EMOTIONS AND PFCs FLOW THROUGH THE SEACOAST
OK I admit it. I am emotional. But don’t tell the Business & Industry Association of New Hampshire. As a woman working in a largely male-dominated field since the late 1980s I have spent most of my career trying not to be emotional. Largely these days the field has evolved though there are certainly challenges that women face in male-dominated workplaces like gender wage gaps and other issues.
This year, my legislation was criticized for being emotional and not based on science by many men and one woman who testified in opposition in the Senate Health and Human Services Committee Hearing in the New Hampshire State House. When speaking with Tom Sherman, M.D., Board Member, Less Cancer the other day, he turned to me and said, “it’s OK to be emotional you know, that means you care.” He’s right. I am emotional. I do care, but that doesn’t mean my emotions are not based in scientific fact.
The fact of the matter is that the science base concerning the health effects from perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) is well developed and shows clear health issues from ingestion. A recent paper and results from the C8Science Panel epidemiologic study cite health effects which include, ADHD, cancers and possible neonatal lung collapse, among others, known from exposure to just two of them.
PFCs are not naturally occurring. According to the Minnesota Department of Health, PFCs are a family of manmade chemicals used for decades to make products that resist heat, oil, stains, grease and water. PFCs are extremely stable and do not break down in the environment. They accumulate in the human body and have been detected in much higher levels than expected in children who attended two daycare centers at Pease and adults who drank PFC-contaminated drinking water in their workplace at the former Pease Air Force base.
High levels of PFCs contaminate our surface water that flows through our idyllic seacoast region of New Hampshire. As newly retired Great Bay waterkeeper Jeff Barnum recently said, the public is largely unaware of the contamination that flows behind their homes and through our seacoast cities and towns. In New Hampshire, our drinking water supply is intimately connected with surface water. This surface water originates from Superfund Sites including the Coakley dump site in Greenland and the former Pease Air Force Base in Newington. We only know this due to Herculean efforts of the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) not the state or federal regulators that are charged with protecting us.
CLF has sampled our seacoast surface water bodies with private funding donated by seacoast area residents who care about the environment in which we live and raise our families. Levels of PFCs detected in our surface water are more than 100 times higher than levels where states like Michigan would tell you not to eat fish caught in these Seacoast New Hampshire waterways. Some of these waterways are stocked with trout for recreational fishing. Currently, we don’t know if the PFCs have made it into shellfish in Great Bay or other areas.
Most troubling is that the state and federal regulators know and have not acted to protect the public. They have not acted to protect the public either from direct contact with contaminated waters or eating possibly contaminated fish caught in these waterways.
The Pan Am rail bed, is part of the Seacoast Greenway which runs alongside the Coakley dump in Greenland. It is often flooded with likely contaminated water. This is unbeknownst to the public who recreate along this trail.
The city of Portsmouth has recently discussed that they have a “vision to restore” Hodgson Brook. Peter Britz says of Hodgson Brook that the “biggest ongoing contamination issue the brook faces is chloride contamination from road salt.” Not so, PFCs were detected by CLF at very high levels in Hodgson Brook. Former Great Bay waterkeeper Jeff Barnum said, “I certainly wouldn’t let my kids play in those brooks … I wouldn’t let my pets or cows or horses drink that water.”
So, what do we do? I want to educate the public about these issues and engage everyone in advocacy to get these issues addressed. New Hampshire Safe Water Alliance, a group that I helped form last year, has shown how important and effective advocacy can be. Find us on twitter (@NHSafeWaterA) or Facebook at New Hampshire Safe Water Alliance.
