Federal judge rules for EPA, against enviro, public health advocates over PFAS testing
Mar 31, 2023 | 1:24 pm ET
US District Court Judge Richard Myers II ruled in favor of the EPA today, dismissing a lawsuit filed by several public health and environmental groups over PFAS testing in humans.
Clean Cape Fear, the Center for Environmental Health, Cape Fear River Watch, and Toxic Free NC had petitioned the EPA in October 2020.
They demanded that the agency force Chemours to study the health effects of 54 toxic PFAS specifically on people living near and downstream of their Fayetteville plant.
The advocates reasoned that since Chemours and its predecessor had contaminated public and private water supplies with these harmful compounds, it only seemed right that the billion-dollar company, with oversight by independent scientists, pay to study the people it had poisoned.
In December 2021, the EPA under Administrator Michael Regan, who had first confronted the PFAS crisis as North Carolina’s Secretary of the Environment, approved the petition.
The advocacy groups sued, alleging the EPA had actually denied their petition but was masquerading it as an approval.
Myers heard the arguments in late February of this year.
Myers disagreed, stating in today’s ruling that the EPA had approved the petition, even though it wasn’t to the plaintiffs’ specifications.
For example, the agency agreed to test only seven of the 54 types of PFAS. The EPA rejected the advocates’ request for biomonitoring of Chemours employees. It declined to mandate testing of mixtures of the compounds in blood. And it did not mandate a comprehensive epidemiological study of Cape Fear Basin residents who have been exposed to PFAS from the Chemours plant.
But Myers wrote in his ruling that a petition cannot legally compel the EPA to perform a specific test.
Advocacy groups also argued that they had filed not a single petition, but 54 individual ones, each representing a type of PFAS and testing to be done.
“The plaintiffs are mistaken,” Myers wrote. “The EPA reasonably construed the Plaintiffs’ petition as a single petition.”
Myers concluded that the EPA has the authority to amend its testing protocol, “and many of the plaintiffs’ positions may ultimately adopted by the EPA,” the judge wrote.
After the decision. Clean Cape Fear issued a statement:
“By dismissing our lawsuit, Trump-appointed Judge Myers has created a dangerous precedent for future EPA administrations to publicly grant citizen TSCA petitions while internally failing to do the work requested. We are considering an appeal to this disappointing decision that serves no one but the chemical companies who continue to hold hostage our regulatory institutions at the expense of our health and well-being.”
Raleigh, NC
