Take a drive upstate in rural Rensselaer County and you'll miss Hoosick Falls or Petersburgh if you blink.
Perhaps blinking will be the excuse we will next hear from state Health officials who appear to have had their eyes closed when it comes to monitoring the drinking water for these two small towns.
NY1's Zack Fink last Friday looked at how the residents of Hoosick Falls were ignored by the state for months even after a local resident paid for a water test that found an elevated level of PFOA, a chemical that is linked to cancer. A factory that is one of Hoosick Falls' main employers uses the chemical. It also sits just 400 yards away from one of the village's wells.
Even after the EPA was ringing the alarm bell last year and the factory itself was giving free bottled water to the town, the State Health Department issued a fact sheet to residents last December, telling them "health effects are not expected to occur from normal use of the water."
And this is after the state's own tests found PFOA levels for at least four water wells in the 600s parts per trillion. (The EPA guideline is 400 parts per trillion.) Only late last month did the state finally agree that there's a crisis in the town.
Just ten miles away from Hoosick Falls is Petersburgh, where residents learned last weekend that there are elevated PFOA levels in their water – a possible contamination from a different plant. But a report in Politico New York today by reporter Scott Waldman shows that state Health officials had concerns about that town's water more than a year ago but said nothing publicly.
As state investigators were trying to learn more about Hoosick Falls' water in 2014, they all but stumbled upon Petersburgh's potential problem. Regarding the town's Taconic Plastics factory, a state health engineer wrote in an e-mail: “It could possibly be a source of PFOA although I didn't see that in the list of chemicals.”
A department spokesman tells Waldman: "The mention of Taconic in the email was speculative, the result of a single DOH staff person looking at a list of nearby potential industrial sources."
So that's how scientific inquiry is handled at the State Health Department.
As Waldman aptly notes: "The state's response to Petersburgh and Hoosick Falls follows a similar pattern of early awareness and then a long period of inaction, followed by a flurry of activity when the situation became public."
Governor Cuomo this week has been busy touring the state in his push to raise the minimum wage. Perhaps he should take that fancy RV to Rensselaer County and try testing more of the county's water.
Bob Hardt