Kind: captions
Language: en
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 freddie you screwed up
all you had to do is keep your mouth
shut there is no level there that it's a
safe level of contamination
fred stone's dairy farm is contaminated
with pfas
chemicals that have been linked to
serious health problems
as the cows ingest the feed and they
drink the water
it gets into the cows themselves and it
translates into the milk
the presence of these chemicals in the
milk caused stone to lose his dairy
license
leaving his third generation family
business in ruins
we don't cry
i really don't know how we're going to
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
that's very special 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
pfas stands for per and poly floral
alkyl substances
so they're man-made and they originated
in
around the 1930s studies have shown they
are
very acutely toxic 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
pfas
compounds can interfere with the immune
system
and essentially prevent
the production of antibodies
insufficient concentrations
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 to certain
proteins in our bodies
which means that 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
suggest 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
so the carbon fluorine bond is one of
the strongest bonds known in chemistry
and when we make these artificially and
we release them to the environment
uh we have to expect that those bonds
are not going to degrade
relatively easily at all when pfas
contaminate the natural resources that
communities depend on
the result can be disastrous that's what
happened in newberg
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
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 there's 18
40 000 pound vessels of carbon so it's
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 so when you filter phase 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
unless we do something to intervene
they'll be present for for
decades if not hundreds or thousands of
years to come
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 the whole
nine yards
for more than 20 years starting in the
1980s the stones fertilized their fields
with nutrient-rich by-products
provided to them at first from a paper
company and later from a municipal
wastewater facility
we did everything by the book and we
have the letters to prove it
but in 2016 testing revealed a problem
it was determined then that the
contamination came from sludge breeding
that we had done
we put in a water filtration system we
were trying to salvage the 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
you know 40 50 years and these are cows
i just can't kill
i'm sorry i just can't kill them we just
we have them here i don't know what the
hell we're to do with them
pfas are pervasive on the stone farm
elevated pfast levels have been found in
members of stone's family too
stone's own blood contains pfas levels
20 times higher than the national
average
those cows all they want us to do is you
know take care of them
and but i feel we failed them
you