Cuomo to meet with Hoosick Falls residents
ALBANY >> Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday he plans to travel to Hoosick Falls to meet with local residents and leaders about polluted drinking water supplies, but he first wants to make sure he has all the necessary facts.
“I want the tests done so I want actually to have some facts and some information,” Cuomo told reporters after attending the swearing in of Court of Appeals Chief Judge Janet DiFiore. “One of the things you have to watch in a situation like this I think is that the emotion doesn’t get ahead of the facts. You know fear is powerful, and fear of what if, what if, what if — that starts to cascade and that’s not especially helpful.”
Cuomo urged that such understandable worries not overtake the investigation into the extent of the groundwater contamination and its potential impacts on human health and property values in the community.
“The state has taken a very aggressive stance,” Cuomo said. “We did one round of testing. The state is now going out and doing a second round of testing on all the affected wells.”
He said he has instructed the Health and Environmental Conservation commissioners leading the investigations to “be overaggressive, overtest, (and) be overprotective because wewant to know exactly what we are dealing with, number one, in terms off chemicals etc. and number two we want to make sure everyone has the facts whatever they are.”
He said the state was also prepared to deal with what he termed the ‘finance issue’. You now have banks that don’t want to lend money on these homes because they believe the homes are unlivable. Howdo they know the homes are unlivable? You can’t make
that conclusion until you have some facts. In some ways we are getting way down the road with very little information.”
The news that a chemical called PFOA is found in drinking water wells and groundwater has prompted the state to install water filters and step up testing, including blood tests of anyone who may want to be tested. Some resi- dents fear that the chemical pollution is responsible for illnesses, including rare cancers.
The industrial chemical was commonly used in making plastics and common consumer goods such as food wrappers, and some suspect the groundwater may have been contaminated by a manufacturing plant that has operated in the community for decades. Managers of the Saint-Gobain plant say the chemical has not been used there during the time it has owned the property.
The pollution has drawn the scrutiny of state and federal regulators, but the extent of the problem is not yet clear. While perfluorooctanoic acid ( PFOA) has been linked to serious illness including cancer, not much is known about safe exposure levels and risk.
Scientists say detectable levels of the chemical are found in the blood of 98 percent of the U.S. population, with higher concentration among those living near plants that used the chemical.