“BENNINGTON — State environmental officials have rejected the draft conclusions of an engineering report for Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics. The engineers claim soil and groundwater tainted by PFOA may have come from sources other than two former Teflon fabric coating plants.
Barr Engineering questions the extent to which perfluorooctanoic acid contamination came from two former ChemFab Corp. plants in town, especially in the eastern half of a contamination zone identified by the state.
That section involves a railroad line and more than 150 private wells east of Route 7A that have been found to have unsafe levels of the industrial chemical.
The state disagrees with the Barr report and alleges that Saint-Gobain is responsible for PFOA found in the contamination zone…
[Saint-Gobain] currently is funding up to $20 million in municipal water line extensions to provide clean water to about 200 properties in the western half of the local contamination zone, as stipulated in a consent agreement reached last year.
Chuck Schwer, director of the state’s Waste Management and Prevention Division, said Friday that the company’s final engineering report is due on March 15, after which Saint-Gobain and ANR representatives will discuss the results and try to reach agreement on how to address pollution the eastern sector.
Schwer added that nothing presented in the draft report has convinced agency officials that there were any other significant sources of PFOA in the area.
Assigning responsibility matters because ANR believes Saint-Gobain should agree to fund the next phase of the corrective response. Extension of water lines to that section is considered the best long-term solution available for nearly all of the affected properties.”
Read the full article by Jim Therrien.