Will EPA Finish What They Started?

Residents of the Mid Ohio Valley have been waiting for more than five years for the Environmental Protection Agency to complete a risk assessment on perfluorooctanoic acid, or C8. Now, a prominent attorney says they may have to wait forever.

Rob Bilott, who represented plaintiffs in the class action lawsuit against DuPont over local water supplies contaminated with C8, recently sent a letter to the EPA and the Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry, urging them not to delay any further release of information.

Bilott says the agencies are under pressure to drop their work on the manmade chemical, which has been the target of a voluntary global phaseout agreement with industry initiated by EPA.

It has been two years since the EPA released any new information about its risk assessment, despite the fact that new scientific data is becoming available.

Bilott said the “new studies should be evaluated to determine whether present agency conclusions warrant modification, but the present conclusions should not be held by the agencies while researchers continue their work.”