Something is afloat in the water
In December 2015, the Times Union ran a comprehensive Sunday story by Brendan J. Lyons under the headline “A danger that lurks below.” It described the efforts of Hoosick Falls resident Michael Hickey and others to call attention to the high levels of perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, detected in tests of private wells and the municipal water system.
The village had for decades been the site of a manufacturing plant that used the compound to produce products such as nonstick kitchenware. The facility, in recent years owned by Saintgobain Performance Plastics, was one of the biggest employers in town. It leached from the plant and other hot zones into the municipal system, and particulate matter from its smokestacks settled over the outlying area and infiltrated private wells.
The Environmental Protection Agency, alerted to the imminent publication of Lyons’ story, sent a letter to village leaders advising them that the village’s water was unsafe for human consumption, and that the information on the village’s website about the potential health effects of PFOA — it has been linked to several maladies in humans, including various forms of cancer — was inaccurate and misleading.
Within six weeks, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and top state health officials were meeting at the Capitol with many of the same local leaders, and the administration announced efforts to add filtration systems to address the problem. Facing heavy criticism of the sluggishness of the state’s response, Cuomo visited Hoosick Falls in March 2016 in a trip marked by a comical level of concealment: on a Sunday morning, with the media only alerted at the last possible moment.
It was, as our editorial board noted last week, a matter in which private citizens and journalists were doing their duty to their community — while a lot of people did something else, at least initially.
On Wednesday, Lyons filed a bookend of sorts to that first story: an exclusive report on a $65 million settlement proposal involving Saint-gobain and two other companies identified as responsible parties in the befouling of Hoosick Falls. The settlement will now be weighed by a federal judge and hundreds of people impacted by the damage — from residents who have received tests that show elevated levels of PFOA in their bloodstream to those who have seen their property values plunge as a result of being situated within or close to a toxic plume.
The settlement proposal sets Dec. 16, 2015, as the date when residents would have been broadly aware of the contamination — the implication being that anyone who, for example, purchased a home in Hoosick
Falls a month later would have done so with knowledge of the problem, and therefore might not be as eligible for settlement dollars. That’s three days after the publication of the Times Union’s first story.
I point this out not to spike the ball, because this is certainly not the end zone. This story is not over, and we are far from done covering it. What happened in Hoosick Falls was a slowcooked crisis, the scope of which might not be fully known for decades.
Feel free to forget for a moment that this was even a Times Union article. But try to imagine how it might have played out if the story hadn’t appeared, and attracted other media attention that created a regional clarion for a far more robust response from state and federal officials. It’s also worth pondering how many other communities have been similarly damaged by corporate irresponsibility and official neglect only to have their stories remain completely untold due to the economic hollowingout of local journalism.
A TV station manager once told me that newspapers do a great job of reporting the news but a lousy job promoting their work. It is entirely possible he
was both a blowhard and somewhat correct. I’ve written a lot in this space about the insufficiency of many of the supposed watchdogs meant to police official corruption, primarily because I have to write three of these columns per month and this topic, alas, provides superabundant material. But maybe we don’t spend enough time noting when watchdogs actually do the work they’re supposed to be providing, even when it’s us.
This work is important. It is also expensive to research, write and produce in print and online. Sunday’s edition of the Times Union includes a report that details how violations of various health protocols at nursing homes have persisted well into the pandemic. Reported by Emilie Munson, it’s the first big product of a new data investigations team that includes Lyons as well as Matt Rocheleau, who recently left the Boston Globe’s storied Spotlight team, where he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize last month for an investigation of lax state enforcement of dangerous drivers. It comes with data visualizations by Vivien Ngo, who came from the Wall Street Journal.
I’m biased, but these are pretty talented people, and we have a lot of journalists like that at this paper. This might sound like self-promotion, but it’s also news — inasmuch as we see ourselves as a community institution devoted to providing the public with sturdy, impactful reporting.
You might think of it, like clean water, as a necessary resource.