[Above: Truax/East Madison Community Center teens at Starkweather Creek where they tested sediments for PFAS, after the Air National Guard, the City of Madison, and Dane County–all responsible for the PFAS pollution– refused to do so, and DNR did not require them to.]
Sharon Lerner’s recent Intercept article– People Exposed to PFAS Criticize EPA Action Plan as Too Little, Too Late– is right on target.
The EPA’s recently released “PFAS Strategic Roadmap” is indeed “too little, too late”–and creates the false impression that EPA is going to take significant and meaningful steps soon to address PFAS. Long-time community environmental activists know better. The subtitle of Lerner’s article says it all: “Community advocates and environmental groups pointed out that the EPA has promised action on toxic PFAS pollution for many years.”
Yup. A strategic roadmap is just that–a map. A plan. Will anyone follow it?
Further, as Lerner outlines, the plan doesn’t address several critical testing and data gap issues–and most importantly, doesn’t recommend regulating PFAS as a class. Not doing so, as many scientists and activists have repeatedly urged, creates an endless chemical “whack-a-mole” game, because as PFAS compounds are regulated one (or a handful) at a time, chemical industries just produce countless new PFAS compounds to replace them, and these new chemicals go onto the market and into the environment mostly unregulated (as Lerner describes in this 2018 Intercept article). Using this scientifically ill-informed and futile approach, we will never catch up. Our children and grandchildren will grapple, many years from now, with how to get rid of the PFAS compounds that are being made right now. By that point, of course, it will be far too late, because their bodies and environment will have been soaked in them for decades already.
Last but not least, here in Madison, this federal “strategic roadmap” will do little now to help the people living near PFAS-soaked Truax Field and along Starkweather Creek —primarily low income people of color–who have already been exposed to PFAS for years if not decades in their drinking water, soils, sediments, air, and fish. It won’t stop these exposures now or prevent future exposures–especially when city, county, and military responsible parties continue to do little to nothing to thoroughly investigate and clean up Truax Field and Starkweather Creek, or to inform/engage the most affected communities–and DNR doesn’t require them to do so, per Wisconsin laws.
