News

Briefing Key Congressional Committees on the Need for Action on Poisons in Our Water

At the House Cannon Building with Hope Grosse and Joann Stanton of Buxmont Coalition, Melanie Benesh of Environmental Working Group and Sharon Lerner of theintercept.com

On Friday November 22, I joined my colleagues Hope Grosse and Joanne Stanton of Buxmont Coalition for Safer Water to brief Congressional staffers in Washington DC. We met with staff from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the House PFAS Task a Force and the House Government oversight committee

We briefed them on three topics of concern:

EPA’s abdication of its mission to protect us from unregulated contaminants

The PFAS crisis has called attention to the thousands of chemicals which are discharged into our environment every day, whose health effects are unknown. Under current law, EPA can only set a maximum contaminant level (MCL) for these chemicals if it conducts toxicity testing on rodents This creates a Catch-22 where EPA cannot protect us against these chemicals without testing, and EPA will not do the testing needed to protect us. So WE become the guinea pigs who drink chemicals of unknown toxicity, only to find out decades later how they will affect our health.

Here’s an excellent presentation by Dr. Johnsie Lang on this topic.

Failing to take action on other PFAS known to cause adverse health effects

Although PFOA and PFOS are by far the best known PFAS, there are thousands of others. Industry using these chemicals have reported adverse health effects from FORTY of them, yet EPA has taken no action. So nothing is being done to test the water or air for these chemicals, putting all of us at risk. See this excellent article by Sharon Lerner.

Failing to hold the Department of Defense Accountable for Pollution

Finally EPA has allowed the DOD to be the fox in charge of the chicken coop. The DOD, not EPA, calls the shots about the manner and pace of investigations and remediation, with the result that, in our corner of SE Pennsylvania between the Willow Grove and Warminster Naval Air bases, nothing has been done to control discharges of high levels of PFAS migrating onto adjacent properties. See my statement to the Committees.