Sydney Martinez, Campus Carrier news editor
PFAS Georgia, an environmental legal group, held a town hall on March 31 in Rome’s Forum. A water expert, trial lawyers and environmental advocate, Erin Brokovich, spoke about the high level of polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) found in the city’s waters. In the meeting, the residents of Rome learned about Dalton’s PFAS problem — caused by the city’s carpet industry — and were urged to take action.
Rome is not unfamiliar with PFAS, man-made chemicals that break down slowly over time and are often harmful to the human body. The city sued carpet manufacturers based in Dalton in 2019 for contaminating the Oostanaula River, which was the source of Rome’s drinking water.
According to Insurance Journal, in the settlement, PFAS chemicals suppliers 3M and Dupont paid the city of Rome $100 million to build a reverse-osmosis water treatment plant and other amounts for damages caused to the city. While some Dalton-based carpet companies, such as Mohawk Industries and Shaw Industries, have stopped using PFAS as of 2019, the continued presence of the forever chemicals remain affecting the environment and water.
At the town hall, Ben Finley and Nick Jackson, lawyers from the Finley Firm and part of the PFAS Georgia team, spoke about the bills in the Georgia General Assembly they are advocating against and what actions a person in Rome could take to fight against corporations that are dumping PFAS into rivers.
“The polluters’ efforts to take away your legal rights are something that I’d like everybody to know about,” Finley said. “There are those that are trying to advance bills, large corporate interests. They’re trying to keep everybody in this room from having a claim, from bringing a claim.”
Finley discussed House Bills 211 and 1212, which are working against the people who have been damaged by the corporations’ PFAS water dumping.
HB211 gives PFAS-using companies immunity from being sued for using forever chemicals in their products. Under HB1212, landowners receiving compensation for PFAS contamination would have to pay a 50% excise tax to the state. According to Finley, Senate Bill 577 disallows local governments from bringing PFAS lawsuits.
Brockovich spoke at the town hall as a non-attorney spokesperson, she discussed the importance of Rome residents standing up to large corporations that have been polluting the city’s water. Brockovich also explained the effects PFAS can have on the human body.
“This is a chemical that caused testicular cancer, thyroid cancer, infertility,” Brockovich said. “That’s scaring me, because now we have farmers reporting their cows are sterile. Animals aren’t reproducing. One of the biggest things about this is it affects the endocrine system: ovaries, uterus, hormones, thyroid, fertility. We need to rise up, and all of us stand together, and that’s the only way this is going to work.”
Bob Bowcock, PFAS Georgia’s water resource manager, spoke at the event. He and his team are testing water around Rome for PFAS. Finely said that Bowcock and his team will test wells on private property if the landowner so chooses.
Bowcock explained that once PFAS gets into the food chain, it becomes very hard to remove it, which can result in serious health effects for humans. In Maine, PFAS in milk were traced to contaminated alfalfa consumed by cattle.
“I will tell you that when we discovered the case up in Maine, it wasn’t because we went out and sampled somebody’s water well and said, ‘You’ve got four parts per trillion in your drinking water well,’” Bowcock said. “No, it was found at 400 parts by the USDA in a bottle of milk at the grocery store, and we literally traced it back from that grocery store to that farm.”
The current regulation over PFAS covers six different chemicals. The Maximum Contaminant Levels (MCLs) for PFOA and PFOS are four parts per trillion, while the MCLs for PFHxS, PFNA and HFPO-DA are 10 parts per trillion. Mixtures that contain two or more of the chemicals above are labeled as a hazard.
Sophomore Bella Brown, who attended the town hall and comes from Dalton, was inspired to talk to her family members about PFAS contamination being found in cattle.
“Knowing that this pollution is happening and that people like my family will be affected, it kind of just hits me in the heart a little bit,” Brown said. “When [Brockovich] was talking about how the chicken products and the cow products are no longer edible because of PFAS, that honestly did scare me because my family buys from local farmers.”
Brown said that if cows in Maine are contaminated with PFAS, and Dalton is experiencing a similar problem, she is afraid that local cattle are also unsafe to eat.
“When I go to Dalton now, I’m going to probably talk to a few farmers that my family know and ask them if they have gotten their soil tested,” Brown said. “Have they gotten their cows tested to make sure that these chemicals aren’t on their land and affecting their product?”
Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Studies Courtney Cooper said that governments have not regulated PFAS until recently.
“They had not been regulated by our regulatory authorities until within the last decade or so,” Cooper said. “All those rules are just being developed, and measuring these things is really hard. It’s expensive to sample or measure in parts per trillion.”
Cooper explained that small amounts of PFAS are linked to a wide range of health effects on the body and human development. PFAS are hard to regulate globally due to their presence in a variety of products.
“Polychloride biphanols are now banned from production because they were strongly correlated with enough health effects that we decided across the globe we weren’t going to produce them anymore,” Cooper said. “The same truth can’t really come about for some of the PFAS manufacturing, or it hasn’t yet because they’re so small and they’re in so many things.”
According to PBS, the EPA cannot enforce laws to prevent companies from using PFAS in their products, but it can regulate the levels of contaminants allowed for consumption by residents. Many states have passed legislation to limit PFAS or ban them in product manufacturing.
Berry’s water is provided from its own privately managed reservoir. The water from Possum Trot Lake is treated by the water treatment plant on Mountain Campus. Samples from the lake are tested quarterly for PFAS. According to Chris Peterson, water plant supervisor, the results have shown no PFAS contamination as of Feb. 5.
“So far, we’ve had excellent results,” Peterson said. “You can’t get better than none detected.”
Testing for PFAS began in 2021 when the chemicals began to be regulated by the EPA.
“[The EPA] tests for [PFAS] to develop the data, so they can do the research, so they can make their recommendations either to regulate them or not, and what happened was that PFAS got moved from the unregulated to the regulated side, and we started testing in 2021.” Peterson said.
Peterson said that because Berry has its own water source, its supply is not contaminated by the water that comes downstream from the Etowah and Oostanaula rivers.
“If there’s no PFAS here, that means that there’s none in the reservoir, and there’s none in the chemicals that I’m using to treat the water,” Peterson said.
Finley said that he is glad that there was a large turnout of about 625 people and hopes that everyone can work together to remediate the issue.
“It’s something that’s important for all of us to continue to work together,” Finley said. “This is not a political issue; it’s not a political race. It is an issue of the human race. It’s an issue we can all benefit from if we work together.”