Dear Editor,
I grew up drinking small-town city water or well water, much like the people in most Georgia counties. I’ve relied on tap water all my life, and don’t buy water in plastic bottles at all because I’m cheap. Why buy water from a store when tap water is free, supposedly safe, and fluorinated, right? Well, I’ve had no further cavities since the ‘70s, but now I have cancer. My lifetime of drinking water full of cancer-causing chemicals called PFAS has come home to roost. (Polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) substances are a group of man-made chemicals used in many products since the 1950s and typically get introduced to water sources in runoff. – Editor) They harm us, our children, and our grandchildren. These “forever chemicals” are literally with us forever.
Sometimes local governments have successfully sued the companies. They only stopped when forced to. On their own, chemical companies won’t lift a finger to save a single soul. The cost in lives lost is apparently worth it to their bottom line. Poor and rural people always suffer the most.
This week, the EPA banned six deadly PFAS chemicals from America’s drinking water. President Nixon started the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the 1960s, with a workforce comprised of regular folks like me and smart scientists who studied our environment to learn what was in it that could harm us. Good government at work.
Sadly, there are more than 15,000 of these PFAS chemicals still out there. The American Chemical Society, representing big chemical companies who don’t want to be bothered by having to get these poisons out of their plastic production, say the EPA has overstepped. Uninformed people simply say we don’t need an EPA at all. Malarkey!
It’s high time we all realize that our federal government is not the enemy. It is made up of people just like us, people with mortgages, cranky kids, cars that won’t start, and so much more. They are here to help us, not harm us.
About $1 billion of the bipartisan Infrastructure funding is now being set aside to help places right here in Georgia like Clayton County, Augusta, Columbus, and North Georgia (thanks to PFAS in the flooring industry), make water safer to drink. Dissing the EPA is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. They are there to help keep us all safer.
R.A. Smith Athens