A French industrial fabric maker that poisoned drinking water supplies with PFAS “forever chemicals” across 65 square miles (168 square kilometers) in southern New Hampshire misled regulators about the amount of the toxic substance it was using, a group of state lawmakers and advocates has charged of public health.
The company, Saint Gobain, now admits it used far more PFAS than regulators previously knew, and officials fear thousands more residents outside the contamination zone may be drinking contaminated water in a region plagued by cancer groups and other health problems believed to result from PFAS contamination.
Saint Gobain in 2018 agreed to provide clean drinking water to the 65-square-mile area as part of a consent agreement with New Hampshire regulators, and damning evidence has emerged that suggests it used more PFAS than previously acknowledged in a set of documents released in a separate class action.
“People are sick, there are really high rates of cancer and people have literally died, so when you see what’s going on and the company is acting this way — it’s really upsetting,” said Mindy Messner, a state representative who analyzed the documents and sent them to the New Hampshire Attorney General and state regulators.
Saint Gobain has denied wrongdoing. PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 12,000 chemicals used in dozens of industries to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. Highly toxic compounds do not break down naturally and have been linked to cancer, thyroid disease, kidney problems, reduced immunity, birth defects and other serious health problems. They have been called “perpetual chemicals” because of their longevity in the environment.
The Saint Gobain Performance Plastics plant in Merrimack, New Hampshire, has for decades treated its products with PFOA, a type of PFAS, to make them healthier. The company released PFOA from its smokestacks, and the chemicals, once they hit the ground, moved through the soil and into aquifers. Hundreds of residential and municipal wells draw from groundwater.
While the company and the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services (DES) negotiated the 2018 consent agreement, company officials repeatedly said they did not use pure PFOA or had no record of using it, but instead used a diluted PFOA mixture of which the toxic chemical contains only about 2%.
In a 2016 letter to state regulators, Saint Gobain wrote that “it has never been used [pure PFOA] as a feedstock at any time” in Merrimack, and in 2014 told the EPA that it “is not and has never been … a user of PFOA per se anywhere in the United States.”
Diluted PFOA will not spread as widely as pure PFOA, and the modeling that defines the boundaries within which Saint Gobain will be responsible for ensuring clean drinking water supplies and removing the contamination was developed with the diluted solution as input.
But documents released as part of the lawsuit show Saint Gobain knew it was using pure PFOA years before the consent decree.
Among the evidence are 2003 emails between company officials that specifically state the Merrimack facility treated its fabric with pure PFOA. Meanwhile, a former lawyer for Saint Gobain who is now a whistleblower testified that sales records from 3M, which sold PFOA to Saint Gobain, show the company purchased “hundreds, if not thousands” of pounds of pure PFOA. 3M’s sales records are under seal in the class action.
And a DuPont salesperson who also sold PFAS products to Saint Gobain testified last year that he “learned that they were using [pure PFOA] … and we add it to our products”.
The modeling used to develop the boundaries of the original contamination zone was “fundamentally flawed” because it did not account for pure PFOA, an engineer hired by Saint Gobain testified in February.
Saint Gobain no longer denies that it used pure PFOA; however, in a statement to the Guardian, the company wrote that it “strongly denies any allegations that it withheld data or misled the New Hampshire Department of the Environment.” The information is “not new” as it is in 90,000 documents provided by DES since 2016, the company wrote.
Mesmer said she was skeptical of this explanation: “If you throw 90,000 sheets at someone, does that really make them aware?”
In response to a follow-up question about why it developed the consent decree modeling by assuming diluted PFOA instead of pure PFOA, the company said that the type of PFOA is only “one factor considered in setting the limits.”
In their July letter to the attorney general’s office and DES, Mesmer and other lawmakers asked for an investigation and expansion of the boundaries of the contamination zone. The state has “a strong legal basis to hold Saint Gobain fully responsible for their pollution, including beyond the current one [boundary]”, the letter says. The attorney general’s office told the Guardian it was reviewing the documents, while DES did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Some are also frustrated with DES. The documents show it knew it didn’t have full records of Saint Gobain purchases from before 2004, but entered into the consent agreement anyway.
“The regulatory agency is broken and I’m really angry at the state departments that are supposed to be there to protect the environment and the residents,” said Loren Allen, a Merrimack resident and clean water activist. “Think of the harm that could have been prevented.”
The documents reveal that a company executive said in 2006 that Saint Gobain “should downplay the potential health risks” of PFOA compared to other PFASs and claimed there were “no proven” health risks. But a company memo from 1995 shows that management issued a decree to stop using PFOA “because of its toxicity and long half-life.”
The company also conducted PFOA blood tests on its employees in 2006, but the results remain sealed, and the plant’s previous owner in the 1980s investigated why male employees were experiencing impotence and “polymer fever.”
“Everybody knew,” Mesmer said.
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