SPOKANE COUNTY, Wash. — The West Plains Water Coalition held a PFAS 101 workshop for people to better understand the harm of the “forever chemical.”
At this workshop, people had the opportunity to learn about the dangers the chemical can pose to humans and the environment.
“It’s an endocrine disrupter, it can cause high cholesterol, it can cause low birth rate in new babies, it can cause certain kinds of cancers, because it’s just a disruption in body normalcy,” said John Hancock, the president of the West Plains Water Coalition. “That’s why it’s called a forever chemical, because it’s built to be non-biodegradable.”
The West Plains Water Coalition is a volunteer-led organization that is helping to inform the community of what might be contaminating their water and what they can do to help mitigate the damage.
“This is how we learn the story together, and it’s how we gain the courage to stand up and say what we think about our neighborhood and our health, and our PFAS and our grandchildren. And our animals and our strawberries and all of those aspects of the health risks of PFAS in our water,” Hancock said.
About 4,000 homes in the West Plains are potentially affected by PFAS contamination in their ground water. For the coalition, every person who takes the time to learn about how the forever chemical and its harms is a step in bringing that number to zero.
“It’s a big snowball rolling down the hill now and every little push that we get from the regulators, from the elected from the neighbors, just fathers more and more momentum towards the solutions,” Hancock said. “So it’s really encouraging to me to see this sort of a big crowd. It helps us understand that we are on the right path forward.”
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