause a “public relations nightmare.”
In 2016, President Obama signed an overhaul of the decades-old Toxic Substances Control Act aimed at improving the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate and test chemicals. But the Trump administration has come under fire for working to undermine the intent of the law.
“That’s chilling … for each of us to kind of swallow that this is what it means for us to live in the United States,” Morris said. “And this is what it means to come to a beautiful place that’s supposed to be the epitome of nature in its greatest glory and instead, there’s a threat around every corner.”
Both Morris and Sumner expressed frustration with Gov. Phil Scott for vetoing a bill last session that would provide Vermonters with a “cause of action” to sue a company that had negligently released toxic substances for medical monitoring costs.
Starting in the 1980s, some courts in the U.S. began awarding plaintiffs exposed to hazardous substances payment for diagnostic tests and other procedures for early detection of diseases they face an increased risk of developing due to exposure. A Vermont court has yet to decide whether to allow medical monitoring claims.
Sumner, whose neighbors have been struggling with cancer diagnoses linked to the chemical family, said he felt the governor had listened to business lobbyists over residents in his decision to veto the medical monitoring bill.
“If he were in my shoes, I really wonder if he would have the same opinion,” he said.
Sitting in the living room of his meticulously crafted house, Sumner said the impact of the PFOA contamination on the property value remains a “question mark.” As the house is his family’s nest egg, he hopes they can get a good price for it when they eventually go to sell it.
“At the same time, anyone who wants to buy this house, I would make damn sure that they knew that even though those flower beds are beautiful, that the soil and groundwater is contaminated,” he said. “And it will be while you’re living here.”
Correction: This post originally used the incorrect abbreviation for the U.S. population’s background PFOA level.
