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- [00:01]
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- [01:54]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
Over the past year, I've talked to a half dozen people who worked in the Saint Gobain plant. I wanted to understand what this story looked like for them. No one was closer to Pfoathe chemical that contaminated Meramec's water than the people who used it every day. In the last episode, we talked about 3M and DuPont companies that made Teflon and PFOA. Saint Gobain was a customer of those companies. They bought chemicals and used them to make their own products. In Merrimack, Saint Gobain was using the chemicals to coat textiles. The Merrimack Plant itself was a huge rectangle, more than two and a half football fields long and tall, says former worker Kenny Blaha.
- [02:43]
Kenny Blaha (Former Worker)
It was imposing. It was like four, four and a half stories tall. I mean, just this very tall building for what it is.
- [02:52]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
Brian Cloak, another former worker, says the building had to be tall to fit the machines they were working with. Inside, it was intimidating due to the
- [03:03]
Brian Cloak (Former Worker)
sheer size of the machinery, but the concept was easy enough to follow.
- [03:11]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
The concept was this. Workers would feed huge rolls of fabric into the giant machines. As the fabric unspooled, it would go through a TR with a milky liquid in it. Workers called the liquid the dispersion, a mix of water and chemicals like Teflon and pfoa.
- [03:33]
Kenny Blaha (Former Worker)
So you'd have a roll here, paying out material. It would pay out into the dispersion tank where it would get coated.
- [03:41]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
Then the coated fabric would be pulled up into a long vertical oven that could get up to 750 degrees. After it was coated, workers would cut and assemble the fabric into their final products. In Meramec, they made everything from hazmat suits and chemical hazard shelters to non stick conveyor belts for fast food restaurants. A lot of the people I talked to said there was something satisfying about the work. They liked building things, things that might save lives. Saint Gobain handled a lot of military contracts. The projects felt important. Kenny Blaha helped install big radar covers in some pretty cool places.
- [04:27]
Kenny Blaha (Former Worker)
I got to be in the midnight sun in the Arctic. I got to go to Kwajalen, where there's a destroyer in the middle of the ring. The atoll, just still sitting there from World War II. Got to do the blazin challenge at a bunch of different Buffalo wild wings across the country.
- [04:50]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
Talking to these guys, I got the sense that most of them were a little amused by the questions I was asking about their old jobs. Like, yeah, we know this work comes with exposure to powerful and dangerous chemicals. But as Josh Lovett told me, that's the job.
- [05:07]
Josh Lovett (Former Worker)
I was like, I worked at a warehouse. What can I, you know what I mean? That's what happens when you're at the bottom of the barrel and you gotta go work at the plant. You get exposed to all the chemicals that other people don't have to deal with, and something's gonna happen, you know?
- [05:19]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
It wasn't like they didn't have any worries. Those massive vertical ovens released a lot of smoke. It was supposed to be vented out the roof of the building through stacks, but everyone said a lot of that smoke stayed inside of the building. Sometimes creating a thick haze.
- [05:36]
Brian Cloak (Former Worker)
We would notice almost like walking into fog, like on a foggy night, even as we were walking down the hallway to get to the production floor.
- [05:49]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
Sometimes workers would get sick from the air inside of the building. Some people called it Teflon flu.
- [05:56]
Kenny Blaha (Former Worker)
It feels like one of the worst flus you've ever had. It just suddenly hits you with a really hard fever.
- [06:04]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
Everyone I talked to remembered getting some kind of personal protective equipment to wear, like masks, paper smocks and gloves. But how seriously people took that protective equipment seemed to vary. John McLaughlin got a job at Saint Gobain right after he got out of the Marine Corps. He told me the co workers who trained him warned him it was not going to be a tidy experience.
- [06:29]
John McLaughlin (Former Worker)
They just said, you know, you're working in the coding department. It's a dirty job. You're gonna get covered in the Teflon. You're gonna have it on your clothes, your boots, your hands. A lot. They're like if you smoked or used smokeless tobacco, like I did at the time, they said you gotta wash your hands with the two different kinds of soap to get most of it off.
- [06:49]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
Sometimes John says the dispersion would also end up on the ground, like when he would clean sheets of metal that sat inside the big vertical ovens and
- [06:59]
John McLaughlin (Former Worker)
we'd power wash it outside in the parking lot, and there was no slot basin or nothing to pick it up. It would just be blowing off into the sunset or all over the ground, right into a drain or something.
- [07:11]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
We asked Saint Gobain about all of this. The smoke in the factory, Teflon flu, the parking lot, power washing. The company didn't answer our questions, but sent a statement saying, quote, ensuring the health and safety of employees is paramount to Saint Gobain and is core to our culture. They also said the company strives to meet or exceed applicable regulations. It seems like for most people, there was no big aha moment, no day when PFOA started setting off alarm bells, when they started to think, huh, maybe one of these chemicals is different from the others. But a few of the former workers told me something did feel off. Michael Holmes said it was a feeling that built up Slowly over the 16 years he worked there.
- [08:05]
Michael Holmes (Former Worker)
The job market at the time at that area was kind of tricky. I was stuck. I was stuck doing a job that I didn't really want to keep doing. And I was watching as one by one, my coworkers were either suffering something or moving on to other things and not coming back. And a year later, they passed on.
- [08:35]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
I wanted to talk to people who worked at Saint Gobain to understand what it was like there. They were closest to these chemicals face to face with the stuff that contaminated a whole community. For many workers, the community they lived in, I was also hoping they'd be able to tell me what the company knew about PFOA before the contamination became public. But our conversations ended up raising even more questions. For one thing, many workers told me they had no idea about PFOA for a lot of the years they worked there, or that it could be harmful for people living nearby. Kenny told me he was surprised when he learned people in Hoosick Falls had been getting sick from pfoa. He said most of what he learned about the chemical he'd worked around for years came from a segment he saw on the Daily show and a documentary he watched after he left the job.
- [09:32]
Kenny Blaha (Former Worker)
You know, I didn't want to be pumping those fumes into the air, into the drinking water, into the wells, into the ground. We didn't want that. We didn't know. We really didn't know the people that were rank and file, you know, and it was hidden. It was hidden not just from us, it was hidden from everybody.
- [10:11]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
So what about the higher ups at Saint Gobain? What did they know about PFOA contamination and its impact on human health? When did they know it and what did they do about it? From the document team at New Hampshire Public Radio, I'm Mara Hoplamizian. This is safe to drink.
- [10:42]
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
On his podcast chasing life, I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent brings you the secrets of the happiest and healthiest people on the planet so that you can live your best life.
- [10:54]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
Are some people just born happier than others? And what might they be doing that the rest of us aren't?
- [11:00]
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
Follow chasing life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Apple, Spotify, Iheart Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts Radio.
- [11:12]
Linley Dixon (Real Organic Podcast Host)
If you're looking for more stories to inform and inspire action around Forever Chemicals, then check out the Real Organic Podcast. It's the award winning best sustainability, environment and climate podcast produced by the Real Organic Project and co hosted by me, Linley Dixon. Recently named one of the best climate podcasts by earth.org, the Real Organic Podcast uncovers the forces reshaping organic food, including the impact of pfas. Each episode features deep conversations with farmers, scientists and journalists fighting to improve the food system. If you're looking for a place to start, check out episode 241 of the Real Organic Podcast called Adam Nordell and Joanna Davis. PFAS Contamination. Joanna and Adam built Songbird Farm in Maine with the dream of growing nutrient dense food for their community. After more than a decade of hard work, they discovered their land, water and bodies were contaminated with pfas. Their story is one of heartbreak, betrayal and resilience on how to overcome systemic chemical pollution. So go ahead, follow the real organic podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
- [12:27]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
To find out what Saint Gobain knew, we have to go back to the 1980s. Because before the plant in Merrimack, New Hampshire belonged to Saint Gobain, it was owned by a company called Chemical Fabrics Corporation. ChemFab for short. ChemFab bought the Meramec plant in 1984. Their big thing was Teflon coated fabric roofs for sports stadiums and shopping malls and hotels. Remember how Dupont and 3M were collecting information about PFOA, doing all those tests on rats and dogs and their own workers? They didn't share any of that information with health officials or regulators, but they did share some of that information with ChemFab. So here's what ChemFab knew. They knew that PFOA caused birth defects when given to lab rats. They knew that PFOA didn't break down in the environment, and they knew that it was being found in human blood. They also knew about Teflon flu, that exposure to Teflon as it was burned could cause workers to get sick for a few days. ChemFab didn't exactly ignore this information. In the 80s, the company commissioned a study of their own workers. It found an association between PFOA and erectile dysfunction. And in the 90s, ChemFab and Dupont had meetings where they discussed what might replace PFOA. Dupont was trying to find an alternative because the chemical was so toxic. But then Saint Gobain, this massive French company, bought ChemFab in 2000. And, well, it's hard to say how much of this information got passed along. The person in charge of knowing this kind of stuff is Ed Canning. He was Saint Gobain's environment, health and safety manager. I tried to talk to Ed. We had a short phone call. He was very polite, but he didn't want to do an interview. We do know a little bit from him, though. In 2019, Ed gave testimony as part of a deposition. And during his deposition, he said, When Saint Gobain took over, ChemFab claimed that all the PFOA in that milky dispersion liquid got burned up in those huge ovens, that none of it was leaving through the stacks on the roof of the plant. So Ed said when Saint Gobain bought ChemFab in 2000, they had no reason to believe there was a risk to the surrounding community. But then, just one year later, in 2001, public scrutiny around PFOA ramped up. Remember, that's when Rob Bellott, the lawyer from the last episode, got those smoking gun documents showing Dupont and 3M, knew exposure to PFOA could be unsafe, and he told the EPA about it. So even if ChemFab hadn't told Saint Gobain what they knew about PFOA, a lot had just been made public. And Saint Gobain was watching, aware that they might also get sued. Ironically, we only know this because eventually Saint Gobain was sued and their internal company documents were made public. I spent months combing through those documents. One of the things they show is that in 2003, Saint Gobain created a special team at senior levels of the company, led by Ed Canning. They gave it a tymor t y m o r. Why did they call it timewar? No idea. But from what I can tell, the team's mission was to make sure this PFOA thing didn't blow up in the company's face. They tracked media coverage of dupont and Teflon closely. They developed standby statements in case sainto Bain got any questions from reporters or from their own customers. And they tightened PPE guidelines for workers. Maybe the most significant thing the Time War team did is they tested the information Ed Canning says the company got from ChemFab that PFOA wasn't leaving Saint Gobain's factories through the stacks. Spoiler alert. It was in 2004. The Time War team confirmed that the Merrimack plant was releasing PFOA into the air. It wasn't all burned off in the ovens like Ed Canning says ChemFab had told them. Saint Gobain reached out to New Hampshire's Department of Environmental Services and told them the news. The state was like, well, how much are you emitting? And Saint Gobain said, basically, they didn't know. They also said to find out would cost so much money, it might force them to close the plant. For the record, Ed Canning told the regulators, testing all 15 coating lines at the Meramec plant in 2005 would have cost them $100,000 a pop. About $1.5 million total. I wondered how much that would eat into the company's bottom line. That year, Saint Gobain reported a net income of about $1.5 billion. That means they were making $1.5 million roughly every eight hours. So to recap, Saint Gobain knew they were emitting PFOA into the air in Meramec as early as 2004. Those emissions had likely been happening for decades, since ChemFab started production in the 1980s. But Saint Gobain didn't know how much PFOA was getting out of their stacks, and they weren't willing to pay to find out. Eventually, New Hampshire and Saint Gobain reached a compromise. Saint Gobain agreed to switch to a low pfoa dispersion by 2006. A new recipe for that milky liquid that had a lot less PFOA in it. But throughout all those years, even after contamination was discovered in the water around Parkersburg, West Virginia, and Rob Bellotte exposed what DuPont and 3M knew, there's no evidence that anyone in New Hampshire stopped to could the same thing that happened in Parkersburg be happening here? Could PFOA from the Saint Gobain plant be getting into the drinking water? So people in Merrimack drank the water. They used it to boil pasta and water their gardens. They poured it into their dog bowls and mixed it with Kool Aid powder for their kids playdates for another decade. I asked Saint Gobain when they first became aware the plant was releasing PFOA into Meramex water and whether they discussed testing drinking water before the contamination in Hoosic Falls became public. In a statement, a company representative said any PFOA used in their facility came from raw materials they bought from suppliers, suppliers they were relying on to follow industry laws and regulations. The company also said while it is well known that PFAS has been used in a wide array of products. And despite other industrial sources in the area, Saint Gobain remains committed to extensive remediation efforts. There's no document we've found or interview we've done that shows Saint Gobain knew they were contaminating the drinking water of the communities they operated in. But today, some of the former workers I talked to are still skeptical that the company didn't know more than they let on. One reason for that skepticism is the blood tests. Three of the former workers I spoke with were at Saint Gobain in the aughts when the drama in West Virginia was playing out. All of them remembered the company discussing blood testing with employees, and two of them said they had their own blood drawn while they were at work. John McLaughlin says at least once he remembers his supervisor telling him to shut down the machines and go into the parking lot. A truck came. John Calls it the blood truck. He doesn't remember who was running the blood truck. He says a random nurse stuck him with a needle.
- [21:48]
John McLaughlin (Former Worker)
They never really told us what they were testing for.
- [21:51]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
John says he didn't really think twice about it.
- [21:53]
John McLaughlin (Former Worker)
I was still in the military mindset of, you know, willing obedience to all orders given. I just did it because I was told to do it, never questioned it.
- [22:04]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
He says the company never shared the results of his blood test with him. I talked to another former worker about this. His name is Yvonne Soto. Yvonne worked at the Meramec plant longer than anyone else I met for more than two decades. He started right before Saint Gobain bought it in 2000, and he worked in lots of different parts of the plant. One of his main jobs was building hazmat suits and packing them up to ship to customers.
- [22:32]
Yvonne Soto (Former Worker)
Put the visors, the gloves, testing, repair package it, send it to the customer.
- [22:39]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
Out of everyone I spoke with, Yvon had the strongest feeling that something wasn't right. At Saint Gobain, he comes off as kind of a teddy bear. The first time we met, he was wearing one of those my favorite kid bought me this kinds of T shirts. But Ivan is not afraid of confrontation. He spoke up about things he was seeing, especially after Dupont was fined by the EPA in 2005 for neglecting to share information about PFOA. Yvon told me he developed a reputation. People called him a troublemaker. He sees it more as a workers rights thing.
- [23:14]
Yvonne Soto (Former Worker)
You have a right to ask questions for everything around you, everything more about you.
- [23:20]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
So when Ivan says the company took his blood and told him the test was routine, he didn't buy that. Yvonne said when he sat down with the nurse who had the needle, he asked, how can this be routine?
- [23:34]
Yvonne Soto (Former Worker)
She told me, I don't know what's going on. He just told me to take out the blood samples. Okay, go ahead. But they never give you the results. They never explain why.
- [23:44]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
Yvon didn't settle for that. He asked the company's HR department for his test results. They said he had to wait for them to be sent to his house. But he says no test results ever came. Years later, he went to HR again. Asked if they could look in his files and find his test results. Yvonne says a woman with the company's HR department told him she didn't know what test he was talking about. Yvonne couldn't believe it.
- [24:12]
Yvonne Soto (Former Worker)
I said, what? I said, you better be kidding me. You take my blow just for fun. I said, my name is on my test. They never give you to any not to me, to any single employee down there. Never give it to us.
- [24:29]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
Then in 2020, he spoke at a public hearing. It was more than a decade after Yvonne says the blood testing happened and he still hadn't gotten his results. The hearing was kind of technical. Saint Gobain was applying for an extension on a regulatory deadline. But Yvon had his own agenda. He told New Hampshire state regulators that the company didn't care about its workers.
- [24:56]
Yvonne Soto (Public Hearing Speaker)
I want to know why that company is so powerful. San Goban pollute the town, the Merrimack. It's just there's something wrong in here. I don't get it. They don't care about the workers, he says.
- [25:11]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
I want to know why this company is so powerful. There's something wrong here. I don't get it. But the state officials don't have any answers for him either. They don't even really acknowledge what he's saying.
- [25:26]
Yvonne Soto (Public Hearing Speaker)
Sir, you've reached well over five minutes now. I think it's safe to say that you oppose the variants, but your comments are rather wide ranging.
- [25:43]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
After Yvonne spoke at that meeting, he seemed to catch Saint Gobain's attention. The company sent Yvonne a letter saying that there was no company sponsored blood testing at the factory. In the letter, they told him the Department of Health and Human Services conducted tests around 2007 and the company didn't have access to the results. But here's where it gets weird. We reached out to both New Hampshire's Department of Health and Human Services and the United States Department of Health and Human Services to confirm this, and both say they were not testing Saint Gobain workers in 2007. Even weirder, a few years ago, I asked Saint Gobain if they were testing employees blood for PFOA. They told me the company did maintain what they called an industrial hygiene program, which included voluntary blood tests for employees in Merrimack. They said the results were protected health information of their employees. So two workers say their blood was taken and they never got their results. Another worker, Micah, says he remembers a meeting from 2005 where a man in a suit who worked for Dupont talked to workers at the plant about PFOA.
- [27:05]
Michael Holmes (Former Worker)
This guy was telling us, okay, it's a nerd. It does this. But what we're going to do is we're going to take a sample of 50 people. We're going to aim for the people that are mostly the closest exposed, you know, the actual workers using it.
- [27:19]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
I asked Saint Cobain about all of this again recently, about that meeting with dupont, about the blood tests, about why Their workers say they never got results. They sent me a long statement about the water remediation they've done, but they didn't answer those questions. To this day I still can't say for sure what was going on. But there is one internal company document that came out in one of the lawsuits against Saint Gobain that I need to mention. It's a document from the Time War team describing one of their objectives for for their work on PFOA in the year 2006. It was a plan to test employees blood. You can read that document, the letter Saint Gobain sent to Yvonne, and much more at our website nhpr.org safetodrink.
- [28:19]
Kenny Blaha (Former Worker)
Foreign.
- [28:27]
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- [28:29]
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- [29:29]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
what about the people who were supposed to be watching over all of this? Every time I read a paper that described rat and dog and monkey deaths from PFOA exposure, or I talked to a former Saint Gobain employee about Teflon flu, I was like why wasn't this enough for regulators to act on? This has been one of the hardest things for me to understand about this whole story. There was so much data. Dupont and 3M had studied this chemical for decades. Then There was the C8 study based on the blood samples of almost 70,000 people in the Ohio River Valley. One of the biggest epidemiological studies ever that resulted in peer reviewed articles that confirmed links between PFOA and six illnesses, including some cancers. But year after year, PFOA remained an unregulated chemical. An unregulated chemical that lots of people were drinking from. What I've gathered there are two main reasons for that. Here's the first. While attorney Rob Bellott was trying to bring the dangers of PFOA to light, the chemical industry was at work on its own project.
- [30:49]
Rob Bellott (Attorney)
Part of the problem was you had companies that were actively pushing back and telling the regulatory agencies the science is still disputed.
- [31:00]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
Dupont and 3M did not respond, respond to our questions about this. But the companies have settled lawsuits, collectively paying out billions of dollars. Neither have publicly admitted that PFOA is harmful to humans. And over the years, they've worked to cast doubt on the growing evidence that the chemical they created was making people sick. For a long time, that doubt seemed to creep into the statements government officials were sharing.
- [31:31]
Rob Bellott (Attorney)
You had these companies and their consultants, you know, these hired experts that were being brought in and set up in meetings with different state agencies to help, quote, explain the science to them that were, frankly, you know, misleading the agencies.
- [31:49]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
When PFOA was found in Merrimack's water, the state of New Hampshire told the public the research on PFOA and human health was inconclusive and more research was needed. Remember, that was in 2016, four years after the C8 study ended. Rob Bellott wrote a letter to those New Hampshire officials telling them they were spreading inaccurate information, ignoring the vast wealth of published, peer reviewed and independent C8 science panel research. He said the public should not be told the water was safe to drink. But then, just a couple weeks later, the state held that big town meeting in Merrimack. Can I drink the water?
- [32:34]
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- [32:38]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
And despite Rob's letter, it didn't sound like the officials had changed their tune very much so.
- [32:45]
Brian Cloak (Former Worker)
The big question here is what does finding PFOA in the water mean for our health? Your health, the health of your loved ones? The quick answer is that the long term health effects are really unclear.
- [33:00]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
Ben Chan, the state epidemiologist, did describe the C8 study in his presentation. He said it didn't represent scientific consensus. And then he presented another academic paper, one that reviewed studies of PFOA and its health effects. That paper concluded there's no evidence that would support the hypothesis that PFOA causes cancer. Chan called it a very good review.
- [33:30]
Brian Cloak (Former Worker)
The toxicology review noted that most evaluations have shown no association between PFOA and various cancers and that positive associations have been weak.
- [33:41]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
His slide deck had a screenshot of the article and included a note that it was funded by 3M. Why does that matter? You might be familiar with the idea of Industry backed research from tobacco companies. Starting in the 1950s, that industry hired scientists and paid for studies to challenge the idea that cigarette smoke was linked to health effects. A tobacco company executive wrote in a 1969 memo, Doubt is our product. Other industries have taken a page from the same book. Industry funded research, looking at links between Agent Orange and prostate cancer or pesticides and Parkinson's concluded there wasn't convincing evidence of cause and effect. More research was needed. There's another thing that these studies I just mentioned have in common. Agent Orange and pesticides. The scientists who authored them were the same scientists behind the PFOA study. New Hampshire officials presented at that town meeting the same exact people. Five scientists on the PFOA study had already all worked together on the Agent Orange study. At least three of them did research for the tobacco industry. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the lead author of the PFOA study wrote several papers funded by chemical companies and trade associations. Sometimes the sponsors were allowed to review drafts of the articles. And in many of those papers the conclusions sound the same. The health effects are uncertain. More research is needed.
- [35:31]
Brian Cloak (Former Worker)
So in summary, there's a lot of uncertainty, unfortunately about what we know about PFCS and the effects on health. This is perhaps a difficult area to operate in and frustrating.
- [35:47]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
I reached out to New Hampshire's health department multiple times hoping to talk to Ben Chan or anyone there about their use of this 3M funded study. They never responded. I also reached out to the lead author of the 3M funded study. Her name is Ellen Chang. We did a phone interview, but we agreed not to use her voice. Ellen acknowledged that funders can have influence over research. But she said 3M didn't direct her to come to a specific conclusion. And she said her paper was in line with another independent review of the science on PFOA that was done around the same time. That review from 2014 said PFOA was possibly carcinogenic. Ellen's paper said there was no evidence to support the hypothesis that PFOA causes cancer. So there are these industry funded studies that are making the scientific conclusions more confusing in ways that benefit companies making chemicals. But here's the second reason it's taken so long to deal with PFOA and drinking water. I talked to Mike Wimsat about it. He's been at New Hampshire's Department of Environmental Services, kind of like the local epa for almost 40 years. He was a big part of the state's response to the Meramec contamination. Such a big part that one of his Kids etched the chemical formula for PFOA into a drinking glass for him, it's really just.
- [37:24]
Mike Wimsatt (NH Dept. of Environmental Services)
It's dominated our work. It's kind of eaten our lunch for 10 years now.
- [37:27]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
Mike told me regulators have to do a really complicated balancing act. If they required every possible contaminant to be filtered out, it would bankrupt most local water systems, which, at the end of the day, are there to make sure we don't all get cholera.
- [37:44]
Mike Wimsatt (NH Dept. of Environmental Services)
If we say, okay, if you've got any of these contaminants at any concentration, you shouldn't drink the water. There'd be no water left to drink. Or if it were, it would have to be so heavily treated that it would be prohibitively expensive to provide it.
- [37:59]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
So Mike says we can't just set all the limits at zero and say, problem solved. Especially when there's science that shows many contaminants are safe to drink below certain levels. Remember, the dose makes the poison. Like, according to the epa, a little bit of arsenic in your water is actually okay. With PFOA, things were especially tricky. Mike says, In 2016. It wasn't on his radar. It wasn't regulated. And he says it's very different from other chemicals. He was used to dealing with contaminants measured in parts per billion. So the idea that PFOA could be a problem in such tiny amounts as parts per billion, trillion, it was strange, and it was humbling. Mike thought his team had been doing a good job prioritizing their work in the right way. And then he found out they had missed what he called the largest drinking water contamination in New Hampshire's history. Mike says New Hampshire started pressuring federal regulators to come up with an enforceable state standard so that they'd have a solid number they could use when trying to get Saint Gobain to investigate. And when talking to the public, he still remembers the questions he got during that town meeting in 2016. He says it was really hard not to be able to give people clear answers about the potential risks to their health.
- [39:35]
Mike Wimsatt (NH Dept. of Environmental Services)
That's why people don't like scientists sometimes, because they caveat everything. They never make blanket black and white declarations. It's always gray. And people hate gray, right? But the world of a scientist is a gray world.
- [39:49]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
The world of a scientist is gray. But whether the government says water is safe to drink or not is black and white. So the question becomes, how much proof do we need to act decisively? It's a question that Betsey Sutherland has been thinking about for a long time. Betsy ran the science and technology office at the EPA's National Water Program until 2017. Part of her job was coming up with the levels of pollutants that could be in the air, soil, and water in the entire country. And Betsy says looking back, she gets why people feel like the EPA didn't do its job quickly enough. She thinks the EPA's regulation of PFAS chemicals was a public health failure.
- [40:39]
Betsy Sutherland (EPA Scientist)
I'm heartbroken because I think that public health protection requires us to be much less risk averse, and the risk averse is over litigation.
- [40:52]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
Betsy says it's not as easy for regulators to act as the public might think. Regulators have to worry about their decisions holding up in court. Companies that use a regulated chemical can sue if they think EPA has gotten a limit wrong. And Betsy says if there's any ambiguity about health impacts, the regulation could get struck down.
- [41:15]
Betsy Sutherland (EPA Scientist)
You want to protect the public, and you don't want to insist on thousands of studies not being enough. 10,000 studies not enough, 100,000 studies not enough. And yet today, I can tell you there are scientists out there working for industry who will say it's very questionable as to whether even PFOA or PFOS are carcinogenic.
- [41:43]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
You might remember that in 2006, in the wake of the contamination in Parkersburg, West Virginia, the EPA got DuPont 3M and other manufacturers to promise they would phase out two PFAs. PFOA and PFOS. Betsy says the problem is the companies just started making new kinds of PFAS chemicals. Nowadays, by Betsy's count, companies have created more than 15,000 of them.
- [42:14]
Betsy Sutherland (EPA Scientist)
You will hear industry. Their constant refrain is that each One of these 15,000 PFAS chemicals is like a snowflake. It's entirely different from each of the other 15,000 PFOS chemicals. Each one must be studied individually and exhaustively before they will agree that they need any regulation at all.
- [42:41]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
Betsy says it takes the EPA about seven years to study one new chemical. If you're curious about the napkin math, that comes to 105,000 years, There are some efforts to streamline that process. And other countries have different ways of managing this problem. Like in the European Union, chemicals aren't innocent until proven guilty. Companies have to register their chemicals and submit safety data before they're allowed to be sold. But in the us, until the federal government finds a more efficient way to regulate PFAS chemicals or companies decide to stop making them, Betsy says state regulators are going to have to handle things on their own.
- [43:31]
Betsy Sutherland (EPA Scientist)
The only hope is that states will have so many of these individual communities that are so terribly burdened with incredibly high levels of PFAS that the states will move out on individual locations with these problems.
- [43:48]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
She's hoping communities will convince states to act without waiting for the epa. In many ways, that's exactly what happened in New Hampshire. Mike Wimsatt says state regulators learned a lot from what happened in 2016.
- [44:03]
Mike Wimsatt (NH Dept. of Environmental Services)
And we're like, okay, we're gonna, it's a shame that we didn't know about this earlier, but we're not gonna be caught flat footed. We're gonna go out there and do everything we can to make sure we understand.
- [44:13]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
In the years after PFOA was found in Maryland, New Hampshire regulators would go on to set one of the lowest PFOA limits for drinking water in the 12 parts per trillion. They also required water systems across the state to test for pfoa, and they got sued for doing that by a local water system.
- [44:35]
Mike Wimsatt (NH Dept. of Environmental Services)
And by 3M, you know, that just goes with the territory. But you can't be afraid of that. You just follow the science then. And that's kind of your. Only if you don't follow the science, then you're in the wilderness.
- [44:47]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
3M eventually dropped the lawsuit. New Hampshire kept testing water. By 2025, state regulators would test more than 15,000 wells. When you look at a map of PFOA and water across the U.S. new Hampshire looks really contaminated compared to other states. But Mike says that's just because they're looking. Where does all of this leave the people who've already been exposed? John McLaughlin, one of the former workers who said he had his blood tested in the early 2000s and never got the results, went in for a regular physical in January 2025. He'd just started seeing a new doctor. She hooked him up to a monitor and saw his blood pressure was high, really high.
- [45:41]
John McLaughlin (Former Worker)
He's like, it's 250something over 171. You're on an EKG, you're actively having a heart attack.
- [45:49]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
John was rushed to the hospital. There they discovered he also had kidney damage.
- [45:55]
John McLaughlin (Former Worker)
Wasn't experiencing anything major except like the weird back pains once in a while. And she's like, yeah, that's usually an indicator. You're having a kidney issue.
- [46:04]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
He's on some meds now. They're helping. And after a few months of trying, he got his insurance and the VA to approve blood tests so he can get the answers about what's in his body that he says Saint Gobain never gave him. He's hoping his results will help his doctors mitigate his risk of cancer.
- [46:24]
John McLaughlin (Former Worker)
I just want to get to the bottom of everything, you know?
- [46:27]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
John says some of his former colleagues have gotten sick and some have died. So many that he says one of his work friends started collecting people's obituaries in a photo album.
- [46:40]
John McLaughlin (Former Worker)
It's kind of like, yeah, so what exactly did I get myself into? And kind of like, what am I supposed to expect later in life?
- [46:55]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
I heard some version of this question from all the former workers I spoke with. Yvonne said when his kids were young, he worried about bringing his clothes home from work because of the chemicals he was working with.
- [47:09]
Yvonne Soto (Former Worker)
My daughter was, what, 2 years old? My son was 4. That was just start being my family. Like I said, I work in a company up in my close home. It was kind of, you know, knocking back in my, hey, gotta do the right thing. It's just tough.
- [47:29]
Josh Lovett (Former Worker)
I'm not gonna lie. The air quality had me really concerned about my longevity because there are people who have been working there for 20 years and they just. They're hacking like you've never heard in your life.
- [47:38]
Michael Holmes (Former Worker)
I'm going, am I next? What am I doing that would make me next? Holy shit. And you start thinking and you start worrying and the stress starts to build.
- [47:50]
Kenny Blaha (Former Worker)
Maybe on some level, I don't want to know if you know, if I've got elevated levels in my blood. Maybe I don't want to know. Maybe they don't want to know. Maybe I'm afraid to find out. Yeah, that's something that'll take me a long time to get to the root of that one.
- [48:19]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
When you know you've been exposed to a chemical that's probably harmful, what can you do with that knowledge? And how do you move forward when you can't trust something as basic as your tap water? All I could think of was, well,
- [48:37]
Kenny Blaha (Former Worker)
if you won't hear us all our
- [48:39]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
yelling, you're gonna see us. You know, a lot of people ask me, why haven't you left?
- [48:44]
Linley Dixon (Real Organic Podcast Host)
Why haven't you gone someplace safer?
- [48:46]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
And it's like, if I leave, who
- [48:48]
Kenny Blaha (Former Worker)
is going to be staying here to fight?
- [48:53]
Mara Hoplamizian (Reporter)
That's next time on the final episode of Safe to Drop. Safe to Drink is reported by me, Mara Hoplamazian. Additional reporting and production by Jason Moon. Our editors are Daniela Alley and Katie Kohler. Editing help from Daniel Barrick, Rebecca Lavoy, Taylor Quimby, Elena Eberwein and Lau Guzman. Fact checking by Danya Suleiman. Legal review by Jeremy Eggleton. Jason Moon wrote all the music you hear in this podcast Photos by Raquel Zaldivar Sara Plord designed our website nhpr.org safetodrink where you can check out court documents from cases involved involving Saint Gobain, a drawing of the ovens at the Saint Gobain plant, the letter Rob Bellott sent to New Hampshire, and much more. Nate Hedgey designed our logo. Safe to Drink is a production of
- [50:07]
Kenny Blaha (Former Worker)
the document team at New Hampshire Public Radio. Foreign.
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Bill Kerr (Harvard Business School Podcast Host)
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