- [Fred Stone] Why in God's green earth,
would you want to sell something
that you know is contaminated?
I had one person honest to God told me,
"Well, you know, Freddy, you screwed up.
All you had to do is keep your mouth shut."
There is no level there that to safe level of contamination.
- Fred Stone's dairy farm
is contaminated
with PFAS,
chemicals that have been linked to serious health problems.
- [Fred Stone] As the cows ingest the feed
and they drink the water
and it gets into the cows themselves
and it translates into the milk.
- The presence of these chemicals in the milk
caused Stone to lose dairy license,
leaving his third generation family business in ruins.
- [Fred Stone] I really don't know how we're gonna proceed
out of this disaster.
We should be thinking about how we're going to retire
and how we're going to move on.
Now we're trying to figure out,
how the hell we're going to stay alive.
- PFAS aren't federally regulated,
and they're virtually everywhere
used for their non-stick water resistant qualities
in waterproof clothing, stain resistant carpet,
food wrappings, cookware and even makeup.
More than 98% of Americans
have some amount of PFAS in their blood or tissue.
- [Jessica Ray] PFAS stands for
per and polyfluoroalkyl substances
so they're man-made
and they originated in, around the 1930s,
studies have shown they are very acutely toxic.
- [Linda Birnbaum] PFAS are a problem.
And they're a problem because they're useful chemicals
so that they do something that we like
that the more we study them,
the more we see adverse health impacts.
- Two of the most widely studied PFAS chemicals,
PFOA and PFOS
have been linked to a slew of health problems
like kidney and testicular cancers.
And there's evidence that suggests PFAS can have
an effect on the immune system.
- [Philippe Grandjean] PFAS compounds can interfere
with the immune system
and essentially prevent
the production of antibodies in sufficient concentrations
and so that we can respond to infectious disease.
PFAS can remain in the body for many years
And scientists don't fully understand why that is
but we know that they bind a certain proteins in our bodies.
- [Jamie Dewitt] Which means they can move around
they can go from organ to organ,
they can hang out in our blood
they can go to other tissues
we think that's why they stick around in our bodies.
There also are some hypotheses that suggests
that when PFAS get to the kidney to be excreted,
the kidney doesn't get rid of them
it just transports them back into our body.
- The reason PFAS don't easily degrade in our bodies
or in the environment has to do with their chemistry.
- [Christopher Higgins] So the carbon fluorine bond
is one of the strongest bonds known in chemistry.
And when we make these artificially
and we released them to the environment,
we have to expect that those bonds
are not going to degrade relatively easily at all.
- When PFS contaminate the natural resources
that communities depend on,
the result can be disastrous.
That's what happened in Newburgh, in New York,
where runoff from a nearby military base
containing PFOS from firefighting foam
made its way into Washington lake.
Contaminating the drinking water of about 30,000 people.
- [Torrance Harvey] One of our greatest assets
in the city of Newburgh has been contaminated
undue to any fault of our own.
It makes me angry.
It makes me sad.
It makes me emotional
because it's not fair.
- After the contamination came to light in 2016,
the city changed its drinking water source
and has been trying to remediate Washington lake.
- [Wayne Vradenburgh] There's 18, 40,000 Pounds vessels
of carbon.
So its granular activated carbon 40,000 pounds per vessel.
- Activated carbon treatment
is a method of filtering PFAS out of water.
The chemicals stick to the porous carbon
as the water passes through.
But removing the PFAS
from the drinking water still leaves the chemicals intact.
- [Jamie Dewitt] So when you filter PFAS out of water,
you're just taking it from here
and putting it here
where it's either going to be incinerated
or landfilled
or filtered out and put somewhere else.
So that's the problem with PFAS.
They just get moved around.
They don't get eliminated,
at least with the technologies that we have right now.
- [Christopher Higgins] Unless we do something to intervene.
They'll be present for decades,
if not hundreds or thousands of years to come.
- [Fred Stone] My wife and I actually met,
showing cows together.
And it was all well and good when I was beating her
but when she started beating me,
that's when we had to get married so...
At least that's what I tell people.
I grew up here
it means everything to my wife and I
the cows, the farm, the whole nine yards.
- For more than 20 years,
starting in the 1980s,
the Stones fertilized their fields
with nutrient rich byproducts provided to them
at first from a paper company
and later from a municipal wastewater facility.
- [Fred Stone] And we did everything by the book
and we have the letters to prove it.
- But in 2016, testing revealed a problem.
- [Fred Stone] It was determined then
that the contamination came
from sludge spreading that we had done.
We put in a water filtration system,
we were trying to salvage dairy operation to no avail.
We ended up slaughtering
about two-thirds of the herd.
There's about 40 or so left.
And these were all cow families
that again go way back 40, 50 years
and this are cows I just can't kill.
Am sorry I just can't kill them.
We just, we have them here.
I don't know what the hell we're going to do with them.
- PFAS are pervasive on the Stone farm
elevated PFAS levels
have been found in members of Stone's family too.
Stones own blood contains PFAS levels,
20 times higher than the national average.
- [Fred Stone] Those cows all they want us to do
is take care of them.
And I feel we failed them.
(soft music)