North Georgia Water Crisis - Part One: What are PFAS?

The Conasauga River on the Border of Whitfield and Murray Counties, Georgia.
Photo by Thomson200, Creative Commons.

 

North Georgia is home to a few beautiful rivers: the Conasauga, Oostanaula, Etowah, and Coosawattee. Each of these rivers and their associated watersheds afford Georgians recreation, and over 300,000 people, across dozens of towns, depend on these rivers for their drinking water. On the surface, the rivers look as clean or muddy as they always have, and even if you took a glass and scooped a sample of water from any of them, you wouldn't notice anything out of the ordinary--no chemical smell, three-eyed fish, or glow-in-the-dark sludge. 

However, despite their otherwise "pristine" appearance, these rivers are so polluted that they are currently unsafe to drink from, according to EPA Standards. The most frightening part isn't even that the pollutants are invisible. What is scarier is that, without an intensive cleanup process, the problem will never go away.

Due to geography and flow, it wasn't Georgians, but Alabamans, who first raised the alarm nearly a decade ago. In 2016, the Gadsden, Alabama water utility—drawing from the Coosa, which receives North Georgia’s flows—filed a suit alleging PFAS contamination traced to Dalton-area industry (check out the original lawsuit via this News Channel 9 article and segment). 

The Coosa river is a tributary of the larger Conasauga, a river with headwaters in the mountains of North West Georgia, which then flows through Dalton, GA, also known as the "Capital Capital of the World." The contamination was, usurpingly, traced to these Dalton-area carpet manufacturers. Other Alabama towns, like Centre, also filed suit against chemical-giant 3M and several carpet manufacturers, and subsequent filings and news coverage have continued to tie downstream detections to upstream sources, helping push the issue into the open on both sides of the state line. 

While litigation outcomes vary, the public record leaves little doubt about the pathway of contamination: PFAS-laden wastewater and biosolids cycling from industrial use to treatment to land application, and then into rivers people use as drinking-water source.

What Are PFAS?

But what are PFAS? PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a large family of man-made chemicals prized for being oil, water, and stain-resistant. These chemicals are often produced by manufacturers like 3M, DuPont, and Chemours and then sold to other industries. Their most common usage has been as an ingredient Scotchgard and Teflon coating for non-stick pans. 

The non-stick and stain-resistant qualities of PFAS, though, are a double-edged sword: these properties are precisely what has made these chemicals so useful in certain industries, but it also means that they simply do not readily break down once introduced into the environment, or worse, once they have made their way into the human body. Hence the often-used nickname for these various compounds--forever chemicals. 

Health studies have linked several PFAS to several serious health issues, such as elevated cholesterol, thyroid disease, reduced vaccine response, pregnancy-induced hypertension, and, for some of these compounds, increased risks of kidney and testicular cancers. 

In April 2024, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued the first nationwide, enforceable drinking-water limits for six PFAS—4 parts per trillion (ppt) for PFOA and PFOS; 10 ppt for PFHxS, PFNA, and HFPO-DA. Keep in mind that PFAS are measured in parts-per-trillion, which shows how little exposure is considered acceptable (and why the problem is invisible). Samples of water taken from the water in Gadsen and Centre, Alabama, and Calhoun and Rome, GA (immediately downstream from the town of Dalton) sometimes showed levels of these various PFAS to exceed the EPA's acceptable limits by three-times the EPA limit, on the low end, to over nine-times the limit on the high end.

 More shockingly, historic raw river measurements near Dalton’s LAS underscore why the new-ish EPA standards matter: peer-reviewed sampling back in 2008 (over 15 years before the EPA began its more stringent standards for PFAS) reported PFOA levels at ~253–1,150 ppt and PFOS levels at ~192–318 ppt downstream. These levels, at the time of their recording, were among the highest non-spill levels ever recorded in U.S. surface waters.

Understanding what PFAS are, what they do, and why we do not want them in our water is the first step before we dig deeper into the issue and what is being done about it. In my next post, we'll take a more in-depth look at how these PFAS migrated from carpet mills into the water supply and what is being done to remedy the situation.