A north Alabama water authority is asking the state of Alabama to join its lawsuit against the 3M Company related to water pollution in the Tennessee River, which is used as a source of drinking water for more than 20,000 water customers in Morgan and Lawrence Counties.
The West Morgan and East Lawrence Water and Sewer Authority mailed a letter to Gov. Kay Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall Friday, asking the state to formally join their lawsuit against the chemical giant. The letter was first reported by WHNT TV in Huntsville.
The lawsuit and pollution issues relate to PFOA and PFOS, two man-made chemicals that for years were manufactured at a 3M facility on the Tennessee River in Decatur. In 2016, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a health advisory that those chemicals were linked to human health problems, including cancer and kidney disease, at lower concentrations than previously believed. Eight Alabama water systems, several of which received their water from the WMEL treatment plant on the Tennessee River, tested above the EPA’s new advisory limits.
After the advisory, the WMEL advised its customers not to drink their tap water and installed a $4 million temporary filtration system to remove those chemicals from its water supply. It is now suing 3M for damages and to pay for the cost of a permanent upgraded filtration system that can remove those substances from its water. Since then, many north Alabama residents have been afraid to drink their tap water, and many customers of the affected systems have been drinking only bottled water.
In the letter, WMEL general manager Don Sims, said Alabama has not stepped up to help its residents, as authorities in Minnesota, Ohio and New York did when similar issues were discovered in those states. Sims cited a recent $850 million settlement between 3M and the state of Minnesota as an example.
“To date, our elected officials in Alabama have not taken up for Alabamians like the officials in Minnesota, and more recently New York, did for their citizens,” Sims wrote. “The part that is most troubling to WMEL is that 3M never even offered to provide so much as one case of bottled water in Alabama, yet we have discovered the fact that they spent $40 million many years ago to build a new water treatment plant for an authority in Minnesota who faced very similar issues to WMEL.
“At the same time that 3M was building a new water plant in Minnesota, they were telling WMEL and [the Alabama Department of Environmental Management] that there was no problem with these chemicals in the Tennessee River.”
Spokesmen for Gov. Kay Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the matter.
3M has repeatedly said that it does not believe PFOS and PFOA are harmful to human health or the environment at the levels commonly found in north Alabama.
“If elected officials in 3M’s home state of Minnesota were willing to stand up against their state’s largest company, isn’t it time that Alabama’s elected officials take action to clean up our state’s largest river and to protect the Alabamians who rely on the river for their drinking water?” Sims wrote.
Read the full text of the letter below.