The company, Saint Gobain, now admits it used far more PFAS than regulators knew, and officials fear thousands more residents outside the contamination zone may be drinking contaminated water in an area plagued by cancer clusters and other health problems believed to stem from PFAS pollution. 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 that it used more PFAS than it had previously admitted emerged in a series of documents published 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 acts like this — it’s really upsetting,” said Mindi Messmer, a former 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. The highly toxic compounds do not break down naturally and are linked to cancer, thyroid disease, kidney problems, reduced immunity, birth defects and other serious health problems. They have been called “forever chemicals” because of their longevity in the environment. Saint Gobain Performance Plastics’ factory in Merrimack, New Hampshire, had for decades treated its products with PFOA, a type of PFAS, to make them stronger. The company released PFOA from its smokestacks, and the chemicals, once in the ground, moved into the ground and into aquifers. Hundreds of residential and municipal wells draw from groundwater. As 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 a history of using it, but instead used a diluted PFOA mixture that the toxic chemical comprised only about 2%. In a 2016 letter to state regulators, Saint Gobain wrote that “it was never 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 determined the limits within which Saint Gobain would be responsible for providing clean drinking water and remediating 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 employees that specifically state that the Merrimack facility treated its fabric with pure PFOA. Meanwhile, a former attorney for Saint Gobain who is now filing complaints testified that sales records from 3M, which sold PFOA to Saint Gobain, show the company bought “hundreds if not thousands” of pounds of pure PFOA. 3M’s sales records are sealed in the class-action form. And a salesperson for DuPont, which also sold PFAS products to Saint Gobain, testified last year that “he had learned that they were using [pure PFOA] … and adding it to our products.” The modeling used to develop the boundaries of the original contamination zone is “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 allegation that it withheld data or misled the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services.” The information was “not new” because it was in 90,000 documents it provided to DES since 2016, the company wrote. Messmer said she’s skeptical of that explanation: “If you throw 90,000 cards at someone, does that really alert them?” In response to a follow-up question about why it developed the consent decree modeling assuming diluted PFOA instead of pure PFOA, the company said the type of PFOA was only “one factor considered in setting the limits.” In their July letter to the attorney general’s office and DES, Messmer and other lawmakers called for an investigation and expanding the boundaries of the contamination zone. The state has “a concrete legal basis to hold Saint Gobain fully responsible for their pollution, even beyond the current [boundary]”, the letter states. 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 disappointed with DES. Documents show he knew he didn’t have Saint Gobain’s complete PFAS records prior to 2004, but still entered into the consent agreement. “The regulatory agency is broken and I’m really angry at the government agencies that are supposed to be there to protect the environment and the residents,” said Merrimack resident and clean water activist Laurene Allen. “Think of the damage that could have been prevented.” The documents reveal a company executive who said in 2006 that Saint Gobain “should downplay the potential health risks” of PFOA relative to other PFASs and maintains that there are no “proven” health risks. However, a 1995 company memo shows that the administration had issued an order to stop the use of PFOA “because of its toxicity and long half-life.” The company also had blood tests for PFOA on its employees in 2006, but the results remain sealed, and the factory’s previous owner in the 1980s investigated why his male employees were experiencing impotence and “polymer fever.” “Everybody knew,” Mesmer said.
