A small North Georgia city known for carpet manufacturing has agreed to overhaul its water system as part of a legal settlement. The deal underscores the high stakes for communities across the country that are pursuing payouts from chemical manufacturers over contamination from toxins known as “forever chemicals.”
The city of Calhoun has agreed to a settlement with the Coosa River Basin Initiative, which sued the city in March, alleging that improper disposal of contaminated wastewater residuals polluted the Coosawattee River and the city’s drinking water.
Forever chemicals — a broad family of synthetic compounds also known as PFAS, the acronym for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — earned their nickname because they do not break down over time, meaning they accumulate in the body’s tissues. They have been used in cookware, fire fighting foams and stain-resistant carpets for many years and have been linked to a number of serious health issues, including negative impacts to the immune system and increased risk of some cancers.
The chemicals have been around for decades, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has only moved to regulate them recently. Those regulations, as well as mounting awareness of the chemicals’ toxicity and the cost of removing them from drinking water, have unleashed a slew of litigation from individuals, local governments and utilities aimed at the industries that manufactured and used PFAS.
Pam Burnett, executive director of the Georgia Association of Water Professionals, said there are solutions that work well to remove forever chemicals from water, but they can be extremely expensive.
“The real goal is to stop these compounds from entering the water source to begin with by banning them,” Burnett said. While every system is different, she said upgrades could be “quite a bit of money.”
As a condition of the proposed settlement, which still needs court approval, the city of Calhoun will install new filtration and treatment technology at its two drinking water plants, test private wells and hire a third-party monitor to oversee compliance. It has also agreed to require industrial facilities to test, report and control PFAS in wastewater as a condition of their permit. The city did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement.
The mayor, members of city council and an attorney for the city could not immediately be reached for comment. The cost of the upgrades and monitoring was not included in the settlement, but based on industry estimates could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars for a city of just 17,000 people.
“Calhoun is a prime example of why we have these regulations, why they have to be enforced, and what happens when it doesn’t get enforced,” said Chris Bowers, an attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, which filed the case on behalf of the Coosa River Basin Initiative. “It wasn’t just harmful for the environment, the rivers, the groundwater — people were drinking toxic industrial chemicals.”
Since 2015, Calhoun’s drinking water has consistently shown high levels of several types of PFAS chemicals, including several that are now subject to regulation. The city has published data recently that it says shows emergency temporary filtration systems are reducing contamination, but it’s still well above the levels set by the EPA.
The city is embroiled in its own lawsuit against some of the biggest companies that make and use PFAS, including Mohawk Industries, which is headquartered in Calhoun. The city has also filed suit against Shaw, 3M, E.I. DuPont de Nemours, Chemours and several others. Calhoun is seeking damages that could be used to offset the cost of remediation to taxpayers and water customers.
The city of Dalton, the carpet capital of the world, also has reached settlements with a number of chemical companies over PFAS contamination.
Bowers sees the Calhoun settlement as a model for other communities that have been impacted by forever chemicals, which are used in countless consumer products from clothing and furniture to cookware to cosmetics. The complaint argued local governments already have the power to regulate PFAS as pollutants through wastewater permitting.
“It should be relied on as a model for how this system is supposed to work,” Bowers said.
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