Flint Residents May Have Been Drinking PFCs in Addition to Lead
A report by the Michigan Department of Community Health found that the Flint River is contaminated with PFOS, PFOA, and 11 other PFCs.
RESIDENTS OF FLINT, MICHIGAN, who drank lead in their water may also have been exposed to perfluorinated compounds, or PFCs, according to a report from the Michigan Department of Community Health.
The May 2015 report showed elevated levels of PFCs in the Flint River — including PFOA, also known as C8, the chemical that spread into drinking water around a DuPont plant in West Virginia and led to a landmark class-action lawsuit. In addition to C8 and PFOS, a similar molecule that’s also based on a chain of eight carbon atoms, scientists found 11 other PFCs in the Flint River — more than in any of the other water sources tested around the state.
In 2014, in an effort to save money, Flint switched the source of its drinking water from Lake Huron to the Flint River, a change that resulted in residents being exposed to lead levels high enough to cause irreversible brain damage in children.
The Michigan report was based on tests of surface water and fish for PFCs in 13 sites around the state. According to Jennifer Eisner, a public information officer for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, the report was not designed to evaluate drinking water. Eisner referred questions about the dangers the PFCs posed to people drinking water from the Flint River to the Department of Environmental Quality, which did not return our phone calls.
Michigan’s testing revealed PFOS in the Flint River at levels that exceeded the state’s limits for both non-drinking water and drinking water. The scientists found C8 in 12 of the 13 bodies of water tested, though at levels below the official cutoff for concern. Michigan has not set safety levels for the other 11 PFCs.
C8, which has been linked to numerous health problems, including immune suppression, thyroid disease, and two types of cancer, has been turning up at dangerous levels in drinking water around the country, including Hoosick Falls in upstate New York, as well as in New Jersey, Colorado, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. Repeated calls to regulate C8 have been dismissed. In fact, Susan Hedman, the EPA regional administrator who stepped down in the wake of the Flint lead crisis, has also offered hollow promises on C8.
PFOS, which has been linked to low birth weight in humans and causes a similar set of health problems as C8 does in lab animals, was also found above threshold safety levels for birds and mammals. The amount of PFOS in the Flint River more than tripled between 2001 and 2013, and high concentrations of the other PFCs were found in fish taken from the river.
The Michigan report noted that “a more thorough assessment may be warranted” to determine the impact of PFOS on wildlife in and near the river, and raised the possibility that the government “should assess whether fish consumption advisories” for PFOS are necessary. Surprisingly there is no mention of the impact of PFOS on the Flint residents who were drinking water from the river when the report was issued. The report acknowledged the presence of C8, but because levels were below the official safety cutoff, concluded that “human health is not being impacted.”
Still, the levels of PFOS and total PFCs in the Flint River were the second highest recorded in the state. The highest levels were in Clark’s Marsh, a wildlife preserve that borders Wurtsmith Air Force Base, which is home to one of hundreds of military fire- and crash-training sites contaminated with firefighting foam.
The Flint River finding should have sounded an alarm and, according to one historian familiar with the area, could have been anticipated. “The Flint River was lined with supply companies that were giving all the toxic materials that went into the modern car,” said David Rosner, author of Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children and a professor of public health at Columbia University. Rosner noted that General Motors, which also operated a plant on the Flint River, stopped using the river water because it was “too corrosive.”
“If it’s harming transmissions and basically the open sewer for factories, how could anyone ever think of that water as a source of drinking water?” said Rosner. “The idea that they’re finding lead and PFCs is not surprising. I’m sure that river has many other pollutants, too.”
For more on C8 and PFCs:
The Teflon Toxin
Part 1: DuPont and the Chemistry of Deception
Part 2: The Case Against DuPont
Part 3: How DuPont Slipped Past the EPA
Poisoning the Well
Toxic Firefighting Foam Has Contaminated U.S. Drinking Water
This is unsettling news; I saw first on Bill Maher with Erin B. She was pushing for carbon filters… I looked at the expression on Bill’s face and wondered if anyone on the panel would chime in that carbon filters are made from wood, coal, or coconut shells.
What a position to be in: coal a problem in one hand, a solution in the other. I can’t imagine Bill advocating for the slashing and burning of trees to produce carbon filters…. So how do we do it?
It’s been suggested there were a group of technologically advanced people who eventually abandoned technology.
Maybe this is the only answer.
Just a side note. Carbon filtration requires quite a bit of contact time with the water passing through it. Faucet filters don’t cut it. What you need is a 50 gallon +/- tank filled with activated charcoal that allows enough contact time to remove pesticides, organics, viruses, etc. Charcoal does an excellent job but contact time is the critical factor which requires a fair amount of charcoal. Perhaps an Env Eng can chime in on this.
Who was the local clown who decided to switch the water source?
Why is this never discussed?
Is the moron still on the tax-payer teat?
I am a Flint resident and I noticed that you said that Flint itself or at least that’s the implication, had changed the water source from the Detroit water to the Flint river. That’s not true. Flint’s water was changed by the Governor of Michigan. We were under an Emergency Manager put into place by our Governor. That meant that we the residents of Flint had NO say what so ever on the decision. It should also be mentioned that the State officials were notified of the lead and other issues with the Flint river water by the EPA before the switch. That’s where the money was saved was for and by the state.
Thanks for keeping the train on the right track, many people still don’t understand who made the decision to switch water sources and why.
Flint res.
Frank Mancuso· Federal Clean Water Act Lawsuit, Author, The Evolution of Pollution
The most important issue facing mankind isn’t global warming it is air and water.
This June it was discovered that phytoplankton is ingesting marine micro plastic. As marine plastic decomposes it absorbs PCB’s spelling the demise of phytoplankton. Phytoplankton has declined by 40% and was supplying over half the worlds oxygen, but since the decline both ocean oxygen and atmospheric oxygen levels are dropping. 2 or 3 percentage points will end all life on the planet. It is irreversible and happening rapidly as evidenced by the oceans vomiting up in world wide beachings of toxic suffocating ocean life forms. Every estuary, river, and stream is now inundated with storm drains which drain toxins, plastic, medical waste, oil, into our oceans quite legally. This practice must be stopped TODAY, BUT government bought and paid for by CEO’s block all attempts to correct this, the most serious issue facing mankind today.My twenty year Federal Clean Water Act lawsuit is proof. NYS and the Federal Government fought tooth and nail to the to allow this to continue. They have zero interest in clean water.
Michigan’s water quality has improved dramatically since I escaped from the state in 1970 but people need to realize it is still the Water-Winter Industrial Wasteland. Mercury rains down every day and PCB’s are stirred up from many of its rivers and lakes. No fish there is actually safe to eat even the ones they claim are okay for once a month consumption. While the environment there is cleaner than before there is no way to totally eliminate these chemicals from that environment.
In this otherwise good report there are a couple of small inaccurate statements here. The Flint city government, emergency manager and the state decided to switch to the new KWA water supply to save money but were required to use their long time backup and former water source the Flint River because the Detroit Water and Sewer Department was cutting off their supply before the KWA pipeline was complete. They will be switching to the new KWA water source this fall.
The rusty and cloudy appearance of the tap water in Flint soon after the switch to the Flint River source alerted the residents there was something wrong and even though their regulators and leaders dismissed the problems. Most of the people in Flint were wise enough to stop drinking the water so about 6% of the young children tested had elevated lead levels and a very few of those had extremely high levels needing medical intervention. This is hardly good news but with 25% of the houses tested showing elevated and some extremely elevated lead levels this crisis could have been much worse.
Now they are drinking Clinton Kool-Aid
No they are drinking Snyder’s ignorance &lead Flint resident
“I’m sure that river has many other pollutants, too.”
That’s a nifty little tongue-in-cheek understatement when you consider the bigger truth is all bodies of water have been poisoned far beyond the levels we’re lead to believe are otherwise managed according to law or as a matter of concern for public safety. And it’s not just the water. It’s also the air and the ground.
The EPA has been shirking its responsibilities over the last decade or two because the act of publicly identifying something new, pernicious, and pervasive in the air, ground, and water would mandate locating the source and identifying the cause, which in this case would expose the truth behind what most people label as that absolutely pathetically silly cockamamie conspiracy theory known as chemtrailing. The EPA is simply protecting it’s employer.
If you were a scientist interested in how the 20th century industrial chemical boom has impacted human beings, Flint Michigan would be the perfect study site. You’d begin by collecting comprehensive data from Flint residents on chemical body burden – something like this study from 2000, featuring Bill Moyers:
http://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/problem/popup_bb_01.html
“The Mount Sinai study tested for five heavy metals, 22 organochlorine pesticides, a suite of organophosphate pesticide metabolites, several organic solvents, 17 dioxins and furans, 73 types of PCBs, and six types of phthalates. In addition to the chemicals they were looking for, analysts identified 78 semivolatile organic compounds in study group blood samples.”
However, this costs quite a lot per person – upwards of $6000 per sample. Testing the entire population of Flint (about 100,000 people) – well, there are economies of scale involved for large-scale testing, but we are talking several hundreds of millions of dollars – or, to put it in perspective, one or two F-35 fighter jets. The F-35 fighter jet program budget is $400 billion; the entire CDC budget is $12 billion. You’d think protecting the health of the American public would be as important to ‘national security’ as a bloated military-industrial contract for overpriced unreliable aircraft is. . . but those are the numbers.
In reality, getting a personal chemical burden measurement is something every American citizen would benefit from – but the chemical industries would hate this, as it would provide a huge database linking chemical exposure to various illnesses resulting in, gasp, stricter regulations and punitive lawsuits. Their investors would take a big hit. Horrible to contemplate. . . The Central Committee would have to veto any such study, for the greater good.
It depends upon where the water samples are taken. As I understand, the inlet for water from the Flint river is upstream from where any industrial sites were and the city itself. I also read where the river tested high in salinity, which would explain the problems GM had.
What depends on where the water samples are taken, pray tell.
Seems the citizens of Flint and perhaps many others Nationwide are drinking water with contaminants know only to God? Individual contaminants are bad enough but how they poison collectively, synergistically is again known only to God. Synergy for good or ill is poorly studied for both toxins and drugs.
Google Theo Colburn
I have not tasted water directly from the tap in my home for twenty years. I have never trusted the government to tell me whether or not anything I ingest is safe for me. In our money-first society, the first thing they always look at is the cost-benefit analysis.