Scott Waldman at Politico NY:
HOOSICK FALLS — Rob Allen rushed home from his teaching job on
Tuesday to find his wife at home weeping and curled in a fetal position.
She has been upset since four separate envelopes arrived from the
state Department of Health the other day. Each was addressed to one of
her children, and the letters said the children have dangerous levels of
a toxic chemical in their bloodstream. Their youngest daughter, who is
still breastfeeding, had the highest level of the toxin, known as PFOA,
coming in at 112 parts per billion. The median number for 2,000 town
residents who were tested was 23 parts per billion.
For almost the baby’s entire life, state and village officials had
assured the family that their water was safe, Allen said. The children’s
numbers are higher than their parents', and Allen's wife is concerned
that PFOA passed through her and into the bodies of her children.
"My daughter was five months old when the village and state knew
[about the contamination], and my daughter is 18 months old when the
village and state finally said don’t drink your water,” he said.
People in Hoosick falls have 50 to 100 times the level of toxins in the blood compared to national levels.
The state knew that the water was contaminated for a year but refused to say anything publicly.
That is not sitting well with the people of Hoosick Falls as the blood test results are coming back and showing the alarmingly high levels of toxins in the blood of the people of the town:
Allen said, among the dozens of people with whom he has spoken in
town, young children seem to be displaying far higher numbers than their
parents.
Allen said he feels betrayed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration and by elected officials who waited more than a year to warn village residents away from drinking their water, which was tainted with PFOA by nearby facilities that made teflon products.
Other young families, where mothers are breastfeeding their
children, have been crushed by the news, particularly those with
children who were young enough that they could have avoided the water
altogether if state and local officials had alerted the public.
“There is this whole contingent who are devastated, utterly
devastated, that that utterly perfect time of nursing a child has been
corrupted,” he said. “Now, they’re wondering if they’ve done the right
thing. There is so much guilt out there that is [affecting] mothers.”
The Cuomo administration refused to alert the people of Hoosick Falls about this problem despite warnings from the EPA that the state needed to do something about it.
For one year, the Cuomo administration sat on the news and did nothing.
Now the administration is in damage mode and, with the helping of the hacks in the legislature, continue to play cover up - they've made sure no hearings on this matter will occur and are doing all they can to minimize the political damage to Cuomo even as they do nothing to minimize the environmental and biological damage to Hoosick Falls:
Cuomo has repeatedly characterized his administration’s handling of
the Hoosick Falls crisis as aggressive. He recently dismissed POLITICO
New York’s reporting of his administration’s pushback against federal
regulators who raised concerns about Hoosick Falls as a “political
he-said, she-said.”
That news about the blood tests arrived just before close of
business on a Friday, when governments tend to release bad news, and is
the closest the Cuomo administration has come to acknowledging a misstep
in its handling of Hoosick Falls. Just a few weeks before, the
administration used the same time slot to put out a statement on the
pending federal investigation of Cuomo’s upstate economic development
plan.
The administration’s handling of the crisis in Hoosick Falls may
raise significant medical questions, experts say. The administration has
not released the full range of results, simply telling reporters that
the results range from "non-detect" to 200 parts per billion, which is
far below some of the high numbers residents are saying they received.
By refusing to publicly release the full scope of test results, without
names attached, the administration has also made it hard to draw
conclusions from those results, experts say.
And so, this is what the people of Hoosick Falls are left with:
The dire news emerging from Hoosick Falls in the last few days
confirms what many had feared. Hundreds of people, from babies to the
elderly, have a dangerous level of toxic chemical in their blood stream.
PFOA has a half-life of about three years and there is no known way to
expel it from the body earlier. The chemical has been linked to cancer,
thyroid problems and high cholesterol, among other issues.
This is what Andrew Cuomo has wrought in Hoosick Falls.
The next time you hear him lecture about breast cancer and his consort, Sandra Lee, pointing out the importance of early detection, remember Hoosick Falls and how he and his cronies at the DOH sat on information about contaminated water in the town that will ultimately lead to some people getting cancer at some point down the road - especially the little children.
