Fears About Water Supply Grip Village That Made Teflon Products

One resident called 911 asking whether the village’s water would burn his skin off. Families have lined up to have their blood drawn and their wells tested.

Banks stopped giving out mortgages, and some local residents stopped washing their dishes, their clothes and themselves. Erin Brockovich has been to town.

Such are the unpleasant contours of a public health emergency that is playing out in Hoosick Falls, a quiet river-bend village near the New York-Vermont border that has been upended by disclosures that the public water supply was tainted with high levels of perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, a toxic chemical linked in some studies to an increased risk for cancer, thyroid disease and serious complications during pregnancy.

Last week, a federal class-action lawsuit was filed against Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics and Honeywell International, the current and former owners of the plant that, according to the state, was the source of the PFOA contamination. The toxic chemical is associated with the making of Teflon, which was used in products manufactured at the plant.

After the revelation of lead contamination in Flint, Mich., where Gov. Rick Snyder’s response was widely criticized, the situation in Hoosick Falls has provoked both deep concern about water quality and a heightened scrutiny of how public officials have responded.

In New York, elements of the state’s response have been repeatedly questioned. Nearly a year and a half passed, for instance, from the time the chemical was discovered in the water — by a concerned resident — to the warning from state health officials that residents avoid drinking it.

In the interim, state and local officials assured the public on several occasions that the water was safe — most recently in December, even after the federal Environmental Protection Agency had recommended to the village’s mayor that residents avoid using Hoosick’s well water. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other officials have defended their response, saying they have acted as aggressively as possible with the information they have — noting shifting federal standards on the contaminant, which is as yet unregulated.

But many residents here believe the damage has already been done in Hoosick Falls, a village of 3,500 about 30 miles northeast of the State Capitol in Albany, whose previous claim to fame was being the resting place of Grandma Moses, whose bucolic, childlike images still adorn walls around town.

Now, however, the village’s very name — pronounced who-sick — seems to be a cruel joke.

“I feel like we’re a stigma,” said Cindy Sprague, 67, a retired waitress who has lived here for more than 40 years. “And I feel like we’re going to become a ghost town.”

The situation in Hoosick Falls has led to heightened and some frightened awareness of PFOA and other potentially hazardous chemicals, with worries rippling out to neighboring towns, over state lines and across the nation. On Feb. 20, state officials announced that PFOA had also been found in the water in Petersburgh, N.Y., 10 miles south of Hoosick Falls. On Thursday, Gov. Peter Shumlin of Vermont announced that wells in North Bennington — just east of Hoosick Falls — had also tested positive for the chemical.

Across the nation, concern over contamination has risen in places like Seattle, where the city recently sued the agribusiness giant Monsanto over chemical pollution in the Duwamish River, and in Minnesota, where a state report issued last week found that up to 60 percent of groundwater samples from wells in the central part of the state had unsafe levels of nitrates. Polls show that nearly half of Americans are concerned about their water supply.

And if Flint is the national standard-bearer for water woes, Hoosick Falls seems to be a local surrogate: Last week, officials in Bethlehem, N.Y., a suburb of Albany, tried to tamp down fears about high levels of trihalomethanes, a common byproduct of chlorination in their water. “Current events in other communities, such as Hoosick Falls and Flint, Mich.,” a statement read, “are very different.”

Faced with the worst environmental crisis of Mr. Cuomo’s five-year-old administration, the Department of Health and the Department of Environmental Conservation have been constant presences in Hoosick Falls in recent weeks, testing villagers’ blood and private wells for PFOA. The state has pledged $10 million to install new filtration systems for the village — using recently unlocked state Superfund money — and on Friday, officials announced that a temporary filtration system had been installed and that the village’s water mains were being flushed.

“We’ve been very active in Hoosick Falls from Day 1,” Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, said on Thursday.

According to documents and accounts posted on the village’s website, state health officials were informed of possible contamination as far back as August 2014, but did not raise an alarm.

In January 2015 — shortly after samples from a village well came back showing levels of PFOA that exceeded a federal advisory — the state health agency told village officials the tainted water “does not constitute an immediate health hazard,” referring to state standards for contaminants.

Testing of wells near the plant in the summer and fall of 2015 showed more troubling signs, including a sample at 45 times the recommended short-term exposure. Those tests helped prompt an E.P.A. warning.

State officials still seemed cautious; in early December, the Department of Health put out a fact sheet saying “health effects are not expected to occur from normal use of the water,” though it recommended that residents limit their exposure to PFOA.

Finally, after a public warning from the E.P.A. in mid-December, a state health department spokesman said residents should rely on bottled water. In late January, Mr. Cuomo announced the state Superfund designation and ordered the classification of PFOA as hazardous.

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Taxonomy

• Treatment
• Groundwater
• Aquifer