Fisically responsible. Financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to progressive and save hundreds. Because progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help when you need it so your dollar goes a long way. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates, potential savings will vary, not available on all states or situations. This is Civics 101 from NHPR. I'm Nick Kepadiche. One thing you'll hear us say on the show often is that Civics isn't just a concept. It's not just part of your social studies curriculum. Civics is how we live our lives. What drives us to act when something is wrong in our communities. What drives us to vote, to protest, to show up at municipal meetings and speak directly to your government. That's why we're bringing you this story today. It is the first episode of a new podcast from NHPR's document team called Safe to Drink. All four episodes are available right now, and we've put a link to the series in the show notes if you want to hear more. The podcast is about PFAS chemicals. These chemicals are everywhere. They're hard to understand, and certainly hard to grapple with when you find out that you or your family or your whole neighborhood may have been exposed to what people call forever chemicals in your drinking water. Imagine how you'd react. Would you ask questions? Would you take action? Would you show up and speak up if you would? That's Civics, and there are people in this story who did just that. Let's dive in. Ben Pierce was driving home. He just dropped his kid off at daycare, and he noticed something kind of odd. I remember coming down high-range road and passing one of the neighbor's houses up on high-range road and they were getting a water delivery. Like cases and cases of bottled water. The kind of delivery you'd see at a convenience store. And I remember just thinking like, wow, they really love the bottled water. They're like, I'm surprised that they have like special delivery of bottled water to their house. Ben's family had just moved to London dairy, a town in southern New Hampshire in the summer of 2019. Now it was October. Ben was still new in town. The water thing was weird, but whatever, he kept driving. And I came around the circle and I drove down to our house and sitting right in our driveway was a whole massive palette of water. No explanation, no delivery person, it was just sitting there in the driveway. Later, Ben did the math. Someone had delivered roughly 27, hundred gallons of water to his house. There wasn't like a note? There was nothing. No. And I just assumed it had to be a mistake. Ben remembered the delivery truck he saw. He decided to try and catch up to it. So I hop back in the car and I drove around the block and I said, hey, I don't know, you made a mistake, but there's all this water in our driveway. We didn't order any water. And he kind of sheeplessly said, like, oh, you know, you don't know about this. For a lot of people, the pierces me, maybe you tap water is a given, like the sky being blue or pavement being solid. Turning on the tap is a reflex, almost like breathing. We do it when we shower, fill the coffee pot, boil pasta, when we brush our teeth. After the surprise delivery, Ben made a few calls. And he discovered that the water he and his family had been using for months had something in it, something that made it unsafe to drink or to cook with, something you couldn't boil out. So instead of turning on the tap, they started cracking open plastic bottles. They explained to their two young kids, don't drink out of the faucet. Don't even use it to rinse your toothbrush. One of the things Ben worried most about was the teeth brushing, especially with his three-year-old Kinsey. You know, it was a lot for her to just even manage a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush. So to then ask her to unscrew a cap and pour a little bit of water on her toothbrush and then I really didn't think they'd be able to do it as kids. They still used the tap for showering, but tried hard not to get the water in their mouths. They still used the sink for washing plates, but dried them off extra carefully. Their son Parker was seven at the time. Probably the most inconvenient part about it is remembering to tell people that haven't been here before. Because like it's not like, we're just kind of used to it, but like if I have friends over that haven't been over before, then we have to like remember to tell them that they can't drink the water. It's been more than six years since the first palette of water showed up in the piercest driveway. Parker is almost a high schooler now, and they still can't drink the water from their faucets. I really don't think that day that I realized that it was a life-changing event. I knew it was a big deal. You knew that it was going to change the house and the home value, and you had all the panic, but you didn't realize that as of this date, your whole existence is going to change. How did this happen? What led to that water delivery at the piercest house? That's what I've been trying to figure out for a few years now. What I found is a story about people who get stuck in the middle of something that doesn't feel right. I'm just sort of thinking, why are all these people always such? You know what? Because in a smaller community like this, you know what the neighbor has for illnesses. Who have to find their own way through a maze of chemical companies, government regulations, and the limits of science? When there's no answers, you're just like, oh, okay, I got it. Just dealt a really bad hand, you know? It's always a gray, and people hate gray, right? But the world of a scientist is a gray world. It's a story about the water in your faucet and the beginning of a problem that could last forever. From the document team at New Hampshire Public Radio, I'm Mara Hoplamasian. This is safe to drink. So food delivery services have been around for a while, and I've tried a lot of them, and I loved some, and I hated others. I will say that green chef is the trusted authority on clean eating. They deliver only real, farm-sourced ingredients. So for my choice, I chose the Mediterranean option because I want to live another thousand years, and the standout to me was the fish. Oh, I've had so much trouble fishing my life. Specifically in this box, the salmon with red peppers and olives, because I don't live by a fishmonger. There isn't one in my town. And salmon, salmon my whole life, it's been a gamble. This salmon from green chef, these were vacuum sealed, they were gorgeous cuts of fish, the kind I literally could not get at my local grocery store. And also, I haven't made a fish in all of Dish in maybe ever. So I learned something, and that means it was a good day. So if you're interested in having someone else handle your meal planning and your grocery shopping in an organic, affordable, varied way, give green chef a try. Just head to greenchef.com slash 50 civics. That's 5-0 C-I-V-I-C-S, and use code 50 civics to get 50% off your first month, and then 20% off for two months with free shipping. Again, that is code 50 civics at greenchef.com slash 50 civics. Many years ago, never mind how many, but I wasn't high school. My very wise friend informed me that I should stop acquiring so much flimsy, follow part in the wash fast fashion. This was, by the way, before the term fast fashion had properly entered the lexicon, so he probably just said junk, and that I should instead invest in high quality clothes that I could wear year after year. Now, there are two reasons that I did not do this at the time. One, I believe I was like 16 years old, two, when I heard invest and high quality in the same sentence, I really heard too expensive for the likes of you. Now, here I am some years later, and there's finally a path to exactly the kind of quality over quantity my buddy Pete was talking about, and that is quince. Quince makes wardrobe staples that last. We are talking 100% European linen, 100% silk, organic cotton, Mongolian cashmere, high quality fabrics, well-made clothes, the stuff that you can reach for year after year. As I speak, I am wearing my quince organic cotton boy friend sweater, something that I reach for week after week, and it has been years. High school Hannah could not even imagine something holding up for this long, let alone keeping its shape, warmth, softness, and color like this puppy has. And because quince works directly with safe ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, I did not end up paying fancy retail or brand markup prices for this. So, Pete was right. I don't need a ton of clothes, I just needed the clothes that I love that last year after year. And you can have the very same right now. Go to quince.com slash civics for free shipping in 365 day returns. That is a full year to wear it and love it. And you will. Now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to qiuince.com slash civics for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash civics. It's March 2016. Three years before Ben Pierce chased his water delivery driver down the street. And we're one town over from where Ben's family lives. And Maramack. Maramack is like a lot of other places in southern New Hampshire. There are industrial buildings fanning out from the center of town and a main drag with a park, a library, a few places where you can get steak for dinner. On this night, tons of people are filing into a school gym filling up the chairs that have been set up on a basketball court. We're semi under control here. DES is here as well as a number of the town. State officials called this meeting. They had just announced that something had been detected in Maramack's drinking water. A chemical called PFOA. Perfloro octanobic acid. They knew people would have questions. I wasn't in Maramack that night. I didn't even live in New Hampshire in 2016. But I've been watching the aftermath of this night unfold since I started working as a reporter here. There's a recording of the night on YouTube. The room has the atmosphere of a town meeting. It's an annual tradition in New Hampshire. I'm going to remind you that just like at town meeting, we have Maramack manners. You guys have always been good about this. I want to remind you that we're still under those rules. Town meetings can be kind of sleepy. A couple dozen dedicated citizens showing up to vote on how much to spend on the sewer system or whether to cut down and sell trees from a town owned forest. But on this night, the room is absolutely packed. People bring in extra chairs for the crowd, but they're still aren't enough. Eventually, the walls are lined with people standing. Everyone is looking around at each other, whispering to their neighbors. It seems tense. This is not a situation that any of us wanted. And I want to assure you that we here are as concerned about this as you are. For an hour, state officials in suits give a presentation about this chemical that was found in the water, PFOA. A screen behind them ticks through slides full of acronyms, diagrams, color coded maps. They explain that this chemical is used to help manufacture teflon products. And that it's part of a bigger family of chemicals. Per and Polly, Floro, Alkal substances. Nickname PFAS. They don't occur naturally. They're man-made. New Hampshire's state epidemiologist Ben Chan tells the crowd these chemicals are in stuff we use all the time. Microwave popcorn bags, fast food wrappers, clothing. He says basically everywhere scientists have looked, they've found these man-made chemicals in the environment. But officials say the levels in the water and maramack are higher than the background levels. Even though PFOA is everywhere, it doesn't really seem like anyone knows very much about it. Chan calls it an emerging contaminant. So the big question here is what does finding PFOA in the water mean for our health, your health, the health of your loved ones? The quick answer is that the long-term health effects are really unclear. The long-term health effects are really unclear, he says. Researchers are still studying them. There's a list of potential health effects and really small type up on the big screen. Liver enzyme levels, total cholesterol, uric acid, sex hormones, thyroid hormones, immune function, obesity, birth weight, kidney function, diabetes, cancers. But Chan says the studies aren't all coming to the same conclusions. They're difficult to interpret. And here's where things seem to get even more confusing. The officials tell the crowd, they don't really know what levels of this chemical are safe to drink. But they're also saying, for most people, including everyone on the public water system. There's no reason to believe it's unsafe to drink. This is why it's very uncomfortable for us being involved in this project because we usually have a clearly articulated standard that's enforceable into the Safe Drinking Water Act. It's been fully vetted by all the toxicologists and physicians to make sure that it's a safe and protective number. We don't have that right now. So we're using the best information we have to make a decision in the interim here about who we're going to provide bottle water to. In 2016, federal regulators hadn't set a legal limit for PFOA in drinking water. The officials say New Hampshire has set its own limit out of quote, an abundance of caution. And people in Merrimack with taps testing higher than the state's limit would start getting bottled water delivered to their houses. After they finish their presentation, officials open up the floor for questions. Everyone gets three minutes to speak. The meeting drags on into the night. And over and over again, the people up on stage don't really have answers. We don't know exactly what that level is. We don't know what the levels of exposure that we're seeing. We don't know yet. We're still trying to put the pieces in the levels of the pond. We don't know what that's. We don't know we're taking. Sorry, we're going to have a frustrating answer on that. We don't know. We only know what we know from the reasons. And if we don't know, why are you not telling us that we shouldn't be drinking the water? Can I drink the water? Can my pregnant patients drink the water? The question that sticks with me most from this meeting came from a woman who had lived in Merrimack for almost 30 years. She told the crowd her husband had recently died of prostate cancer. My husband was a big water drinker, tap water. He liked it room temperature. And my concern is I was the one that gave him that water to drink. I don't know if I killed my husband and that's my feeling right now. I don't know what to do about it now. The gym emptied out after almost four hours. But there still seem to be more questions than answers. What was this chemical? How did it get into Merrimack's water? What was it doing to people's bodies? And what next? Something in somebody has to be responsible for this. Being an adult sucks. Adults, they have to work all day. When adults get mail, it's always bills and bills suck. Sure, but we've got a driver's license. Enjoy 4.9% APR representative with up to four years free servicing on the Alpine A290 plus range at your Alpine store. PCP mobile life financial services order between the 6th and 23rd of February, 2026 TSD supply. Visit AlpineHyphenCars.co.uk for more information. The Oath and the Office is a politics law and democracy podcast hosted by constitutional scholar Corey Brecht Schneider and Sirius XM host John Fugelsing. Each week they break down the biggest political stories, three constitutional lens in plain English for a broad audience. It's smart, accessible and focused on how power actually works. The Oath and the Office is available wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube with full video episodes each week. From the start, suspicion fell on a local factory owned by the St. Gobane Corporation. It was actually this factory that detected PFOA in the Maramack water supply when they tested their own taps. That water was coming from the town's supply. So when the company found PFOA in that water, they reported it to the state. St. Gobane was familiar with PFOA. They used it at the factory. But in letters to town officials, St. Gobane said they believed other sources, like a local landfill, caused the contamination. The company was basically saying, sure, their tests found PFOA in the town's water. But it wasn't their fault. St. Gobane is a massive French manufacturing company, one of the oldest companies in the world. By the way, a lot of people who worked there call it Sankoban. I'm going to say St. Gobane since that's how most people say it in Maramack. The Maramack plant was huge, and a pretty big employer in town. But to St. Gobane, it was a tiny star in a big global constellation. There's a very good chance you've ridden in a car with a St. Gobane windshield, or been in a building with St. Gobane siding or roofing or insulation. In Maramack, they were making coated fabrics. Coated fabrics. It doesn't sound that exciting. But the stuff they were making, it was kind of amazing. Think of all the things that make a material useful. Light weight, resistant to fire and water and sun. These fabrics could do it all. Workers at the plant made those coated fabrics, and then turned them into stuff like grill sheets for fast food restaurants, and super durable suits for emergency responders. Right before St. Gobane bought the factory, it was owned by a different company, called ChemFab. The plant had a few minutes of fame after they made fabric for a huge dome that was built in London, to celebrate the millennium. The dome at Greenwich, the biggest dome in the world, and the first wonder of the new millennium. So everybody was like, whoa, you know, look at this, the millennial dome. This is really cool. This is Lerine Allen, Maramack resident since 1985. I'm not sure what determines who becomes an activist. Some drive for fairness or a special brand of persistence. But whatever that thing is, Lerine has it. For her, this all started on her couch. She was watching the local public TV station. They were broadcasting a meeting about the PFOA contamination. She remembers how state officials couldn't, or maybe wouldn't, answer most people's questions. I'm picking up this arrogant, a little mansplaining, a little, they were patronizing some of them, and I know that. As a female in my generation, I know when somebody's saying, they're there, dear, don't worry about it. The men have the sun to control. I recognize that feel, and I immediately say something's going on here. Something's going on here. Lerine felt unsettled. One of the things officials said was that these chemicals had been in use since the 1940s. She was like, what do you mean we don't know anything about them? So she started spending her free time researching. By 2016, you could find a lot about PFOA with a Google search. There were health studies, news stories, lawsuits. Lerine began breaking a central rule of her sleep routine. No electronics upstairs. She started bringing her iPad to bed. So the more you're going down, Alice in Wonderland's crazy world, at a late time at night, when everybody else is sleeping, and you're going, oh my freaking word. And you feel like you're the only one who knows this, but somebody has to know it, but is anybody connecting all the dots? Lerine's a therapist, not a scientist. But she felt her brain begin to work like an encyclopedia, rabbling off facts and acronyms that she didn't even realize she'd learned. And she had a clear feeling. This stuff, PFOA, it really doesn't seem like it's safe to drink. So why were officials saying it was fine? Lerine and a few other Merrimack residents started hosting meetings about the water at the town library, and sometimes at Lerine's house. One of the other people who showed up was Wendy Thomas. We live in New Hampshire. We have got mountains. We've got lakes. You know, our water is beautiful. I never, it never occurred to me that our water would be contaminated. It just never occurred to me. Wendy raised six kids in Merrimack. By 2016, she already had experience with vocal activism. She'd organized to stop a gas pipeline from coming through town. But she didn't know anything about PFOA. That is until she heard Lerine talk about it at one of those library meetings. Boy, she knows her stuff. And she just rattled off all of these acronyms and all of these facts. And I was like, wow. She remembers coming home from one of those meetings and telling her husband, we need to get our well tested. Their house wasn't on public water. Like about half of people in New Hampshire, Wendy's family got their water from a private well on their property. But getting tested was complicated. Wendy's house was about three miles from St. Gobein's Merrimack plant. The state was focusing their testing on wells within a mile and a half of the plant. Wendy and Lerine were skeptical of that radius. To them, it seemed like the state was saying anyone further away doesn't need to be concerned about this. Even my husband was like, the state says it's safe. You know, we, we, and I was like, I don't care. We're testing our water. Okay, let's step back for a moment. Maybe you've heard the saying the dose makes the poison. The dose of PF away are measured in parts per trillion. You're going to hear parts per trillion a lot in this podcast. Sorry. The comparison used most often is that one part per trillion is like a droplet and about 20 Olympic sized swimming pools. It's like one second in 31,546 years. Tiny, right? But you know what they say about the little things. Remember, at the time all this was going down in Merrimack, the US Environmental Protection Agency didn't have official regulations or limits for how much PF away could be in drinking water. But they did put out some guidance. It shifted around over the course of 2016, from 400 parts per trillion to 70 parts per trillion. In Merrimack, St. Go Bains PF away testing on the town's public water was coming back at about 30 parts per trillion. So, all good, right? But next door in Vermont, their standard was 20 parts per trillion. That was confusing. Then there's the fact that PF away bio accumulates. That means it builds up in your body over time if you keep adjusting it. Like a bathtub with a clogged drain, with a steady drip, the tub eventually fills up. That's part of how PF away and the family of PFAS chemicals like it got their nickname, forever chemicals. They stick around in human bodies for a really long time. So, it matters not just how much PF away is in your water, but how long you've been drinking it. And before 2016, the EPA's guidelines were only for short-term exposure. Not for water you'd drink over the course of a lifetime. For people not on the public water system in Merrimack, things were even more confusing. When the state started testing private wells within a mile of the St. Go Bains plant, some of those levels were coming in much higher than the town, at 190, 360, 820 parts per trillion. St. Go Bain agreed to pay for bottled water, or other solutions for houses that tested over the guidelines the EPA was using. As for Wendy, her well tested at 40 parts per trillion. So well under the EPA's guidance of 70, but double Vermont's limit of 20. Wendy told her kids not to use the taps. They started drinking bottled water and installed two kinds of filtration systems. Altogether, she was out more than $5,000. Water contamination isn't the kind of fiasco that happens all at once. Months went by. The state and St. Go Bain were negotiating. Many families were living on bottled water. Merrimack was trying to get the chemical out of its public water. As the town tried to figure out their treatment options, they shut down the public wells, testing highest for PFOA, and kept others testing at lower levels online. For everyone on the public system, the word was, it was still safe to drink. It seemed like people started settling into loose camps. There were some who trusted the official word. They said, hey, I've been drinking the water. I'm fine. The other camp, Lorine, Wendy, and their friends said, no, we need to do something. They started showing up to local government meetings, trying to get people to take their concerns seriously. It was mostly driven by women. There were some men in this initial advocacy group. But we were hysterical women. We were fear mongers. We were going to drive down the property rates in Merrimack. We were going to force businesses out of Merrimack. We had better shut up if we know what's good for us. At one town council meeting, several councillors told Lorine's group, they shouldn't say the town had contaminated water. Another council member basically said, this isn't an air-in-brock-of-age situation. Town councillors were worried about jumping to conclusions. They were worried about the town getting a reputation. The last thing I want to do is scare anybody and over-react to something we need to deal with. But not to the point where we're going to scare anybody. From where I sit here in the future, there's something eerie about looking back at this moment. This fight about the contamination, even the word contamination in 2017. Eerie, because all of this had already happened before, this unprecedented, emerging contamination. It had already played out in another community a hundred miles away. Like two towns putting on the same theater production. The set looked a little different. The cast was local. But the script, the themes, the choreography, they were mostly the same. The plays are so similar that in this other town, the person playing the role of Lorine, a local resident turned activist, is also named Lorine. I'm not an activist, but I was pissed off. I was beyond angry, knowing that now this was done to us. That's next on Safe to Drink. To hear the next three episodes right now, search for Safe to Drink, wherever you get your podcasts. There's also a link to the whole podcast in the show notes. Safe to Drink is a production of the document team at New Hampshire Public Radio. It was reported by Mara Hoplamasian with additional reporting and production by Jason Moon. It was edited by Dan Yella Ali in Katie Culinary with help from Dan Berrick, Rebecca LaVoy, Taylor Quimbee, Elena Eberwine, and Laugos Monde. Fact checking by Dania Sulamon, legal review by Jerry Agleton, and music by Jason Moon. Our Civics 101 team is me Nick Capodice, along with my co-host Tana McCarthy, Rebecca LaVoy, our executive producer and head of the podcast team. Civics 101 is production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio. The Sometimes it feels like red and blue states are just as divergent as post-World War II, East and West Germany. So what can the US learn from German political history in order to create a more perfect union? Find out on the new season of the future of our former democracy, the Signal Award winning podcast for a more equitable democracy and large media. Hosted by me Colin Cole and Heather Villanova. It's time to rethink democracy. So follow the future of our former democracy wherever you get your podcasts. Not all darkness is dangerous. Sometimes it's the doorway to becoming whole. On the brand new podcast The Shadow Sessions, hosted by me, Hibba Belfake, a psychologist and trauma expert, we should light on the hidden corners of the human experience. Through raw unfiltered conversations from the edge of healing, the Shadow Sessions invites you to do the deeper work that leads to real change. Follow the Shadow Sessions wherever you're listening now.
