“How do we make them see?”
Moving beyond theboundaries that fragmentPFOA groundwater contamination in Vermont and New York
by Caroline White-Nockleby
Independent Study, Fall 2016
Advisor: Nicolas Howe
Table of Contents
Introduction
Maps
Timelines
Thresholds
Filters
Envelopes
Bibliography
Introduction
“I thought I would hand the mayor a file and be done with it.” This is how Hoosick Falls resident Michael Hickey tells me he expected his initial meeting with the Village Board would go. That was back in March 2014, when he first requested that the town’s drinking water be tested for perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA. Michael had been grieving the loss of his father, who had recently died at age 68 of kidney cancer. When he had realized that two other local residents had also recently died of this cancer, he’d Googled ‘Teflon’ and ‘cancer’. PFOA was the first chemical listed. Michael soon learned that the Saint-Gobain Plastics plant in town used PFOA during the production process to coat nonstick pans and waterproof fabrics with Teflon. The plant was on the same street as his father’s house – and the wells that supplied Village drinking water.
It had been a difficult decision, Michael remembers, to raise his concerns with the board. He was loyal to the town; his family went back generations. Both his parents had worked for Saint-Gobain – the family name was inscribed inside the plant. He was worried, too, about the possible social repercussions for his three-year-old son and his nephew in high school. “[Saint-Gobain is] the biggest payer on the tax roll,” he tells me; “it was a big accusation to make.” But Michael trusted Hoosick Village’s Mayor David Borge. The mayor had known his father; his son had been Michael’s dad’s hospice nurse. Borge’s family, too, had been in Hoosick a long time. So Michael was surprised, that March, when the town board refused to test the water. He eventually decided to pay for the tests himself. Even then, though, he was not allowed to sample water from town wells because, as he was informed, “citizens don’t have access to raw water.” Instead he sampled water from his tap – and from the bathroom at a local McDonald’s.
The samples tested positive for PFOA; the highest concentration was 540 parts per trillion (ppt),[1] well over the EPA’s existing health advisory of 400 ppt[2] (this guideline has since been reduced to 70 ppt).[3] In August, Michael again approached the board. Over the next eighteen months, the New York Department of Health and the Village board tried to quietly address the problem, assuring citizens that the contamination was not a serious concern. Only in December 2015 did the Federal EPA finally step in to issue a ‘no-drink’ order to Hoosick residents.[4] From there, the news of the contamination spread; the media picked up the story, and nearby towns began testing their water for PFOA. In February 2016, elevated PFOA levels were measured in the Vermont town of North Bennington;[5] in late March, PFOA was found in Pownal, Vermont.[6][7] Meanwhile, the boundaries of the problem in Hoosick Falls continued to expand; five separate sites in town have now been declared state Superfunds[8] – including the town dump, where in July PFOA concentrations were measured at 21,000 ppt.[9]
By the time I meet Michael Hickey, nearly three years after he first came forward, he has accumulated dozens of files about PFOA. We sit on his living room couch in a room that smells pleasantly of vanilla candle. Behind us, his son eats a bowl of macaroni. Some progress has been made, he explains: the establishment of state Superfund sites; the installation of temporary water filters; the filing of class action lawsuits that seek financial recourse. But many more things have barely changed all; little progress has been made to understand how the contamination might spread over time, establish a long-term plan for clean drinking water and remediation, or force the responsible companies to pay. Indeed, not everyone is happy Michael spoke up – especially those who work at Saint-Gobain. “When we go to little league games,” he tells me, “some people put their heads down; they don’t look up.” The months since he first tried to meet with Mayor Borge, he reflects, have been exhausting. “Three years is a long time.”
~
I entered this PFOA crisis during a season of waiting. I conducted my first interview in September 2016, a few days after the last of the State Senate water quality hearings in Hoosick Falls. I’m leaving, now, weeks before the legislative sessions in New York and Vermont will begin again. My twelve-week window into this event has been characterized, for the most part, by planning. In Hoosick Falls, activists strategized about the upcoming legislative session; others debated whether the town should become a Federal Superfund Site. In Pownal, officials dealt with the technical difficulties of maintaining the newly installed water filters. In Bennington, legislators brainstormed ways to force Saint-Gobain, one of the responsible companies, to pay.
The following pages could, indeed, easily be filled with descriptions of various stakeholders sitting and waiting. Of an activist stuck in traffic in a sticky car seat; a local teacher folded into an auditorium chair; three residents wedged into a gas station booth. People wait for blood results to show up in their mailbox; they stand in line for free bottled water at the grocery store; they mark the periodically scheduled community meetings on calendars weeks in advance. At the meetings, some wait hours to ask a question. Many of my interactions have taken place in an atmosphere of waiting; of surficial, uneasy calm – what the writer Rob Nixon calls “the hushed havoc and injurious invisibility that trails slow violence.”[10]
Yet somehow from the long drives and drafty meetings I’ve found myself extracting the instances of tangible tension, and collapsing somewhat the expanses between. It’s a lot easier to write about action than uniform stretches of time. But I was drawn to these moments of tension – about whether to drink the filtered water; when the contamination began; how to define the limits of contaminated areas – for other reasons as well. I was surprised, at first, by the extent of the conflictsI witnessed or learned about. Before starting my interviews, I imagined that the most visible clashes would be those between the companies responsible for releasing PFOA into the groundwater and the citizens who had been drinking from the tap. I thought these conflicts might consist of broad, sweeping debates about responsibility; about risk; about illness and death. Yet the conflicts I learned about arose in many contexts: between the department of health and citizens; within factions of government; among neighbors. At times it seemed that it was the smallest, most concrete negotiations that incited the most anger.
That’s not to say that what I learned of this crisis was characterized solely by tension and the erosion of relationships. I was often awed by the displays of solidarity I saw – between representatives and their constituents; between communities separated by states and oceans; between those with the highest PFOA blood levels and their neighbors with unaffected wells. I was amazed, also, at the generosity extended to me. Those I spoke with welcomed me into homes and strategy meetings, overlooking my noisy note taking and the silver ‘Williams College’ minivan that always seemed to take up two parking spots.
But efforts to engage in solidarity and collaboration, it seems to me, often struggle against other forces that fracture social bonds. The contexts in which this tension erupts reveal the ways this contamination has affected not only the health of individuals, but also the cohesion of entire affected communities. This was something, too, that I didn’t fully expect. I thought the symptoms of PFOA itself would be borne largely by individuals – principally through the seven diseases that have been found to have ‘probable links’ to PFOA exposure, a list key Hoosick Falls activist Michele Baker terms, with bitter irony, “the seven deadly sins.” I thought I would learn, mostly, about the individual anxieties, fear, and pain of grappling with this uncertain risk.
These conflicts reveal the way that the symptoms of PFOA extend beyond the individual body. The impacts of PFOA on relationships, I learned, can be just as real as those suffered within the porous boundaries of skin; as the anthropologist Kai Erikson puts it, “sometimes the tissues of community can be damaged in much the same way as the tissues of mind and body.”[11] The contamination exacerbated existing divisions of class and location within communities. It sowed silence between those who might once have chatted at the grocery store. It caused conflict even between close friends. As I became immersed in these moments of conflict I began to wonder: what causes PFOA to be so damaging not only to individual bodies, but to relationshipsandcommunities? What enables the scale of its material impacts to extend so dramatically beyond the molecule’s own microscopic size? How can the harm the contamination has causedat the community level seem, almost, to transcend the harmful qualities of the pollutant itself?
Making sense of these fragments of conflict, to begin to answer these questions, is daunting. It is, perhaps, akin to the efforts of Bennington College geologist Tim Schroeder and others to reconstruct groundwater flow in Vermont. This is vital work that will help the state predict when and where the contamination might expand. By measuring the water concentrations of PFOA, heavy metals, and other elements in certain wells and ponds, the geologistshope to map the rate and directions of groundwater flow. Yet around here, bedrock dynamics are complex. Uneven fractures in the rock can pool or divert water; heavy rain can change the rate of flow.[12] These subtleties are hidden in the empty spaces between the sampled sites.
Perhaps Tim and his team will continue to send cups of water to the lab, narrowing the margins of uncertainty. Yet mapping the dynamics that produce moments of conflict is more difficult. There is no one perspective on these issues. There are multiple overlapping,and at times conflicting, reasons why contamination has such an intense impact on communities – and why the tension is made manifest in particular settings. I can only begin to understand the extent of this complexity.
I wonder, though, if the erosive power of this contamination stems in part from the way PFOA reveals the extent to which individual lives can be shaped – and shortened – by power. The ability of states, multinational corporations, or other actors to affect human life is what Michel Foucault terms ‘biopower’: “a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.”[13] This power, Foucault explains, is often expressed as an opportunity; as an ability and commitmentto extending and enhancing lifespans. Yet implicit in the capacity to sustain life is the ability to erode it. PFOA contamination can be understood, in part, as an expression of biopower over individual lives. When it is released into the environment, PFOA begins a process of transport that can lead it to human bodies.[14] In humans, the chemical can erode the quality of people’s lives through devastating diseases – or the uncertainty that such a disease may one day arrive. As it infiltrates homes and enters bodies, indeed, PFOA exposes the instability of the temporal and spatial boundaries that insulate communities, and the vulnerability of seemingly private spaces to external agencies.[15] It can also reveal the extent to which power disproportionately impacts environments in already marginalized communities, eroding lifespans and agency along linesof gender, race, and class.
The chemical qualities of PFOA shape its influence, exerting another type of agency that can extend, or complicate, the initial expression of power. PFOA’s particular qualities, including chemical inertness and high solubility, cause it to linger between decades and infiltrate communities, homes, and bloodstreams. As scholar Linda Nash, speaking about the spread of agricultural chemicals in California, explains, “property lines and the posting of metal signs [do] not stop pesticides from moving into soil, water, air and human bodies.”[16]Like pesticides, PFOA can pass through intimate spatial borders, flowing into private homes and entering bodies. Theseboundaries – the lines that demarcate states, neighborhoods, and bodies – help ground all of us in a particular place. They allow us to constrain our sense of self; to tether our identities to the people around us and to the weekly duty of mowing the lawn. These spaces, indeed, are often imagined to beinsulated from outside forces; to be places where we can exert control and agency over our lives. Homes are supposed to be governed by their inhabitants; parents, not corporate officials, choose wallpaper and decide on dinner times.[17] The infiltration of PFOA across these borders exposes how the most private spaces are subject to institutional and corporate control.
PFOA durability also dwarfs the temporal resolution of everyday life. As Rob Nixon puts it, “we all inhabit multiple temporal orders that often coexist in frictional states, shifting and sliding like tectonic plates.”[18] The presence of PFOA in the environment may span multiple human lifetimes, lasting decades or hundreds or even thousands of years. These spans of time are not compatible with weekly schedules filled with little league games and school plays. From the perspective of the present, where we are immersed in the minutiae of daily life – in mornings notched by the snooze button and hour blocks set aside for lunch – conceiving of such lengths of time is nearly impossible. Confronting the lingering nature of PFOA contamination forces people to insert their own lives onto geologic timescales; to view each year not as an expression of individual agency but as a moment in a process of pollution that may extend across generations.
In part because of this temporal and spatial diffusion, it is hard to envision exactly who is responsible for allowing PFOA to enter water pipes.Many have had a role to play: inventors; consumers; CEOs; regulators; factory managers; company scientists. Yet for the most part, the hands and faces that released PFOA into the environment remain blurry. Because the contamination is spread so thinly over space and time, it is difficult pinpoint a specific person or moment to blame – to, as Bennington-based Vermont State Representative Bill Botzow puts it, map the “contours of responsibility.” Assessing responsibility is like trying to hold water in a hand. The water may seem from a distance to have heft and particular dimensions. But try to pick it up – to constrain it in a palm – and it will seep quietly away, trickling through cracks between fingers. Likewise, the scope of responsibility seems from a distance, to be easy to define. Yet everyone involved is limited by the rigid constraints of their job; of their knowledge; of their smallness. Examine any one actor closely, and the heft of blame begins to seep away.
Like responsibility, the risks and impacts imposed by PFOA can become less clear at the level of individuals. This was, for me, at first counterintuitive. In many senses, the risks imposed by PFOA seem on the surface to be private. Indeed, the anxiety of monitoring for risk is often borne alone; at the kitchen sink; at a child’s bath time; in the doctor’s office. Pain and fear are deeply isolating. Yet the waysin which the impacts of PFOA unfoldbind each individual to those around them. These risksoften manifest most clearly at the level of communities. For any one person, it is impossible to predict whether PFOA will cause any measurable harm. Health problems are the result of a complex combination of factors – including chance. Biopower can only be fully expressed when looking at communities and populations; only at this scale are the impacts of particular policies or actions revealed. Indeed, many I talked to use the same word to describe the way in which PFOA hasaffected entire communities: stigma. ‘Stigma’ shares many of the qualities ofthe contamination itself. It is invisible; diffuse; malleable. It seems to permeate all aspects of life.
Like the risks caused by PFOA, the mechanisms that exist to regulate its levels in water supplies also affect entire communities at once. In some ways, regulating PFOA levels can be seen another aspect of the exertion of biopower; theprecise level of contaminationdeemed to be ‘acceptable’helps determine the health risks for those exposed. Small shifts in these threshold values can have concrete impacts on the lives of everyone who lives in the contaminated part of the watershed.[19] Such regulation occurs across multiple dimensions, including both spatial and temporal, and in multiple spheres – political, legal, and scientific. In Vermont and New York, the spatial limits of contamination are sometimes drawn onto maps in fluorescent circles; the maps themselvesin turn sliced by the political boundaries between states and towns. In timelines, decades of seeping are at times subdivided into events the length of baseball games. Thresholds for safe concentrations of PFOA in drinking water, vegetables, and blood are calibrated by state and federal agencies to the parts per trillionth.