Years after a chemical contaminated Paden City's water supply, residents are still sick and suffering

Apr. 17—PADEN CITY — Robin Fox remembers the first sign that something was wrong with her husband Mark.

"That was three years before we knew about the water," she said.

First, he began slurring his speech. Though Mark was once the picture of health, his muscle function rapidly deteriorated until he was relying on a feeding tube.

By 2020, only four years after being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, Mark had lost the ability to walk or talk. He died later that year.

Everybody knows everybody here, and Fox can effortlessly rattle off the names of people with cancer and kidney problems. In recent years, dozens of others have reported neurological conditions like Fox's husband, such as ALS and epilepsy. In some cases, the Environmental Protection Agency has connected these types of diseases to exposure to high levels of a chemical used in dry cleaning called PCE.

City officials first found low levels of PCE in Paden City's water supply in 2010, and the EPA traced it to where the former Band Box dry cleaner dumped it into the sewers, steps away from the Paden City High School football field. While no one knows whether PCE is the cause of health problems in Paden City, multiple times since then regulators have found amounts of PCE in the drinking water that exceed the government-set maximum levels, and last year told residents to stop using the water when a chemical stripper went offline.

Now, despite the EPA adding Paden City to their National Priorities List in 2022, making it eligible for Superfund assistance, the cleanup plan is unclear and local residents are left to grapple with lifelong health conditions. Fox has watched her husband and neighbors get sick and die. But she'll soon be on a fixed income and can't afford to leave.

"I'm getting ready to retire," she said. "I'm a widow."

PCE exposure can happen several ways. People can be exposed to the chemical at higher levels if they work around it, and at lower levels through air and water.

When Band Box dumped the PCE into the sewer sometime around its closure in the 1990s, it got into the drinking water. It also seeped into the soil, and PCE in the ground can also reach the air above. PCE vapor can come out of water faucets, contaminating the air inside homes and other buildings and bursting into the faces of people turning on their spigots.

Though city officials first detected the chemical in 2010, it took another decade for the city to install an air stripper to remove the chemical from its public water supply.

Mayor Steve Kastigar and water superintendent Joshua Billiter didn't respond to requests for comment, although residents noted leadership has changed since 2010.

Former Paden City resident Tonya Shuler has tried to bring more attention to the water quality for years.

Her son had his first seizure years before state health officials published a notice about PCE in the water in a local paper. He was 15 and staying at a friend's when he had a violent grand mal seizure.

"He didn't know who I was for three hours afterwards," Shuler said.

Following the newspaper notice in 2020, Shuler and Hannah Spencer, a former Paden City resident, launched an online survey and went door-to-door asking people about their health problems.

Of about 200 Paden City residents who responded, Spencer said 80 had kidney issues; 63 reported neurological disorders; such as muscle spasms; 56 reported cancer and seven had ALS.

Shuler said EPA officials promised they'd also test people for PCE in their bodies. But according to the EPA, that testing isn't included in its current plan.

Lisa Davis and her husband Mike used to own and live in two apartment buildings just a short distance from the former dry cleaner. Their son, who already suffered from a traumatic brain injury, lost a kidney after suffering from severe kidney stones. She also knows of one household where six people have developed brain cancer, and others where children have been diagnosed with cancer and died shortly after.

So they moved to Friendly, ten miles down the road along the Ohio River. And now, after drawing so much attention to the water, Davis has lost friends. She said she feels shunned by those residents who can't leave and those who don't want to acknowledge the problem.

"Some people are just like, 'you live in Chemical Valley, go away,'" she said.

Last year, residents were without clean tap water for weeks after the air stripper went offline. Water superintendent Billiter has said the city made the call to let water bypass the stripper because water treatment plant levels were low and they were concerned it would be needed for fire suppression.

While many people bought bottled water for drinking, they still used the city water to cook, shower and wash their clothes.

And despite the Biden administration's reinstatement of a chemical tax to help clean up Superfund sites and funneling millions to the effort through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, there's no set date for clean-up

"While the Site has not received funding to perform a cleanup, the Site has indirectly benefited as other money was available to expedite the investigation into Paden City," said EPA spokesperson Kelly Offner in an email.

She also said the EPA has mainly helped with earlier steps in its process, by determining the source of the contamination, as well as sampling soil, wells and indoor air.

In an email, state health officials, who are responsible for ensuring clean drinking water in West Virginia, acknowledged that they'd known about the PCE's presence since 2010, and that current sampling didn't prevent the 2023 outage, but wouldn't provide any future plans for preventing contamination.

A spokesperson for Gov. Jim Justice also didn't present a plan as of deadline. State health officials report to the governor.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assessed health risks to a limited area including some homes around the former dry cleaner and released its findings in January. The agency concluded that residents were not likely to have experienced harmful health effects due to the contamination.

But in their study, they also acknowledged they didn't know how much PCE was in the water prior to 2010, and they recommended more action, including indoor air testing at the high school and the development of a back-up emergency plan.

Fox views the state and country as ill-prepared to adequately respond to environmental emergencies like water crises. Profits, she said, are the priority.

And she still has to live in Paden City.

She remembers how she and her husband used to joke, even after he lost the ability to talk. They'd use his text-to-speech device but give it a woman's voice or a British accent and laugh and laugh.

"We cried a lot," she said. "But we laughed a lot too."

They also tried to figure out what good could come of Mark's diagnosis. She remembers sitting on the couch together, searching for purpose.

She suggested that, maybe, God wanted them to work to bring attention to environmental destruction.

"I said, 'Our environment is just getting so bad,'" she said. "'And maybe we're not being very good stewards of this earth.'"

This story originally appeared in the Statehouse Spotlight newsletter published by Mountain State Spotlight. Get coverage of the legislative session delivered to your email inbox Monday through Thursday; sign up for the free newsletter at mountainstatespotlight.org/newsletter