PFAS Is Impacting All Granite Staters

I'm Anita Burrows and I want to thank Wendy Thomas to another edition of Digging In. And today, we're gonna be talking about PFAS. and we will get into that in a minute.

I want to talk to Wendy about her background. So you're a microbiologist, is that correct? That was one of my jobs. One of my college degrees is in medical biology. So when I got that degree, I moved into, I was a clinical microbiologist. I worked in a commercial lab.

We can see why you have the background there. So you were elected in 2018 and then you, lost the election in 2020 and you came back again in 2022, which is what happens to a lot of people. So glad to have you back.

Well, thank you.

You've been called the mouse that roared.

I want to talk about that. And maybe we can start by talking about what is PFAS what is the risk to us right here in New Hampshire?

 Sure. Well, so First of all, I live in a town that has more PFAS than is normal. If you tested everybody's blood, they would probably have some PFAS in their blood.

Can you explain to people what basically what PFAS is?

So PFAS, and actually, when I say PFAS, I'm talking about... more than 15,000 chemicals. they belong in a class. And PFAS is defined as having a carbon-fluorine bond. And that's as far as I'm going to go into organic chemistry because I hated it in college just like everybody else.

But, you know, this bond is very, very strong. So that's why these chemicals are called forever chemicals, because they do not break down. That You need incredible heat to break them down. PFAS chemicals have a place in our lives. If you have Teflon pans, you've used PFAS chemicals.

 You know, we advise people to move away from Teflon pans because once they start getting corroded, once they start pitting, you're ingesting PFAS. So that's not good.

What's the danger to people in terms of PFAS? Oh, well, there are many, many dangers, but it's not like arsenic or something. If you ingest it, you're going to get immediately ill. PFAS, at low levels but with constant chronic exposure, causes all kinds of cancers.

 They cause immune systems to break down. They cause vaccines to not be as effective. They are called hormone disruptors. And what that means is that they mimic some of the hormones in our body like estrogen and progesterone, which is why we find people who are chronically exposed to PFAS, they have testicular cancer, they have prostate cancer, they have uterine cancer, cervical cancer, and breast cancer, all of the reproductive cancers we're seeing with these chemicals.

They're also finding that pregnant women who drink water that is in the levels we have in our town, throughout their pregnancy, they have a higher risk of having a child born with learning disabilities.

So can you talk for a minute, if you're comfortable doing it, about your own medical history with PFAS?

 Sure, that's fine. In fact, you know, I'm very vocal about my health because I... people need to see what PFAS can do. You can't see PFAS, you can't smell it, you can't taste it, but it's still there and it's very, very dangerous. In our family, we have a private well and we live three miles from this company that has contaminated our town, which is Saint-Gobain.

And the state had told us that only the people within a half mile radius of this company needed to be concerned about contaminated water. Then they did some testing and they said, oh, we're going to extend that just to be safe. It's really a mile out that people have to be concerned.

Now we live three miles from St. Cobain. I have six children. We have a private well. My kids all have lactose intolerance. So we never drank milk. We always drank water. I breastfed all of them. So I drank a ton of this water. I had our well tested in 2016. and it was so contaminated we had to shut it down. And we had the money to install a full house filtration system with a reverse osmosis RO system in our kitchen.

We thought we were doing the right thing, and we had the kids, they could only drink water from the RO. You know, we changed the filters regularly. But then these medical problems kept popping up in our family. My kids have autoimmune issues. my young adult children between the ages of 23 and 32, some of them have cardiac issues, they have joint issues, they have cholesterol issues.

After a while you hear a quack and then another quack and then another quack and people, the doctor’s kind of say, well, that's bad luck and everything, but after a while there's so much quacking, it's a duck and you can sort of make connections.

My husband has high cholesterol. When he was 55 years old, which is very early for this, he had to have a quadruple cardiac bypass. And those are all linked with PFAS, as are the autoimmune diseases, as are joint issues and skin issues, as well as reproductive and fertility issues. Now, last year, I was diagnosed with invasive lobular breast cancer. it was a shock because I have no history in my family at all of this, but you know, cancer happens. I just thought maybe I, you know, got the short end of the stick or something. They did some testing. I don't have any genetic markers for cancer. and then I was working with an advocacy group down in Washington, DC, the environmental working group, and they said, Hey, Wendy, let's check your blood levels for PFAS.

And I was like, I think we should, get the information. But we've been doing the right thing since 2016. So I expected some, but not a lot.

 And what we found out is that I have 12 chemicals in my body that are over the toxic limit that's allowed for humans.

So you can test people to see if it is in their systems because there's some been some pushback on that in the house

You can. Yeah. ,Yes in our first, my first term working with Nancy Murphy, Kathy Stack and Rosemary Rung, we actually passed a bill that health insurance in New Hampshire has to cover PFAS testing.

 So you can go to your doctor …anyone can order it, but you know, if you have cause, you can get it done. The thing is, they're only testing for a few PFAS chemicals. And remember, there's 15,000 of them.

So how are you doing today, health-wise? Well, I'm doing great. I mean, I can never say that I'm cancer-free because cancer doesn't work that way. I've had a bilateral mastectomy because I was like, my breasts are trying to kill me. I don't want them anymore. They're not my friends, get rid of them.

I had to have a revision to that this past May because there was so much scar tissue and muscle damage. And then I had gone up to Dartmouth-Hitchcock in Lebanon and they looked at my blood results and everything. And I had a high concentration of a series of chemicals that hit the ovaries and the fallopian tubes. So I had to have surgery to have both of those prophylactically removed.

 I had a hysterectomy years ago, so I didn't have my uterus. So, I've had three major operations in the last year. You know, I've got scar tissue. I'm not as strong as I used to be. I get fatigue. but right now, I could be cancer-free, but let's face it, with that kind of chemical in my blood, it's just, you know, it's a matter of time. It's a matter of time.

 You also mentioned in committee, Wendy, that some of your pets died and you feel that was related to PFAS. Absolutely. So we go for the little dogs, you know, the little bedroom slipper dogs. And so far I've had to put four of them down because of cancer. Four. I mean, that seems statistically significant. They were younger than they didn't have a normal lifespan you're saying. No, no. And I've talked with our local vet and he says that he sees cancer in the Meramec dogs all the time, dogs and cats, you know, because they're the canaries in the coal mine

They've got this small body weight. They're drinking this contaminated water. So it's gonna affect them more than that.

 has it been demonstrated clearly that the source of this was St. Gobain and the chemicals that they were dumping?

It has been demonstrated that many of the chemicals that we're seeing in our water and in our bodies are because of Saint-Gobain. And that's because they have a very definite fingerprint of which chemicals they're using. So we can logistically tie it back to them. On my street, I live on a short street, there's Four houses that have private wells. In house number one, the dad died of kidney cancer. In house number two, the dad and adult son died of colon cancer. In house number three, the dad is actively dying of prostate cancer. The fourth house is my house, and we've got breast cancer and we've got cardiac issues. So again, that seems statistically significant to me. I would say so. That is actually appalling.

And when people first become aware of what was happening through St. Cobain?

 So in 2016, St. Cobain self-reported that they had high levels of PFAS in their water. So you know it's bad if a company is self-reporting because they don't want this to get out, they knew that PFAS chemicals were bad And they also know that this had happened in Vermont as well as Hoosick Falls in New York state.

 So they have a history of coming into towns, you know, dumping garbage into the towns, polluting them, contaminating them, and then getting up and moving. So, in 2016, they self-reported, but they lied about the amount that they had actually discharged, which, the Boston Globe had verified that they had lied. Recently, they have thermal scrubbers on their building, which are supposed to catch PFAS particles because they incinerate, every night they incinerate garbage.

The particulates, remember you need really, really high heat and it's not as high to break the bonds. So the particulates, which are PFAS chemicals, coat our town every time they incinerate. The rain drives it down into the ground. It gets into the water and it gets into our produce too. Our produce has PFAS in it.

Wow, that's actually amazing. And the thing that I read that blew me away is that there was this widespread understanding of what was happening. And year the Department of, DES Department of Environmental Services granted them a permit to go till 2028. I don't understand that.

I don't either. And actually, that's why one of my bills is that going forward, to give any kind of permits, DES has to look at, they have to demonstrate that there is a public benefit, and they have to evaluate the community impact.

Because in a meeting I was in with DES, they basically said, if you fill out the application and you've got everything, you've checked off all the boxes, you're going to get your permit. And that to me doesn't make any sense at all because people are literally dying. And that's just kind of mind boggling that agency that's supposed to be protecting us from environment, these environmental factors allowed that to go on. Right. And the other thing is that with those thermal scrubbers, they had installed a bypass that they didn't tell anybody, they didn't tell DES about. And so their scrubbers failed. And so they used the bypass and they self-reported that because of, because nothing was being filtered, put 17 pounds of this chemical into our town air. And one drop in an Olympic swimming pool is enough to make it contaminated.

Wow.

We know that this year they just made an announcement they were going to be leaving. Do you think it was pressure that the activists were putting on them and all the bad PR that they were getting that forced them out?

 I would like to say that it was, It was us that did it, but, you know, money talks a lot and, they, they've had it good in New Hampshire. They haven't been challenged. We don't have the regulations. they're, they're in like Flint with, our governor. So, they, they had it good in New Hampshire, which is one of the reasons they came here.

, I actually, I think we helped tip the, tip the decision. However, I think what is more likely is that the EPA is. is posturing that they're going to get on top of this PFAS situation, create limits that are going to be very, very expensive for this company to uphold.

The thing that really infuriated me I was reading the New York Times and this ad popped up for St. Bain and so I clicked on it and they positioning themselves as leaders. in environmental sustainability.

No, I know.

It was like, what? People have done all this damage and people are dying and now your leaders, in sustainability. I mean, good for you for making this PR facade, but that's not who they are.

 It's gaslighting. I mean, they've got more lawyers than, you know, there are, daisies in a field and they have more money than God. And s they're not afraid to challenge or put out things like that.

 You know, for some, you have, a lot of medical bills, have they offered to, to help subsidize that in any way?

. We get bottled water from them. So for the last about three plus years, the only water that we've had to drink or cook in our house is bottled water because we can't trust our well water. So they pay for the bottled water. We get a delivery about once a month and we get about 164 gallons at a time. So we get cases and cases. Where where do you put cases and cases and cases of water? So we have them, you know in our living room and we have them in the foyer

and you have to shower

Right. Well, we have to shower with the house water. I mean we can't use bottled water for that, we're still not clean in this household and the thing is with that When you shower with dirty water like this and I'm not talking dirty mud dirty. I'm talking contaminated dirty.  it vaporizes into the steam and then you're inhaling this stuff.

That is absolutely infuriating and married to an attorney. I assume that they didn't want to voluntarily assist with the medical bills because then they would have been acknowledging their part in this.

Correct. More money involved. Right. And the other thing is, is that this is a French based company. Their headquarters are in Paris. France has really strict environmental laws. If they did this in France, they'd be in jail. But, you know, live free or die, we let them do whatever they want in New Hampshire. I mean, I've heard that DES has been monitoring them, but, you know, they've lied. They've consistently lied. So we have no idea really the extent of the damage that they've done.

 Are there lawsuits going forward to... to hold them accountable?

There is a lawsuit and I'm actually a member of it, but it's been years, and it will be years and years more. It's for the private well owners. And so we have to prove that they contaminated our well first. And then the next step is to prove that there's been physical injury because of it. So, you know, it's gonna be years and years and years.

 I may not even be alive when it's determined, who knows?

Absolutely unbelievable. I don't know what other word to use for it. And so, you know, I am, as you know, I'm in the Commerce Committee, so we heard some of these bills the last session. We're not going to talk too much about them because those conversations are still ongoing, and I don't want to interfere with that. But I guess what surprised me when you came in to testify about your medical history, It just seems that there's a lot of skepticism among legislators that, well, how do you know that PFAS impacted your health? And I don't understand where that's coming from because it seemed very clear to me that there was a direct cause.

Exactly. Well, I think it's a conundrum we have with the vaccines right now. There's a very sort of anti-science. group of people that, you know, and again, remember, you can't see it, you can't taste it, you can't smell it. And then we have people saying, you know, I've lived in Merrimack my whole life and I've had the water and I'm not sick. You're not sick yet. You know, you could very likely, you know, be diagnosed with cancer tomorrow.

 The science is starting to come in. We have higher rates of cancer in Merrimack than what they would expect to see. Right now, they've got kidney and testicular. cancer, and I really question that because when I've gone public with, you know, in my town with my breast cancer story, So many women reached out to me and said, I've got breast cancer, too. I've got breast cancer Oh, I've got breast cancer, you know, so I think that the numbers are off, and I'm not sure how they connect it or how they collect the information

When I first I first ran for office in 2018 the Democratic Party sent out a mailer on my behalf and it was about PFAS. And very honestly, I thought people up in the North country, they don't even know what PFAS is and it's not, I mean, very frank, it's not a concern to them. And I was absolutely astounded to find out that they have found PFAS in our groundwater in Conway and there's some in Jackson. So it's not just a problem of Merrimack. Can you speak to that about how pervasive this is?

Well, so we're the epicenter, and the seacoast, but theirs is a little bit different. Theirs is because the military base out there used firefighting foam. So they've sort of stopped the contamination and now they're doing cleanup and the wells and that kind of stuff. We have ongoing contamination.

Every single day we get more contaminated. So we have very, very high levels of PFAS in our blood. I had said earlier that if you have your blood tested, you will show that you have PFAS in your blood. Some of it comes from, , Gore-Tex. When, you know, we're an outdoor state, we wear, you know, waterproof shoes. our tents are waterproof. Our jackets are waterproof. That's all PFAS chemicals that are doing that. It's a plastic. that coats fabric to make it impermeable. So it's good for waterproofing.

You know, Karen Ebel has a bill going forward that would prohibit certain carpets from going into landfills because carpets are treated with stain resistors, which is, you know, a PFAS chemical. If you get a fast food burger, you know, it's wrapped in sort of that wax paper. Well, it's not wax, it's coated with PFAS. which is impermeable so it doesn't leak or it doesn't, it contains the burger for you.

And there's PFAS in makeup, there's PFAS in, women have something, it's fairly new, it's called period panties. And these are sort of underwear that, so you don't leak or you don't have to wear a pad. Those are coated in PFAS. You know, and to put that chemical right near your reproductive organs like that, that's crazy. Crazy. It's crazy. So we have to get rid of these chemicals, but it's going to be very hard.

Well, I can see why it's hard. we're really struggling even to get some basic thing passed. Again, you know, we won't get into detail, but the carpet bill is now before us in commerce. And before, before the bill was being introduced, I went to some local carpet stores. And I asked the owners, \Do you know what PFAS is? And they did, had no idea. They were very concerned when I told them about it. They didn't even know that it was in the products that they were selling. I just, again, I find it, I find it just very hard to understand such pushback to wanting to change it.

one of the things I heard was, it's everywhere. So what are we gonna do about it?

You can load you can lessen your load is what you can do. You can buy stuff that doesn't have PFAS in it. You can ditch the dental floss, the glide dental floss, which is coated with PFAS and use something that's coated with wax instead.

There are ways we can lessen the load and protect ourselves. I disagree with that sentiment that there's nothing we can do because it's everywhere. I mean, it is so pervasive and they're finding it's all over the place. It is very difficult to clean up because they're testing it down to parts per million. And that's a very, very tiny amount. And so, in the town of Merrimack, we had a warrant article and we voted for our town to pay $14 million to filter our public water. You know, so our public water is now at a lower level. There's still some PFAS in it, but it's at a much lower level. But we had to pay for that, not the corporation that has squatted in our town and done this to us.

I believe you were recognized during the Democratic convention, am I right, for your work? Yes, and that was a surprise. That was a surprise. I didn't know that was going to happen.

Who presented that? I remember. Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania. Wonderful. That's wonderful that he recognized it.

I know you've been chipping away at this and chipping away at this. And I believe that you were one of the sponsors of a law relative to ambient groundwater quality standards, am I right? Yeah.

And that the governor signed., everything is a victory. Were there any bills that passed in the last session relative to PFAS?

 No, the last session, so it shouldn't be a partisan subject, but apparently it is, because the Republicans see any kind of pushback on PFAS levels as infringement on a company's right to make a profit. Until what it gets it. Exactly. So, you know, it shouldn't be a partisan issue, but it appears to be a partisan issue because the Democrats are saying you go ahead and use these chemicals if you want to, but dispose of them safely. You have no right to in to affect people's health because of your business. that's basically the big difference. So in the last term, there was only one Democrat from Merrimack and very little to nothing got done on PFAS. because they see it as infringement on, free market and whatever. They think, you know, if you don't like it, you'll just sell your house and move to a different town.

 Well, who is going to buy a house like I have that you can't use the water? Who's going to buy that? And, you know, I have to say, I respect many, many of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. And I think some of this is coming from the extremists.

They are a faction that is causing enormous havoc in New Hampshire. chaos is their middle name.

, they're doing everything just to create chaos. But you know, the other thing is, so for years and years and years, there's a group in my town, Merrimack Citizens for Clean Water, and we have put out articles and we've put out graphs and we've put out statistics. And, and that's, that's how Democrats work. You know, we rely on facts and figures, and we present it. But the thing is the average person doesn't get that.

They don't understand these charts. And, you know, we can say that PFAS is bad until we're blue in the face. they won't get it. But when I came out and said, I have breast cancer, I've had to have tons of surgery. And my doctors think that this is because of PFAS. Well, now you've got someone's attention.

I thought that your testimony was very powerful. And to me, it was very difficult to just discount it as being an outlier.

I know you've submitted new legislation for the next session. What bills are you most excited about putting forth next year relative to PFAS? I'm submitting two and working with Senator Chandley on another one. So we'll start with Senator Chandley’s bill. She is going to put a bill forward that will define PFAS chemicals, because we do not have a legal definition. And without having a legal definition, and I think it happened in your committee, the lobbyists tried to define it for us and they define it to their benefit. So we can't have that. We need to have a legal scientific definition of PFAS for our books. So that's one of the bills. I mentioned earlier that I'm submitting an LSR for. DES, for any permit, they have to consider public benefit and community impact. They have to. They can no longer just fill out an application It has to be an LSR to make that happen.

I've been talking with people in New York State and they have departments of environmental conservation, departments of environmental protection. I went to a meeting with DES and they're like, we don't care about the people or the environment. It's whether or not they filled out the application, you know, and that's got to change. And then another LSR that I put in, I haven't gotten the wording back yet, but it is a house resolution and a house resolution is an official document from one governing body to another governing body. And basically it's a short history of Saint-Gobain. that they have lied. They've been not truthful. The damage they've done in our town and asking President Biden, Shaheen Hassan, Papas,Custer, and the president of France to keep their eyes on this situation as they close down to make sure that they are fully responsible for remediation. And, and sadly that will probably get quite a bit of pushback, but I don't know. I don't know. I mean, because all I'm asking them is to keep their eyes on the situation.

I, I feel somewhat hopeful going forward. We have seen a little movement in commerce to saying, yes, we have to do something about that. Are you feeling that? that we're going to slowly, I know it's going to happen not at once. Do you think that we'll be slowly chipping away at this?

Well, there's, there's a core group of us that will continue to slowly chip away, but full protections are not going to be in place until we've got a democratic governor, democratic Senate, democratic executive council, and a democratic house, because we are all on top of protecting people, giving people dignity and providing services.

 You know, so if we could have that, that set up, we could pass so many things that would help people and protect them. I will not name him, but a Republican colleague said to me that he was personally going to make sure that this and other bills were killed, which I found hard to hear.

 Again, as you said, I think looking forward, I'm hoping that that with a change in the legislature that we will move forward. it is so discouraging to hear that because I see so much damage from these chemicals and it just defies coincidence. When you've got every house that has a private well has cancer, four dogs that have cancer,

It just defies coincidence. And so, when I hear things like that, it just makes me want to doubt the human experience.

In wrapping up here, just a little anecdote. I bought a rug because my grandkids were coming, and I thought it'd be more comfortable for them to run around on this rug. And I got it and I opened it up and saw that it had PFAS in it and I got rid of it. I sent it back and I said, I am not having them roll around. I'm not having my pets roll around in it. I'm not having any of us roll around in it. So, it's, you have to be aware of it.

Well, you do have to be aware of it and you have to be open to the science that is showing that this is very dangerous, you know, and right now, I don't know how we got here, but we're in a very anti-scientific point in American history. And it's, it's insane. I mean, they're taking good science and they're just saying it's, it's fake news. Europe is much better at protecting their people.

They have strict rules on PFAS and they have testing and they've made more correlation to different diseases

I just wanna thank you so much for all the work that you do on behalf of not just your own community, but for everyone in New Hampshire. And I think we need to understand it's not a Merrimack problem. It's not just a hamster problem. This is a pervasive problem that we need to address head on. So I hope you keep going and do what you're doing and you're inspiring other people like myself to get more involved and to fight.

 Well, it is literally a case of life or death.

Thank you for being here on Digging In, and I will see you soon in the new session in 2024. Excellent. Thank you for having me.