The Weight of Water: Part One
Nicole Civita is the Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at Sterling College and volunteer member of the Craftsbury Fire District #2’s Board of Commissioners. The views expressed in this piece are her own.
In December 2021, routine mandatory quality testing had indicated and confirmed that the primary well from which our water is pumped had 23ng/L of the five PFAS substances that Vermont regulates, exceeding the 20ng/L maximum contaminant level. Though this was just a little over the limit – a very precautionary limit that the State of Vermont set at a level intended to protect infants and nursing mothers exposure – it required the public water system that serves Sterling to issue a “Do Not Drink Order” for PFAS contamination. As the scientific evidence of PFAS risks continues to develop, state and federal regulators are considering even more stringent standards – so even this seemingly small overage is important to take seriously. This meant we needed to get water somewhere other than the tap. It took several weeks to both find a local, authorized, contaminant-free source capable of reliably supplying bottled water for a little Vermont town and secure emergency funding to cover the cost of some very expensive water.
In the meanwhile, Sterling employees and Craftsbury residents wiped out the stock of bottled water at our local grocery stores. As we filled shopping cart after shopping cart with water in the single-use plastic bottles we typically avoid, I started worrying about the places and communities from which this water was extracted: Did they have clean, safe, sufficient water? Or was I lugging around water that should have been available to them? Admittedly, these kinds of questions come naturally to Sterling folks, but I’d like to believe that when one’s only source of safe drinking water comes in bottles, most people will start paying a whole lot more attention to where it comes from, how much there is, how it is allocated, and what might threaten it.
As both a member of Sterling’s leadership team and one of eight volunteer commissioners for Craftsbury Fire District #2 (CFD2), the strangely named rural public water system that serves Craftsbury Common (inclusive of Sterling College, Craftsbury Academy, and approximately 60 other metered buildings), I personally had to keep my focus on the needs and safety of our community. This not only involved getting a rapid education in MCLs, water blending, new source development and permitting, treatment options and their exorbitant costs, and State revolving loan funds, but also trying to wrap my head around best available, constantly developing science on the health risks of PFAS via various pathways of exposure. We knew not to ingest the water, but could we wash our hands with it? (Super important in the context of COVID. Yes.) Should we wash dishes and laundry with it? (Yes, no worries there.) Could we shower or bathe in it? (Yes, with mouths closed, please.) Brush our teeth with it? (No. Better not to.) Could we start seeds or irrigate some of our gardens with it? (Yes, occasionally.)
Countless hours of research, meetings with state regulators and public health experts, and CFD#2 meetings that went on late into the night shed light on the strange size and shape of the PFAS problem: It is all around us. It comes from countless sources. It doesn’t take a lot of it to cause harm. We can’t be sure just which bad things it causes because there are countless other environmental contaminants riddling our bodies and the land.
I quickly realized that while we might be unwittingly participating in the environmental injustices perpetrated by the bottled water profiteers, we were also experiencing environmental injustices perpetrated by chemical companies that profited from selling unsafe products. The state investigation into the source of the PFAS contamination in Craftsbury Common is ongoing. Both the College and CFD2 have been identified as potentially responsible parties, given the proximity of their infrastructure. But even without the investigation’s conclusions, it is apparent that there is not and has never been manufacturing of PFAS chemicals or products that make use of them, substantial application of aqueous firefighting foam, or widespread application of contaminated sewage sludge on our hilltop. Neither Sterling nor CFD#2 were manufacturers, sellers, or even exceptionally heavy users of PFAS-containing products. In other words, there does not seem to be an industrial polluter in our midst. Rather, there are just several hundred people going about their lives making use of everyday products that contain toxic chemicals. Chemicals that companies like 3M and Dupont (now Chemours, a corporate spin off designed to evade liability) have profited handsomely from. Those same chemical companies also happen to manufacture from polyethylene terephthalate – the plastic resin used to make the majority of plastic water bottles. Profit from the problem, profit from the solution… It’s a twisted but apparently winning business strategy. And a terrible way to be in the world.
So what is a responsible educator, leader, and public servant to do? Here’s where I landed:
Ask and entertain hard questions.
Share what you know – and what you don’t know.
Build trust by being transparent.
Provide resources so that people can make their own informed risk assessments and trade-offs – to the best of their ability, in their own contexts, with the knowledge that what we know (and don’t know) will continue to change.
Learn from the good public servants who work to keep water safe – and raise your voice when their regulations, systems, and policies aren’t working well for affected communities.
Encourage collaboration in the effort to find clean groundwater. Be willing to make sacrifices, but always acknowledge the trade-offs.
Make sure bottled water is available and reliable in the meanwhile.
Stop panicking about reusable plastic — try to avoid the single-use kind and take good care of the reusable containers.
Join efforts to hold the chemical companies that produced PFAS legally accountable.
Treat everything as an opportunity to learn about how to live, care, contribute, and even hydrate on this wonderful wounded planet.
That isn’t a perfect or complete formula, but perhaps it will serve as a helpful set of orienting principles for others who will inevitably have to guide their communities through a similar challenge.