The Journal. - One Town's Fight Against 'Forever' Chemicals

Episode Date: September 4, 2023

Happy Labor Day! We’re bringing you an episode that was originally published in June 2022. Peshtigo, Wisconsin, is grappling with a crisis: Chemicals known as PFAS have leached from a nearby industrial site into the town's groundwater. WSJ's Kris Maher traveled to the town to report on what the community is doing and how the contamination has affected people's health and lives. Further Reading:  - A Wisconsin Town With Contaminated Drinking Water Must Decide Its Future  - Startups Race to Kill ‘Forever Chemicals’  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Kate. We're off for Labor Day, but we wanted to remind you of this episode that we made in June of last year. It's about PFAS, the forever chemicals that are all around us, in much of our water supply, in our clothing, and even in our food wrappers. In this episode, we look at one town in Wisconsin caught in a battle over PFAS. Here it is. Peshtigo, Wisconsin sits on the shores of Green Bay. It's a small place. Just about 4,000 people live there. On its website, the town promises a vibrant rural community full of friendly people. Our colleague Chris Marr visited the town this spring. It's a quite beautiful

place. There are stands of white pine and the shoreline of the bay is very pretty. It's made up of these old summer cabins which have now mostly become permanent homes. And it's just in this very peaceful, shady grove of trees.

Just outside of Peshtigo is an industrial facility set on a big campus, 380 acres with low-rise buildings and a stretch of tarmac plopped right in the middle of the Wisconsin woods. It's one of the main employers in the area. The facility is operated by a company named Johnson Controls, and this was

the reason Chris was in town. Since the early 60s, this facility was used to test a firefighting foam, and that foam contained something called PFAS. And PFAS stands for per- and polyfluoral substances. And this is a class of thousands of chemicals that have been used in industrial processes. They've been used in tons of consumer products from nonstick frying pans to Gore-Tex hiking boots and all kinds of things. Even your grease-free pizza boxes and fast food wrappers. No. Even cosmetics and dental floss. So they're very pervasive in consumer products

and in industrial uses. They're pretty much everywhere. They may be everywhere, but PFAS can be dangerous. Some people call them forever chemicals because they don't break down in nature and accumulate over time. Scientists have connected PFAS with health problems, from various types of cancer to high cholesterol and thyroid disease. And after decades of using PFAS at its facility, Johnson Controls said it had leached into drinking

water in Peshtigo, and the company has taken responsibility for that. But many residents believe the company is to blame for much more. They want Johnson Controls to take responsibility for the contamination over a bigger area and pay for a solution. So now Peshtigo has a fight on its hands. I've never had a fight with a multinational corporation before. I've never had a fight with a multinational corporation before. I've gotten involved because it's just wrong what happened. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Limar. Coming up on social media,

you can spend more time dinnering with them. How's that spicy enchilada? Very flavorful. Yodeling with them. Ooh, must be mating season. And hiking with them. Is that a squirrel? Bear! Run!

Collect more moments with more ways to earn. Air Mile. Our colleague Chris went to Peshtigo to find out more about the town's PFAS contamination and how residents are dealing with it. One person he spent a lot of time with was Doug Ointzinger. He's a city council member in the city right next to Peshtigo called Marinette. So the Bay of Green Bay is out there and I'm a little setback, but I can see the water from here. And we sat around a wooden table and wooden chairs and just kind of a dining room set right off his kitchen. Yeah.

He has a certain gravitas. He has a certain deliberate way of speaking. And he doesn't really mince words. You know, he tells it the way he sees it. I can be pretty blunt. And it's like, you don't want that answer, don't ask me that question. Doug told Chris that he first heard about the PFAS contamination in 2017. That's when Johnson Controls told residents of Peshtigo that some groundwater in the town was contaminated with

PFAS. For decades, the company had been spraying its firefighting foam on its campus, which is located in Marinette. When the foam washed off, it seeped into the surrounding soil and the groundwater. That foam contained PFAS. And eventually, it reached the wells of some people in Peshtigo. At the time, a Johnson Controls representative said the company had been totally transparent and would keep people informed. It provided bottled water to people whose wells were contaminated and promised to test other wells in the area. At first, Doug didn't think too much of it. He thought the company would take care of it soon. They're trying to do the right thing, and they were surprised that this happened.

I always considered them, you know, a good corporate citizen, which I don't anymore. But Doug realized that many people in the area had no idea they might be exposed to contamination. Around that time, Doug and his wife joined a community garden through a local church about a mile from the Johnson Controls facility. Doug noticed a shallow well that the church used to water the vegetable patch, and he thought of the PFAS contamination. At a gathering for the garden, he asked about it. And I said, oh, by the way, I don't know if you use that for watering the garden,

but because of the contamination, I don't think you should probably do that. Everyone in that room, probably about 25 people, said, what contamination? And that's when I knew my community had a problem. So Doug decided to look into it. He started digging through obscure websites to find old environmental reports. He looked up filings the company had submitted to state regulators.

And he found documents that showed the company had known about the PFAS contamination for three years before it told state authorities, like the Department of Natural Resources. The law in the state of Wisconsin says you have a hazardous spill, you must immediately report it to the DNR. You didn't report it in 2013. You say, we didn't think it left our property. You didn't look. This isn't stuff I made up. This isn't speculation. These are just the facts. Is there a conspiracy? I don't know. But I can tell you this happened

and then that happened. You can draw your own conclusions. This March, the Wisconsin Attorney General sued Johnson Controls for allegedly failing to tell state regulators about the PFAS contamination. In court filings, Johnson Controls said the state regulators acted beyond their authority and said PFAS was not considered a hazardous substance when the contamination occurred. A Johnson Controls spokeswoman said that when the company found PFAS on the border of its property in 2016, it reported it to the state. Doug also found a document from an industry group that laid out best practices to prevent PFAS from getting out into the surrounding environment. It tells you three things.

It says, oh, never flush this down the sanitary sewer because wastewater treatment plants can't take care of it. It says, always make sure you have proper containment so it doesn't get into the environment. And it tells you, don't use this for training. Use some non-PFAS foam for training. Well, what did you do at the Fire Technology Center? You flushed it down the sanitary sewer, you washed it into the environment, and you used it for training exercises. I don't get angry at corporations who bought something and they weren't told it was dangerous.

I only get mad at them once they know that they don't do the right thing. And that's where I'm at with, like, you knew. When we asked Johnson Controls about whether it follows industry best practices, a company spokeswoman said, quote, We are proud of the life-saving work we do, and we always hold ourselves to the highest standards. of the life-saving work we do, and we always hold ourselves to the highest standards. The company has stopped

testing firefighting foam containing PFAS on open ground. While Doug was digging through all these documents and finding out more about Johnson Controls and the contamination, he was letting his neighbors know too.

And Peshtigo residents began asking, what impact did PFAS have on them and their families? That's coming up. Picture this. You finally get to the party. And it's the usual. Drinks and small talk. Suddenly, you spot something different. The Bold Seagram 13. A 13% cosmopolitan cocktail. Thanks for watching. dare to make your own luck. Must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Available at the LCBO. Summer's here, and you can now get almost anything you need for your sunny days delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by

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Uber Eats can definitely get you that. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol in select markets. Product availability may vary by Regency app for details. As Doug was digging into the history of PFAS in the area, he shared his findings with one of his friends, a woman named Cindy Boyle, who lives in Peshtigo.

She's a bit of a local historian. I can take this with you if you're interested. We published this. Great. I don't know, close to 20 years. And there's little blurbs in there about history and some stuff. When Cindy heard about the PFAS contamination, she started to think about how it could have affected her life. It's terrifying.

So for me, it went immediately think about your health. And then you start connecting the dots like, oh yeah, I had a full thyroidectomy in my 30s. And then you find out it was spread on the farm fields and you think about all your family connections that are kidney cancer, thyroid disease, thyroidectomy, right? That's freaky.

While there's no way to know whether PFAS exposure is connected to Cindy's health issues, Chris says there is research that links PFAS to health problems. The EPA and the CDC have said that they're linked to kidney, prostate, and testicular cancers. They've been linked to high cholesterol, thyroid disease, decreased fertility, and high blood pressure in pregnant women, and even shown to cause or potentially lead to other problems such as low birth weight,

reduced ability to fight infections, and reduced vaccine response. But Cindy wasn't just worried about her own health. Immediately, I went to our kids because there's a lot of science out there that shows when children are exposed to PFAS, because of the amount of water they consume compared to adults, it's apparently a much different ratio. And their body, and the fact that it's a bioaccumulator and their bodies are developing, the consequence that it has to children is that much greater. But we, in that little log cabin right over there where it's the shallower well, so the first driveway as you pulled in, that's where we raised our first and second child. And I didn't breastfeed. I fed them on bottled formula.

And then you wrestle with that guilt of that and the fear. And this is what I mean. This is the only part of it that I feel cowardice about is, ugh, I just, I know how angry this makes me. You've got kids. And if I test our middle son, and it's high, I know what that can mean for him for reproduction.

I know what that can mean for him lifelong. And to know we had a part in that. Cindy talked about these fears with her sister. She said, Cindy, you have so much property there. You're self-employed. It's such a big part of your retirement strategy. You know what you know. You know the health impacts. You're either going to address this now or you're going to leave it for your kids to deal with. That's all she had to say. And I was like, s***. With the encouragement of her sister, Cindy ran for local office and won.

She's now the town chairperson. So it has fallen to Cindy to address the drinking water contamination. And a big point of contention is how many people in Peshtigo Johnson Controls should be helping. The company said it contaminated 169 wells. It says it will pay for solutions for those homes. Last year, the company settled a class action lawsuit over the contamination for $15 million. It did not admit wrongdoing. But the state of Wisconsin did separate testing in Peshtigo and found about 300 more contaminated wells. Johnson Controls says it's not responsible for those. Now, Cindy holds town halls where residents can debate this issue.

Chris went to one, and a lawyer representing the facility was there too. So there were about three dozen residents from the town of Peshtigo in this meeting in an older kind of looking municipal building. Cindy Boyle ran that meeting. And then residents, you know, there was a time for open comment, and residents stood up and voiced their concerns about the contamination on their property, and many talked about the dissatisfaction they have with how the company's handling things. My law has been contaminated now

with double documentation from two tests. I have received nothing. I've been paying out of pocket close to $200 a month for bottled water. The last straw I had was when my baby grandson was coming to stay at my house and I could not give him a bath in my bathtub because I didn't want to contaminate him. There were definitely emotions in the room. I mean, there were people, this is a really deeply sensitive issue, particularly when it comes to the health of your children or ground children. I think there are probably few issues that can be as upsetting to people.

We tried to get bottled water, or even get reimbursed for our water, and they said nothing. JCI wouldn't even take my call. Right there. Right there. Where are they? Right there. Hey, hey, I'm talking to you.

Why? How come when I call there, I cannot get anybody through in my area? How come we never get nothing done on our side? I have no idea. Well, then why are you here? To take notes, to learn, report back to my clients, so maybe we can do a better job if we're not doing a better job. You better start doing a better job.

You haven't done nothing. Okay. Chris reached out to Johnson Controls about the PFAS contamination in Peshtigo. He spoke with Katie McGinty, the company's chief sustainability officer. Firstly, I'm just going to say again, straight up, we take full responsibility for any PFAS from our operations. That's on us to fix it. That's our job. We are fixing it.

We're determined to fix it. But Katie says Johnson Controls isn't responsible for the other wells that the state of Wisconsin says are contaminated. There's just no correlation between our actions and the PFAS that has been found in the expanded area. Are there any other industrial sources there nearby? I mean, yes. Oh, okay. Yes, and the other thing is because PFAS is in just about every consumer product, certainly every industrial process, it genuinely is in just about everything.

Your common household products, you know, your Scotchgard, your Teflon pan, your Gore-Tex jacket. Your Gore-Tex jacket. Your dental floss. Yeah, right. It has PFAS.as and so you know especially where you have homes as is the case in in this area where you have a drinking water

well and you have a septic system you know all of that waste water from your dish detergent that has PFAS in it, from your bathroom where you flossed your teeth with dental floss with PFAS, where you scrubbed your Teflon pan. It all goes into your septic system with a drainage field that in many cases is very close to the drinking water wells. is very close to the drinking water wells. Chris spoke to PFAS experts, who questioned whether dental floss and Gore-Tex jackets could contaminate water at the levels found in Peshtigo. The federal government has growing concerns about PFAS contamination. This month, the EPA issued a new health advisory, and it has drastically lowered the amount of PFAS

that it considers safe in drinking water. Some environmental groups are estimating that more than 100 million people are drinking water that has some level of PFAS in it. The EPA is requiring much greater testing across the whole country for PFAS chemicals. And that's going to happen over the next few years. And there's in all likelihood going to be a lot of people concerned about whether or not my water is safe to drink.

Back in Peshtigo, Doug fears that the contamination in his community won't be resolved in his lifetime. won't be resolved in his lifetime. If you have contamination in the groundwater on your property today, you will still have contamination on your property 30 years from now. It's not going away. It's a hard, hard truth that those of us who live, myself included, that there's PFAS in the groundwater underneath your home, it's not going away. It's a forever chemical. It's still here. None of us will live long enough to see it go away because they haven't found a technology yet that can solve that problem.

This episode originally ran in June 2022. Since then, the EPA has proposed setting federal limits on several PFAS compounds in drinking water. And some companies are working on technology to destroy PFAS. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow with a new episode. See you then.