Will regulators prevent pollution?
Saint Gobain says it will shutter NH plant but the people will suffer impacts of lax regulation and corporate malfeasance forever.
In 2014, I reported an excessive number of children diagnosed and dying from a rare form of cancer in my town. In 2016, after two years of pressure, the answer came. Yes, there was a cancer cluster, in fact, a double pediatric cancer cluster, but the state wanted to wait and see. They called me and another mom to our library to deliver the news.
As an environmental scientist, I made my career of investigating environmental hazards. I knew something could be done to address the concerns of mine and moms in my town who sounded the bell on the children with cancer. However, every step of the way, my suggestions were denied. When it was clear that nothing would be done, I blew the whistle to the local press, knowing that I could not live with myself if one more child was diagnosed with an environmentally triggered cancer, and I had done nothing. I had the tools to do something about it, and I could not sit back.
So, I ran for office and won a seat in the NH House to represent my town and another seacoast town. I went to the NH House with a purpose — to use my scientific background to assess what needed to be done to make the required change to protect us from environmental exposures.
The NH House leadership included people who represented the town of Merrimack, where a significant industrial polluter, Saint Gobain Performance Plastics (Saint Gobain), operated unfettered for decades polluting more than 65 square miles of our aquifer with emissions of chemicals from their stacks.
In 2002, Saint Gobain had shut down the Bennington Vermont plant and transferred those operations to Merrimack, NH. Saint Gobain explained that propane to run the incinerator in Vermont cost $50,000 per year, so Saint Gobain moved operations to Merrimack where it could poison the community without that cost.
In 2017, I met Attorney Rob Bilott at the Less Cancer National Cancer Prevention Workshop. His legal advocacy resulted in the biggest epidemiological study in history where more than 69,000 people were studied who had unknowingly been exposed to PFAS chemicals in their air and drinking water from a DuPont facility in his hometown of Parkersburg, West Virginia. After 15 years, the study concluded there was a probable link between exposure to a minimum of 50 parts per trillion (ppt) of PFOA (one of the 5,000 PFAS chemicals) in drinking water and 6 chronic health conditions: kidney and testicular cancers, thyroid disorder, preeclampsia, ulcerative colitis, and high cholesterol.
He offered as much time for me to ask questions so I could learn how to use the information in my legislative efforts. I was struck by his modesty, patience, and kindness. A few years later, Attorney Bilott’s work would be the basis of a documentary entitled “The Devil We Know” and the major motion picture “Dark Waters” and he was dubbed “DuPont’s Worst Nightmare” by the New York Times.
After my initial legislative attempts failed to regulate PFAS in drinking water, the following session I worked with a Republican Senator who was up for re-election to sponsor my bill. The bill passed into law, making New Hampshire a leader in regulating four of the more than 14,000 PFAS in our drinking water. A major victory.
However, for about a year, 3M successfully blocked implementation of our new drinking water standards in court, until their case was circumvented in 2019 by legislation that put the new protections into state statute.
In 2019, NH filed two class-action lawsuits to hold the manufacturers of these chemicals accountable for the clean-up in NH.
In 2021, a group of scientists joined me in publishing a peer-reviewed study in a scientific journal entitled, “Risk of Cancer in a Community Exposed to Per- and Poly-Fluoroalkyl Substances.”
Below is an excerpt from a story published by Ani Freedman which includes a discussion of the paper:
“It’s difficult to directly link PFAS to health impacts at this point, but scientists have been building the case for how it impacts people the more it is studied. Mindi Messmer, environmental scientist, health researcher, and former state Representative of Rye and New Castle, has been studying cancer risk and PFAS exposure in New Hampshire for years.
In 2021, Messmer co-authored a study looking at cancer risk in the PFAS-exposed community of Merrimack, finding that residents were vulnerable to multiple health risks, including elevated cholesterol, prostate, testicular, kidney, and breast cancer, decreased fertility, pregnancy-induced hypertension, suppressed immune system (decreasing vaccine efficacy), and hormone system disruption, among others.
When compared with three towns in Maine and one in Vermont with similar demographics to Merrimack, Messmer found that risks for kidney, colon, prostate, renal, and thyroid cancers were higher among Merrimack residents.
“It’s hard to say that this caused that,” Messmer said over the phone, “but all of those things contribute to both building a case at the state and the federal level for increased regulation of these chemicals.”
Messmer said she and her colleagues had been hearing from the Merrimack community that they felt their cancer rates were too high. The study became a means to see if those concerns were valid. “We found that they were,” Messmer said. “I’m pretty confident that those rates are elevated due to, in part, exposure to PFAS.”
Dr. Linda Birnbaum, former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, said, “All PFAS are going to last in the environment essentially forever.”
While Birnbaum thinks PFAS can be useful for production, she doesn’t think they are necessary. “The majority of their use is not essential,” Birnbaum said. “They’re easy, relatively cheap, and they make the companies billions each year.”
While PFAS are regulated by federal and state governments, scientists like Messmer and Birnbaum believe much more needs to be done.
“We only regulate four of the more than 14,000 PFAS chemicals that we know about in existence,” Messmer said. “And there are and have been historically many PFAS chemicals coming out of that plant (in Merrimack, NH).”
While on a recent trip to Italy, I couldn’t escape the fact that Saint Gobain has many other plants around the world.
Despite significant public outcry, on August 16, 2023, the state of NH Department of Environmental Services announced they had approved a permit that would allow Saint Gobain to continue to spew their industrial emissions over southern NH. Again, NH regulators sided with industrial polluters, rather than the people, in the affected communities.
But in an about-face, about a week later, Saint Gobain announced they would be closing their Merrimack NH plant in 2024 leaving more than 150 employees out of work.
But NH will be dealing with the impacts of lax regulation and corporate malfeasance forever.
