The numbers don’t lie. In the first two months of 2026, the data center industry spent more than $36 billion on new construction in the United States, according to an April report. That’s just in January and February. For context in those same two months in 2025, the industry spent $1.4 billion.

That’s a land rush with 67 percent of it is headed for rural America, for the communities with the fewest resources, the least regulatory protection, and the most to lose.

The worst part? Most people don’t know they’re coming until it’s too late.

These massive facilities consume as much electricity as 80,000 homes each, drain hundreds of millions of gallons of water annually, run diesel backup generators that pump toxic pollution into the air, and drive up utility bills.

In many communities, they can be (and have been) approved without a single public hearing, without a single elected official casting a vote, and without anyone living in the community getting a say.

As more people understand the bigger picture on data centers, more communities are showing up and using their voices. Here’s what we’re seeing right now.

First, the push for state moratoriums is struggling.

The statewide moratorium movement sits with New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul right now. Earlier this month, the New York State Legislature passed the Responsible Data Center Development Act, a one-year moratorium on data center permits for any facility drawing more than 20 megawatts of peak power.

If Governor Hochul signs it, New York would become the first state in the nation to enact such a freeze.

The bill also requires a local public hearing before construction and a statewide environmental impact report within 18 months. It’s a direct response to what’s been happening on the ground with data centers proposed across upstate communities from Niagara County to the Hudson Valley, local planning boards overwhelmed by developers and their lawyers, and residents having nowhere to turn.

“The burden of rigorous analysis and defense against billionaires and their white-shoe law firms should not be put on volunteer planning board appointees,” Gay Nicholson of Sustainable Finger Lakes said at a press conference. “We need state-level intervention.”

The New York bill didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was built on years of exactly the kind of local organizing I’ve been advocating for. Towns like Oneonta passing their own 12-month moratoriums after residents showed up to planning meetings and town halls. New York shows what’s possible when local momentum reaches critical mass.

Now, the state needs to follow.

Meanwhile, Maine's veto override failed. State lawmakers failed to override a veto from Governor Janet Mills on a bill that would have made Maine the first state in the nation to impose a temporary ban on data center development.

In Mills’ veto message, she acknowledged concerns about data centers but said the pause would block the redevelopment of a former paper mill, a $550 million project its developer claimed would create more than 100 permanent jobs. House Democrats and a few Republicans voted to override, arguing the veto left Mainers vulnerable to developers and big corporations. It wasn't enough.

Minnesota's bills have died. A bill to impose a statewide moratorium until Minnesota had a regulatory framework in place was widely and heatedly discussed but never put to a vote. An NDA bill that would have banned local elected officials from signing non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with developers passed the Senate with bipartisan support but was blocked in the tied House. A water protection bill requiring large industrial water users to obtain their own DNR permits advanced in both chambers but couldn't cross the finish line.

Subscribe now

Vermont’s veto override fell six votes short despite tripartisan supermajorities.

Vermont Governor Philip Scott issued a statement saying, “I understand the potential impacts of data centers, but this bill creates an unacceptable precedent which will have much broader consequences for economic opportunity and long-term competitiveness in Vermont. We cannot afford policies that risk driving current or future jobs and investment to other states, when we already have regulations and policies in place to address our concerns about data centers.”

Smaller, more nimble governments are moving faster.

Cities and counties are outpacing states by a wide margin, and they are finding new tools beyond the moratorium.

The most significant development came from Monterey Park, California, a city in the Los Angeles region, where residents became the first in the country to vote on a permanent ban on data centers through a ballot initiative. The result was a landslide.

More than 86 percent of votes counted (in early returns) were in favor of the ban. The city council had already passed an indefinite moratorium in April after growing community anger toward a developer pushing to build a facility covering nearly 250,000 square feet.

Organizers had just two months to run a campaign. They printed 10,000 flyers and turned out thousands of voters.

The ballot initiative is a key consideration for other cities and towns.

A vote of the people carries far more legal and political weight than an ordinance passed by city council members, and the developer in California apparently knew it. After threatening to sue over the moratorium, they backed down once the ballot measure passed.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, the city council voted unanimously this month to implement a 150-day moratorium on new data centers after months of community pressure, including thousands of petition signatures to block a proposed facility near the Reedy Creek Nature Preserve.

Supporters in the council chambers broke into applause and chants of “a people united will never be divided.”

“This is not a partisan issue when it comes to protecting our neighborhoods,” at-large Councilmember Dimple Ajmera said. “This is not a blue or red issue. This is about quality of life. This is about clean air, clean water.”

Charlotte joins Durham, Apex, Canton, Chatham County, and Gates County, which have recently passed their own moratoriums in North Carolina. That’s a cluster, and clusters are worth noting.

Minneapolis, Denver, Baltimore, Reno, and more than a dozen Michigan townships have all gotten something done. Local governments can act on shorter timelines with far less lobbying pressure than state legislatures face.

Narrower, more defensible framing is winning.

The bills that are getting signed such as Florida’s SB 484, Oklahoma’s HB 2992, Washington’s SB 5982, aren’t moratoriums.

They are ratepayer protection and cost-allocation laws. Framing the issue as “data centers shouldn’t pass their costs onto residents and small businesses” is proving more politically durable than broader bans. Concrete harm to identifiable people is more actionable than abstract environmental concern.

Water and utility costs are the stickiest arguments. Florida’s law specifically tightened aquifer permitting alongside the ratepayer rules. Both water resource protection and electricity cost allocation give legislators and local councils the most defensible ground to stand on.

Momentum is contagious at the local level.

The pace of new pauses quickened through late May and into June, according to research. Once a few neighboring jurisdictions act, others follow.

Michigan has cluster of more than 20 local moratoriums. In Illinois, the twin cities of Bloomington and Normal are debating data centers together. Though we’ve heard from locals that the mayor of Bloomington is ignoring community members. Not a good look!

Coalition-building between adjacent communities can be a real accelerant.

Monterey Park’s ballot initiative is already being watched by communities in Port Washington, Wisconsin, Janesville, Wisconsin, and Augusta Township, Michigan, all of which have their own ballot measures in the pipeline.

A national Gallup poll released in May found that seven in 10 Americans oppose the construction of AI data centers in their local areas. This movement is not fringe. You are the majority.

What’s losing.

Broad constitutional amendments like the one in Ohio is far short of the signatures needed for its proposed amendment to ban data centers over 25 MW. Outright statewide bans have stalled in governor’s offices.

Editor’s note: Live in Ohio and want to join the effort? Go here.

Any measure that gives developers a clean legal target is vulnerable. The Hill County, Texas lawsuit is a warning sign about how quickly a local ordinance can land in court.

The through-line is clear. Protect the ratepayer and the aquifer, not the abstract principle, and work locally until the state-level window reopens.

What to Watch Out For

Don’t let them define “data center” broadly. Some developers try to fold gas turbines or other onsite fossil fuel power generation into the definition of “data center” so it gets approved alongside the facility. Your zoning ordinance’s definition should be specific to computer systems and directly associated components.

Don’t let them postpone public hearings without scrutiny. Developers sometimes ask to delay scheduled hearings because they want more time to lobby the governing body. Know your local rules about when and how hearings can be removed from the agenda and watch for procedural maneuvering.

Don’t let the tax revenue argument go unchallenged. Developers will always lead with job numbers and tax projections. Ask them to show you the full cost picture: infrastructure upgrades, utility rate impacts, water system strain, emergency services, road damage from construction traffic. Those numbers belong in the conversation too.

Credibility is everything. In a public process, your word is your most valuable asset. Verify every factual claim before you make it. Inaccurate statements can undercut your credibility and, in some cases, expose you to legal liability. Stick to what you can prove.

Additional Resources

• Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC): selc.org

• Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development: www.datacenterresponsibility.com

• Better Data Center Project: betterdatacenterproject.com

• Halt the Harm Network: datacenters.halttheharm.net

• FracTracker Alliance: fractracker.org

• Data Center Moratoriums: www.datacenterbans.com

• Ban Secret Deals: bansecretdeals.org

Help the Nashville Zoo!

Learn more here: Why Nashville Zoo is fighting a proposed data center next door

How can you help?

Zoo leaders are speaking regularly with city leaders, they are also asking the community and anyone interested in supporting our fight to sign our petition declaring that you oppose the data center being built near the Zoo and our surrounding community.

After signing the petition, please contact the Metro Nashville Council Members and Nashville’s Mayor, sharing your support for the Zoo and encourage them to pass the Metro Nashville Government Legislation SB2026-1391.

Lastly, please plan to attend the Planning Commission Public Hearing on Thursday, June 11 at 4:00 p.m., located at 700 President Ronald Reagan Way, Nashville, TN 37210.

Parking is FREE. At the planning commission, they will call out a series of bills. You need to let them know you are there to speak in support of council member Rollin Horton’s legislation BL2026-1391. Each person will be given two minutes to speak.

We've Been Swallowing This Long Enough. The EPA Needs to Act on Microplastics.

For the first time, microplastics have made the U.S. EPA’s official list of unregulated contaminants being considered for future drinking water regulation.

We’ve written about microplastics here:

The draft Sixth Contaminant Candidate List (CCL 6) includes 75 chemicals, four chemical groups: disinfection byproducts (DBPs), microplastics, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and pharmaceuticals, along with nine microbes.

Starting June 15, and continuing through the summer, an EPA Science Advisory Board committee will hold five public meetings to discuss which contaminants on that list move forward toward rules.

These meetings matter. But so does the fact that the EPA has published five lists before, and not a single contaminant from list 5 has been regulated.

Public pressure isn’t optional. The first meeting is on June 15 at 12 p.m. E.T.
Show up. Stay engaged. Make noise.

Tell them the people drinking this water are watching.

The more you know: What is the drinking water CCL?

The drinking water CCL is a list of contaminants that are currently not subject to any proposed national primary drinking water regulations but are known or anticipated to occur in public water systems.

Contaminants listed on the CCL may require future regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). SDWA requires EPA to publish the CCL every five years.

SDWA directs the agency to consider the health effects and occurrence information for unregulated contaminants and further specifies that the agency place those contaminants on the list that present the greatest public health concern related to exposure from drinking water.

EPA uses the CCL to identify priority contaminants for regulatory decision making and information collection.

What’s happening in your community? Let us know in the comments below. Remember: this is a community space to share information and strategies or ask questions.

Want to know what it's like when a data center secretly comes to your town?

Today we're talking with organizers from Farmington, Minnesota, a small community of 25,000 that woke up to a 350-acre hyperscale data center approved near their homes.

Kris Akin is the Outreach, Communications and Partnership Director for the Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development. Matthew Shaw is a Virginia-based volunteer researcher, who tracks data center opposition movements nationwide. Their story is one you need to hear, and their fight may be coming to your backyard next.

Farmington, Minnesota, sits on the outer ring of the Twin Cities suburbs. It has the kind of community life that people move toward with a historic downtown and 48 miles of nature trails.

What it doesn’t have, since December 2019, is a grocery store. Residents drive to neighboring Lakeville or Rosemount to buy food. So, when the golf course southeast of town went up for sale, people were hoping a developer would build homes.

What they got instead was an almost 350-acre hyperscale data center with massive buildings, some rising 50 to 80 feet, planted between four established neighborhoods just 1.9 miles from downtown. The project was approved in November 2024. Non-disclosure agreements had been signed. The identity of the end user still hasn’t been revealed.

This community’s story shows what happens when neighbors refuse to be steamrolled. We spoke with Kris and Matthew about what they’ve learned, what’s at stake, and why Farmington’s fight may matter far beyond Minnesota.

The Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development is a citizen-centered community working together to mitigate the impact of data center installations on electric grids, land use, conservation, and water resources.

Kris, take us back to the beginning. Tell us about Farmington and what life was like before the data center.

Kris: The community still retains its small-town character with a historic downtown, county fairground, and pioneer village. The land to the south and east is mostly farmland. It felt like our small town was growing and moving forward with the pleasant community life we were used to.

The golf course southeast of Farmington in Castle Rock Township was for sale as the owners were ready to retire. Our neighborhoods surrounding the golf course expected a new owner to purchase the business or a housing developer to create a new housing development there.

Our community has been without a grocery store since December 2019. Farmington needs more “rooftops” to support one, according to market studies, and a housing development would have helped create more of a market for it.

The political landscape in Farmington is ugly, and public support has eroded with the resignation of the mayor after an outburst by him when he announced a limit on public comments to 5 minutes to preserve “decorum.”

He has been very passionate about this project and our community. Public data requests by our Coalition revealed that the planning commission director has asked for coaching on how to talk to the public and that a city employee had joined our email list only to then share it back with others at city hall.

How did you first learn about data centers coming to your area?

Kris: When the data center discussions surfaced publicly in the spring of 2024, I initially trusted that our city leadership would thoroughly vet a project of this magnitude. Annexation, rezoning, and the transformation of a long‑established residential area are not small matters. I believed the city would either reject the proposal or relocate it to a more suitable site.

I was wrong. The city notified neighbors that lived directly near the golf course but not residents that lived across the street about a public hearing.

Our neighborhood started holding discussions, attending city planning commission meetings as well as city council meetings. We expressed our concerns from May to November of 2024, protesting outside of City Hall, meeting with the Mayor and City Council members, printing and posting yard signs and working to make others aware of what was happening.

November of 2024 the proposed development was approved for a 350-acre data center on the golf course property between four neighborhoods just 1.9 miles from our downtown area.

As I did some more research wondering why our city leaders would support a hyperscale data center, it became clear that something fundamental had shifted at City Hall. Key staff positions were new. The Community & Economic Development Department had changed and restructured to consist entirely of City Council members.

Few cities in Minnesota operate this way. Most maintain a balance of residents and elected officials to ensure transparency and accountability. Farmington moved in the opposite direction.

This restructuring matters. It concentrates power. It narrows perspectives. It makes it far easier for major decisions to move forward without meaningful public involvement.

Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) were signed by some City of Farmington staff and information about end users of the hyperscale data center have not been revealed or released.

Editor’s note: What is an annexation agreement? Minnesota keeps a database here.

There are about 20 proposed data center sites in Minnesota alone. Does your fight in Farmington feel like it could set a precedent for those communities?

Kris: Yes! Our neighbors organized a 501(c)(4) organization. We believed that people would think we were “NIMBYS” (not in my backyard) folks and overreacting to the location of this hyperscale data center.

We quickly learned about the scope and size of a facility like this and felt that it was not the proper place to support this industrial infrastructure.

We filed a lawsuit in January of 2025 and began lobbying at the city, county, and state level to bring awareness about this rapidly growing industry that needs some guardrails, policies, and guidelines to keep people and our planet safe.

We also organized as a 501(c)(3) under the same organization name. Our lawsuit has been challenged twice with a motion to dismiss by the City of Farmington, and the developer (TRACT) and a judge has rejected their motion and said our case has merit. We are in discovery now with a court date of May 2027.

Since we started our website and Facebook page, we have heard from so many people across the country that are experiencing the same issues with NDAs, questionable tactics, rush to approval, and vague information.

If we can get our day in court, spread sunshine on how this happened and win, it would set a precedent and send a message to Big Tech hyperscale data center developers that the people and the planet come first.

The main legal claims outlined in this lawsuit are:

1. Breach of Contract (Count I): The City of Farmington allegedly violated the Orderly Annexation Agreement (OAA) with Castle Rock Township by rezoning the Subject Property without the Township’s consent and failing to engage in the required dispute resolution process.

2. Declaratory Judgment under Minn. Stat. Ch. 555 (Count II): Plaintiffs seek a declaration that the City of Farmington’s rezoning of the Subject Property is prohibited by the OAA and is arbitrary, capricious, unreasonable, and unlawful.

3. Judicial Review of Zoning Decision under Minn. Stat. § 462.361 (Count III): Plaintiffs argue that the City’s zoning determination was inappropriate for the proposed Data Center’s scale and use, violated the OAA, and was arbitrary, capricious, unreasonable, and unlawful. They seek to reverse the zoning determination and declare the ordinance void.

4. Declaratory Judgment under the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act (MERA) (Count IV): Plaintiffs allege that the Data Center project will pollute, impair, or destroy natural resources protected under MERA and seek a declaration that the project violates MERA.

5. Injunctive Relief under MERA (Count V): Plaintiffs request temporary and permanent injunctive relief to prevent the Data Center project from proceeding until compliance with MERA is demonstrated.

Castle Rock Township has also filed a lawsuit regarding their Orderly Annexation Agreement.

You’ve been working toward a statewide moratorium. What would that look like, and how close are you?

Kris: We have been meeting weekly with lobbyists and staff from about 20 other organizations in the Minnesota area that support clean water and our environment. We have had sit down meetings with reps from the House and Senate.

We have had two rallies at the rotunda inside the capitol and shared literature with all legislators and the governor.

We supported 3 bills at the State level:

1. The bill to impose a statewide moratorium on data-center development until Minnesota has a regulatory framework in place was widely and heatedly discussed among legislators but was never put to a vote.

2. An NDA bill would have banned local elected officials from signing non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with developers. That bill passed the Senate with bipartisan support but was blocked in the tied House.

3. A bill aimed at better protecting Minnesota’s water supply by requiring large-volume industrial water users to get their own permit from the Department of Natural Resources rather than hide behind municipal water permits advanced in both the House and Senate but wasn’t able to cross the finish line this session.

How have you built your nonprofit and worked with others to move your cause forward?

Kris: We have filed the necessary paperwork with the IRS, Minnesota Secretary of State and Minnesota Attorney General. We have joined the Minnesota Council of Non-Profits to receive important information about nonprofit boards and organizational procedures. We have developed relationships with 20 different non-profit organizations in the state.

We have a volunteer researcher from Virgina (Matthew), who is providing support and research and connections. Some on our team visit online or by phone with other Minnesota folks fighting hyperscale data centers in Hermantown, Pine Island, Monticello, and Rosemount.

Data centers are often talked about as invisible infrastructure. What do you want people to understand about their physical footprint?

Kris: Hyperscale Data Centers are larger facilities than the legacy data centers built and maintained from years back.

The proposal in Farmington will be 342.81 acres with 12 large buildings and two admin buildings. Some buildings are 50 to 80 feet tall. There will be lots of concrete and asphalt parking lots. Rainwater will warm up as it runs off the buildings and parking lots and will run into our groundwater and nearby trout pond.

The power and water consumed by a hyperscale data center this big will be as much as our community uses. A new additional water tower and an electrical substation will be required. The City of Farmington has agreed to provide the water to the data center.

Diesel generators will be placed on the tops of buildings for a backup and will need to be tested regularly to assure they are working. Extra diesel fuel will be stored on site in large tanks. During the construction phase of 5 to 7 years, there will be up to large gravel and sand deliveries daily, increased construction equipment, and crew traffic.

Reports from Ellendale, North Dakota, where a data center is being constructed, indicate that residents stay off the roads during morning and late afternoon to avoid the heavy traffic.

Matthew: Our data is often thought of as floating in the “Cloud,” an ethereal and nebulous phenomenon that has nothing to do with the real world. I like to think of data centers as part of the Data Center Industrial Complex (DCIC), first termed by Mél Hogan. This concept encapsulates not only the data centers themselves but the supply chains, end users, and environmental impacts from development, use, and e-waste.

It begins with extractive industries: copper, cement, rare earth minerals, lithium, etc., all of which must be dug up, refined, and transported around the world. This brings direct harm to the people living in those areas, often in poor and/or indigenous communities.

Next is the fossil fuel industry, with data centers consuming 4.4 percent of total energy demand in 2023; they are expected to grow to up to 12 percent by 2028.

There is also the risk of increased nuclear proliferation with larger plants, such as Three Mile Island, and smaller modular reactors becoming a popular option for the tech giants who need constant energy but don’t want the CO2 emissions.

Data Center water consumption is typically only measured in direct usage, not indirectly from power generation. Data Center water consumption is centralized, often affecting already water-stressed communities, which exacerbates local water insecurity.

Noise and light pollution from data centers are harmful to people and animals. First, it is harmful to the employees; it can directly damage their hearing. Next, it affects the community with a hum/buzz, which can cause headaches, stress, and sleep issues. Lastly, it affects wildlife, causing new migration patterns and habitat development in birds, butterflies, bats, etc.

Matthew, you’re based in Virginia, one of the most data-center-dense places on Earth. What made you want to volunteer your research skills for a fight happening in Minnesota?

Matthew: First, some background on me. I have BA degrees in political science and public policy, and since then have been working for a contractor for HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R). Everything I say is my own and doesn’t reflect my employer or HUD, to be clear.

We host data and case studies on all things housing, and I help do quality assurance, write short summaries, and work on the help desk. I am also starting my master’s program in international relations (IR).

During the past year, I kept hearing stories from an IR perspective about how the U.S. needs data centers to defeat China. Big Tech would come into a small/medium-sized town, sign NDAs, and then there would be a community opposition movement to stop development.

This immediately interested me from an “underdog” perspective. It also interested me because I see parallels to other industries like nuclear and fossil fuels, where communities are placed in the position where, for “national security,” they must suffer the consequences to “win.”

I wanted to create a nonprofit which would be like HUD’s PD&R but for communities facing data centers. I originally was going to do this myself and started creating the dataset to do so. As I was making the dataset, I stumbled upon CRDCD, which hosted local information but also had a goal to create nationwide information, such as the 101 guide on how to start a data center opposition movement, and after reaching out to Kris and meeting the rest of the team, we all decided I would be a good fit.

I benefit from learning from CRDCD about their firsthand struggles, and CRDCD benefits from my work through media coverage, finding new community groups, NGOs, and other resources.

The data centers have won in Northern Virginia; they have local politicians in their pocket, but they have been slowed down by interconnection delays. They don’t want to wait 7 years in Virginia when they can do it elsewhere.

What’s the one piece of research or data that you think every local official should have to read before approving a hyperscale data center project?

Matthew: The thing about data center development is that there is (usually) no single issue. It is context-dependent and multifaceted.

Take Pine Island, Minnesota, where they are planning on building one of the largest battery facilities for backup power generation, but may not have adequate firefighting resources if there were to be a lithium battery fire.

There needs to be comprehensive planning coordination across all governmental agencies, particularly public health, water, and energy, at the local, county, state, and national levels, and that just isn’t happening right now because the administration wants full speed ahead,

Big Tech comes into town offering jobs and taxes, and rushes through planning without community input.

If I am talking to a council member, I would tell them about AI Now’s North Star Data Center Policy Toolkit.

If I had to pick for an academic, it would be this journal article on the making of critical data center studies: .

If I were speaking to a scientist, I would say read the latest doomsday clock report from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and ask how data centers are involved.

To an economist, I would refer them to building a solidarity ecosystem for AI.

You’ve held two rallies at the state capitol. Can you talk about how you organized for those rallies for maximum impact.

Kris: Boy! It was a lot of work, but the message was carried out through our promotions, media releases, advertising and at the event. At the rally, we had speakers, tables with information and lots of signs and banners.

Some meetings with legislators were scheduled after the rally the same day. After the events, the message was carried on through newspaper, radio, and digital sharing of the event. A video was created both times to share with the public.

We made a lot of good noise!

What’s your message to people in other states who are watching similar projects proposed in their backyards?

Kris: Get informed. Read research and factual stories about the harms and impacts that these huge facilities bring to a community.

Look and find published research and studies. Look for public information that shares the processes and planning that went on before the project was announced.

Request public data from your local units of government.

Schedule meetings with your elected officials where you can speak to them face to face.

In this new digital world, use digital tools to share images and information. It seems so ironic that the very tools we all use are supported by data centers, but they can be designed and built with more time provided to protect people and planet!

Adopt all that Erin Brockovich’s experiences and story have taught us!

What do you need most right now and how can others follow along?

Awareness and building support for civic engagement is difficult these days. We are grateful for people like Erin that have joined the fight. It will help—if people follow her call to get involved.

Our biggest need is our fundraising for the lawsuit. Our legal fees are expected to total around $250,000.

Some folks think we are suing for money or for our homes to be bought out, but we are challenging the process and the location and care about the safety of our water, air, and environment.

We have raised $100,000 through a bike ride, dinner and silent auction, and personal donations. Twelve families have been sharing the burden of frequent donations.

We have multiple ways for others to donate and donations to our Coalition for Responsible Data Center Fund are tax deductible as a 501(c)(3).

The Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development is based in Farmington, Minnesota. Their interactive map of opposition groups nationwide, monthly research reports, and a community toolkit for organizing are available on their website.

Learn more about Farmington Technology Park here.

What This Fight Can Teach Your Community

1. The process matters as much as the project. It’s not what they’re building; it’s how they got it approved. NDAs, restructured oversight bodies, selective public notification, rushed votes. When your city is moving unusually fast and unusually quietly, that’s your first warning sign. Request public data early and often. You have that right. Use it.

2. Know what you’re dealing with. A hyperscale data center is not your grandfather’s server farm. We’re talking hundreds of acres, buildings five stories tall, diesel generators on rooftops, water consumption equal to an entire city, and years of heavy construction traffic through your neighborhood. Get the physical facts on paper.

3. The NDA is a red flag, not a formality. When elected officials sign non-disclosure agreements with developers, you lose your right to know who is coming, what they’re building, and why. That should make every single one of us angry. Push back on NDAs at every level. Farmington’s coalition nearly got them banned statewide.

4. Find your people. As of May 2026, there are more 345 opposition groups with more than 428,000 members fighting these exact battles across the country. Most formed in the last year and don’t even know each other yet. Reach out. Connect with communities near you. Share what works. That’s how movements grow.

5. Get your legal footing early. Lawsuits are expensive and they take time, but they create accountability that rallies and yard signs alone cannot. Farmington’s coalition survived two motions to dismiss. Their case has merit, a judge said so. Start building your legal strategy before you need it and support the communities already fighting.

6. Go to your state capitol, not just city hall. Local decisions can be shaped by state policy, and state policy can be shaped by you. Farmington’s coalition helped advance three bills in a single legislative session—a moratorium, an NDA ban, and water permitting reform. None crossed the finish line this time. But legislators are paying attention, and that pressure doesn’t go away.

7. Use every tool you have, including the digital ones. I know the irony isn’t lost on anyone. The very tools we use every day are powered by the data centers we’re fighting. Use them anyway. Video, social media, email lists, digital organizing. Make noise, make connections, and make yourselves impossible to ignore. That’s exactly what Farmington did, and they’re still standing.

In my more than 30 years of working with communities, I’ve learned that when my email inbox starts to clog up with the same message, something is up.

That’s how this whole map project got going. It’s always about the PEOPLE. You had concerns and I wanted to make sure we create some kind of civic infrastructure to track what’s happening.

We have more than 3,000 reports and thousands more submissions that I’ll be sorting through this weekend.

https://brockovichdatacenter.com

Let’s keep talking about this important issue. Stay loud!

Get more from Erin Brockovich in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

I have spent my career listening to the people, especially those who were told to sit down and be quiet, who were told their backyard was safe, and that the water was safe to drink….

I’ve shown up to community after community across the country for decades because the people who live in these towns invite me. I get hundreds of emails every single day, and what they say boils down to two little words: help me.

So when I started hearing from people about AI data centers appearing in their communities with little to no notice, I paid attention.

On April 27, I put out a simple ask: if you have concerns about an AI data center near you, tell me about it. I expected some response. What I got was a flood.

We started with 30 reports on the map at BrockovichDataCenter.com. In a month, 3,862 residents submitted reports. The map now has 2,716 pins and represents 49 states. The single most common concern—more than noise, more than water usage, more than rising utility bills—is the one word that keeps appearing in submission after submission: transparency.

Residents are using words like silenced, ignored, secretive, and not seen and not heard.

They write about back-door deals and NDAs. They describe showing up to planning meetings only to find out the decisions have already been made.

They’re watching their utility bills climb, finding sick animals they can’t explain, and worrying about the long-term impacts on their health and property values. These complaints are not small. They show a national pattern.

Subscribe now

When you hear about issues in one community here or there, it looks bad. But when you line these communities up side by side, you see the larger picture.

So let me ask the question directly: if AI data centers are such a tremendous benefit to communities, why are so many of them being built without meaningful community input?

The Scale of What’s Being Built

To understand what communities are dealing with, you first have to understand the scale of what is being constructed, and how fast it’s all happening.

I’m not talking about a handful of buildings going up quietly in industrial zones. What we’re seeing is a wholesale remaking of the American landscape, town by town, county by county.

In the flatlands of northeast Louisiana, know for soybean fields and dense clusters of rivercane, Meta is building a 4-million-square-foot AI campus called Hyperion. When finished, it will consume more electricity than the entire city of New Orleans and cover a footprint the size of lower Manhattan.

“Meta’s investment establishes the region as an anchor in Louisiana’s rapidly expanding tech sector, revitalizes one of our state’s beautiful rural areas and creates opportunities for Louisiana workers to fill high-paying jobs of the future,” said Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry in a press statement. “I thank Meta for their commitment to our state.”

Diane Cobb, a resident of Holly Ridge an unincorporated community in Richland Parish, said she found out about the data center the way everyone else in her community did—when they started digging.

“Nobody told us anything,” she told New Orleans Public Radio. “They supposedly had a big meeting. The whole community was supposed to come. Nobody knew anything about it. Ever.”

At a meeting at Diane’s house in February, local community members brought their questions.

Why does their water sometimes turns brown?

Why has their electricity has been shutting off without any notice, sometimes for days at a time?

Why does everyone seem to have gotten sicker since Meta showed up?

In West Memphis, Arkansas, Alphabet’s Google has started construction on what state officials are calling the largest private capital investment in state history, a multibillion dollar campus on 1,100 acres of scrubland.

In South Memphis, Tennessee, Elon Musk converted a vacant Electrolux factory into his Colossus supercomputer in just 122 days. He is now building a second, larger version targeting a million GPUs, has acquired a third building to expand further, and purchased a former Duke Energy power plant to keep it all running.

Microsoft has invested more than $7 billion in its data centers in Racine County, Wisconsin.

“In the heart of the American Midwest, a modern marvel is rising,” Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said in a statement. “We’re in the final phases of building the world’s most powerful AI datacenter in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin—part of a region forged by generations of hard work and ingenuity.”

Meanwhile, environmental groups are pursuing legal action and policy advocacy.

“Transparency cannot depend on a company’s goodwill or public relations strategy, according to a 2026 statement released by the org. “Rather, transparency is foundational to democratic decision-making and community trust, especially for projects with environmental impacts as significant as large-scale data centers. These facilities will place enormous demands on our water supplies, electricity grids, and local infrastructure. Communities have a right to full, timely, and meaningful information before decisions are made—not after deals are signed behind closed doors.”

In rural Indiana near the banks of Lake Michigan, Amazon has transformed 1,200 acres of farmland into an $11 billion facility called Project Rainier.

Hundreds of data centers are already operating in Texas with hundreds more on the way. Concerns about water consumption at these facilities is rising as the state stares down a major water shortage due to prolonged drought, population growth and industrial demand that outpace existing supplies. Texas will need at least $174 billion in the next 50 years to avoid a major water crisis, according to a new state analysis.

I could go on, and on, and on. Read more here.

U.S. data centers also consumed more than 4 percent of total U.S. electricity in 2023, according to the MIT Energy Initiative. That number could more than double to 9 percent by 2030, the research group projects. A single hyperscale data center can consume as much electricity as 50,000 homes.

Meet the Messengers

As residents across the country have begun pushing back, they’ve started encountering a well-funded counter-effort, and it’s worth knowing who is behind it.

NetChoice is a Washington, D.C.-based trade association whose members include some of the biggest names in the tech sector: Amazon, Google, Meta, and others. It’s funded primarily through membership dues and sponsorships paid by those same corporations.

The association’s stated mission is to promote free enterprise and free expression online. NetChoice lobbies against regulations its corporate members find inconvenient, litigates against state laws those members oppose, and runs public campaigns designed to shape how communities and lawmakers think about technology policy.

One of those campaigns is called “Data Centers Help Local Communities.” Maybe you’ve seen an ad on YouTube? It promotes the economic benefits of data centers and encourages states to offer tax exemptions to attract them.

The messaging emphasizes job creation, tax revenue, and broadband expansion. It does not emphasize community consent, environmental impact, or the right of residents to know what is being built next door before the permits are signed.

This effort is not put out by an independent research organization or a neutral policy group. It’s an industry lobby funded by the very companies building these facilities, running ads and campaigns designed to smooth the path for their members’ projects.

When you see messaging about how data centers are good for your town, it’s worth asking: who paid for that message, and what are they selling?

The economic arguments NetChoice makes are not fabricated. Data centers do create some jobs. They can generate tax revenue. In places like Loudoun County, Virginia, that revenue has been genuinely significant. But an industry lobby will always lead with the benefits and bury the costs.

It will not tell you about the strain on your power grid, the draw on your water supply, the noise that doesn’t stop, or the back-door deals your local officials may have already signed before you heard a word about it.

Communities Are Pushing Back —> & Winning

The good news is that when communities organize and show up, conditions can change.

In Monroe Township, New Jersey, residents began packing planning board meetings after discovering a proposed 1 million-square-foot data center and 522,000-square-foot warehouse on 172 acres of vacant farmland.

People raised concerns about electricity consumption, water usage, and noise. Officials heard them.

By April, Monroe Township passed ordinances banning data centers entirely. When developer Hexa Builders’ application was subsequently denied as incomplete, the ban took full effect. You can read the Mayor’s full statement about it here.

Monroe Township is not alone. Pemberton Township in Burlington County passed what advocates say was New Jersey’s first municipal data center ban in February.

Advocates are now pushing for a state moratorium on new data centers.

Kassi Solberg a mom in rural Montana made national headlines taking on a proposed 5,000-acre AI data center near her property. At a recent town hall meeting, she asked if anyone on the town council had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the developer that would keep them silent about the project.

The mayor replied that the council wasn’t obliged to answer the public’s questions at the town meetings, according to what the town’s lawyer had told him.

“I think they count on us being dumb country people and us not pushing back,” she told The New York Times. “But by the time you figure out what these companies are planning to do, they’ve got the data centers built already.”

In Utah, Kevin O’Leary’s massive proposed facility is facing mounting community opposition.

The pattern is consistent. When communities are informed and organized, they can change the conversation. They can take action.

What Transparency Looks Like

I want to be clear. I’m not making a blanket argument against data centers or against the technology they support. Some communities have welcomed these facilities after genuine public engagement, honest disclosure of impacts, and real negotiation of community benefits. When that happens, that’s democracy working the way it should.

What is not acceptable is the pattern our map documents: projects announced after permits are already secured, developers who don’t return calls, local officials who signed NDAs before their neighbors knew a project was being considered.

A company can be planning something the size of lower Manhattan in your county, drawing more electricity than a major American city, backed by hundreds of billions in borrowed money, and the people who live there may have no idea it’s coming until the trucks arrive.

Transparency means notifying residents before decisions are made, not after. It means public hearings with real, complete information about energy consumption, water use, noise levels, and effects on local infrastructure. It means elected officials who answer to their constituents first, not to the corporations seeking tax breaks and zoning variances.

When a company the size of Meta or Amazon wants to put a billion-dollar facility in a town of less than 20,000 people, give the people who live there a seat at the table. It’s that simple.

Subscribe now

What You Can Do

The map at BrockovichDataCenter.com exists because of you. Every pin represents a real person who refused to be silent. A new feature where you can upload photos and videos is coming soon, which means the documentation will only get stronger. Get your phones out and start showing us what your water looks like, what your neighborhood sounds like, or any other visual changes in your neighborhood.

If there is a data center issue in your community, report it.

Attend your local planning board meetings. Ask your elected officials what they knew and when they knew it. Ask whether any NDAs were signed. Ask for the full environmental and energy impact assessments, and if they don’t exist, ask why not.

The race to build AI infrastructure is unfolding town by town across this country. In some places, it is welcomed. In others, it is being forced through the back door.

The difference, in almost every case, comes down to whether the community was informed, whether they organized, and whether they showed up.

To all of you who have already submitted, thank you! Keep it coming.

Note: We have about 4,000 data centers operating in the U.S., many built before the AI boom. The map isn't intended to show every data center. It's focused on locations where community members are actively voicing concerns.

Report your AI data center concerns and view the full map at brockovichdatacenter.com.

Want to learn more? Need more support?

🚨Resource Alert 🚨

Halt the Harm has a Help Desk where individuals can request help and they will respond within 48 hours. They can help in a variety of ways: information sharing, strategy development, connecting community members to experts, financial assistance, and often times just being someone to listen and be thought partner.

Join the Free Webinar:
200 Feet Away: One Family’s Unexpected Fight Against a Data Center

Join Halt The Harm for a conversation with two community advocates from Wilmington Residents for Responsible Development, who never expected to become experts in zoning fights, public accountability, and data center development, but whose experiences have lessons for anyone facing a similar fight.

When: Thursday, May 28 at 6pm ET
RSVP: https://luma.com/hhn-2aek

I’ve been doing this work long enough to know what a con looks like.

It doesn’t announce itself. It comes dressed in words like “gold-standard science,” “legally defensible,” and “practical implementation.”

It arrives with press releases and officials standing at podiums. It sounds almost reasonable, if you don’t know what to look for.

They Call It “Making America Healthy Again.”

This week, the Trump EPA announced what it called a “comprehensive strategy” to address PFAS, the forever chemicals that have contaminated the blood of virtually every person in the U.S. today, even newborn babies. The announcement came with $1 billion in grant funding, talk of cutting-edge destruction technologies, and solemn promises to follow the science.

If you need a PFAS primer, go here.

Buried in the careful language of a press release was the gutting of protections for 4 of the 6 chemicals that the previous administration had finally, FINALLY, after decades of industry obstruction, brought under enforceable limits. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, you can catch up on the 2024 ruling here.

The EPA is now proposing to withdraw regulations for PFNA, PFHxS, GenX and PFBS, chemicals its own scientists have documented as serious health threats, on the grounds that the previous administration made a procedural error. And for PFOA and PFOS, the two most studied forever chemicals, water systems can now apply for a two-year delay, pushing compliance to 2031.

Delay. Delay. Delay.

Communities across this country have been drinking PFAS-contaminated water since the 1950s and 1960s, when companies like 3M and DuPont began releasing these chemicals into the environment while hiding what they knew about the consequences. They kept their own science hidden from the public and paid legal fees instead of pulling harmful products from the market.

By consequences, I mean cancer, immune suppression, and other health issues.

PFAS are toxic even at low levels of exposure and can build up in the body.

Very low doses of PFAS have been linked to suppression of the immune system. Studies show exposure to PFAS can also increase the risk of cancer, harm fetal development, and cause other serious health problems.

In my 2024 New York Times op-ed leading up to the last election, I wrote about Amara Strande, who grew up near a 150-square-mile plume of contaminated groundwater in Minnesota’s Twin Cities metro, the direct legacy of 3M’s decades of dumping. She testified before Minnesota lawmakers in support of legislation she believed could save people like her from the rare liver cancer she was facing. She died at 20, weeks before that law passed bearing her name.

There are more people like Amara, who are sick and dying because of these chemicals. A 2025 study found that PFAS in drinking water was responsible for up to 6,800 cancer cases a year in the U.S.

How can we afford to delay regulations and enforcement while contamination continues? What about all the people who don’t even know if their tap water contains PFAS yet?

Share The Brockovich Report

A 2-Sided Agency

Now let me tell you what else I know, because the press release doesn’t tell you this part. The people currently running the EPA’s chemical safety operations are not neutral public servants.

Nancy Beck, now a senior EPA adviser, came directly from the American Chemistry Council, the most powerful lobbying force in the country fighting to keep PFAS in consumer products and out of federal regulation.

Lynn Dekleva, who spent decades at DuPont before joining the ACC, was placed in charge of approving new chemicals for market, and federal reports documented retaliation against employees who raised concerns.

Steven Cook, who built a career representing PFAS polluters, is now working to dismantle the very rules that would make those polluters pay for cleanup as a principal deputy within the EPA.

The revolving door between the chemical industry and the agency that is supposed to regulate it isn’t spinning anymore, it has been left open.

The money behind this effort is staggering. Since 2023, the coalition against PFAS regulation anchored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has spent nearly $273 million on lobbying. In the first half of 2025 alone, industry groups spent tens of millions lobbying the EPA and the White House specifically on PFAS.

When the EPA subsequently asked a federal appeals court to throw out four of the Biden-era PFAS water regulations, internal documents leaked to the press revealed the agency had changed its position after meeting with industry representatives.

Connect those dots yourself.

The Project 2025 Connection

None of this should surprise anyone who read Project 2025 carefully. Most people glazed over it or assumed it was too extreme to take seriously. But it was a blueprint, and we are now living inside it.

The Project 2025 chapter on the EPA mentions PFAS twice. The first mention sounds almost reasonable, it calls for revising groundwater cleanup regulations to better reflect the challenges posed by persistent contaminants. Fine.

But the second mention is where the ideology reveals itself: it calls for revisiting the designation of PFAS chemicals as hazardous substances under Superfund law. That designation is not a bureaucratic label; it’s a legal mechanism that makes polluters pay.

Without that designation of PFAS chemicals as “hazardous substances” under CERCLA, suddenly taxpayers, ratepayers, families who had nothing to do with creating the contamination become financially responsible for cleanup.

Stripping it away doesn’t just weaken regulation. It transfers the entire financial burden of decades of corporate malfeasance onto the communities that were already victimized by it.

When I read that, I thought about Amara Strande. I thought about the families in Minnesota’s eastern Twin Cities metro who spent years not knowing why their water was making them sick. I thought about the 3M executives who knew what their chemicals were doing and kept dumping anyway.

Project 2025 looked at that history and decided the problem was that the polluters were being held too accountable.

Now we see that blueprint being executed, agency appointment by agency appointment, proposed rule by proposed rule. These personnel decisions are not coincidences or accidents of a chaotic transition. They are the deliberate installation of industry operatives into the positions with the most power to dismantle the regulatory architecture that Project 2025 identified as the obstacle.

The press release talks about science and legal defensibility. The appointments tell you whose science and whose legal interests are being served.

The Water Crisis On Top Of It All

What makes this moment particularly ruthless is the financial trap it exploits.

America’s water infrastructure is in crisis that has nothing to do with PFAS. The American Water Works Association estimates that drinking water utilities need up to $2.4 trillion dollars in infrastructure upgrades through 2050.

Without massive new investment, water rates will more than double, pushing affordability beyond the reach of millions of households. Water systems are not imagining their financial distress. It is real, and it’s enormous.

So, when the EPA offers a 2-year compliance extension, many utilities will take it, not out of bad faith, but out of genuine desperation. And the industry knows it.

The financial pressure on water systems is the mechanism by which delay becomes acceptable, even welcomed.

It’s business as usual for the manufacturers and the lobbyists of these chemicals. It’s how the PFAS industry has delayed, weakened, and killed protective legislation across the country, state by state, year by year.

Listen, environmental failure is bipartisan, and I will say so as long as I have a voice. But what is happening right now, with these specific people in these specific positions doing these specific things, is not a failure of competence or resources. It is a policy choice. It is a decision made by people who know exactly what they are doing and who wrote down what they intended to do before they ever took office, to subordinate public health to industry profit.

The Data Center Connection & Playbook

Meanwhile, in Farmington, Minnesota, 30 minutes south of the Twin Cities, a group of families organized themselves into a coalition to fight a proposed hyperscale data center that would sit on property bounded by a trout stream. They have raised and spent a $100,000. They have filed lawsuits, organized rallies, worked with lobbyists, and shown up.

They are fighting not just for their neighborhood but for the 20+ other proposed sites across Minnesota, and for every community in this country that is about to discover what it means to have industrial infrastructure imposed on them without transparency, without consent, and without any honest accounting of what it will cost the water, the land, and the people.

Their fight and the PFAS fight are similar. They both show who gets to decide what goes into the water. They highlight whether the people who live somewhere have any real power against the industries and governments that want to use that somewhere for profit. They are about whether the law means anything when the people enforcing it came from the industry being regulated.

Plus, more research is showing that data centers are contributing to PFAS pollution.

I get emails every day from people who want someone to fight for them. They think I am a lawyer. I am not. What I am is someone who has spent decades watching the same con run by different actors, and I am not willing to pretend the new costumes make it a different show.

The EPA’s announcement calls its approach a “comprehensive, lifecycle-based strategy.” I see it more as a decision to let 176 million people in the U.S. continue drinking contaminated water, while the people responsible for that contamination write the rules about how long they get to keep doing it.

How do we know it’s 176 million people? That’s thanks to the EPA’s own tests of the nation’s drinking water supply conducted as part of the Fifth Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule, or UCMR 5, which requires U.S. water utilities to test drinking water for PFAS compounds.

Project 2025 told us this “reframe” was coming. The appointments confirmed it. The proposed rules are just the paperwork.

We deserve better. We have always deserved better. The first step is refusing to be fooled by the language of people who are counting on our exhaustion and our confusion to keep us quiet.

The EPA press release said, “When a Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) is rushed, it minimizes the opportunity for meaningful public comment.” We’ve been dragging our feet on this issue for decades. This is not a rush job. It’s a hit job.

What You Can Do Right Now

I know how overwhelming this information feels. People write to me every day feeling helpless, and I understand why. The money is enormous, the machinery is entrenched, and the people running the agency that is supposed to protect us came from the industries poisoning us.

Protect your own water first. Don’t wait for the EPA to act. Reverse osmosis and activated carbon filtration systems are the most effective methods for removing PFAS from your tap water. If you can install one, do it.

Make noise where it counts. Contact your elected representatives. Your senators, your House member, and your state legislators. Demand they investigate the legality of what the EPA just did. The anti-backsliding provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act explicitly prohibits reducing health protections. What the EPA is proposing may violate federal law. Your representatives need to hear that their constituents know that, and are watching.

Follow the money in your own state. Ask your city council, your water utility, or your school board who their lobbyists are and what other clients those lobbyists represent. The Bad Chemistry report documented 132 local governments share lobbying firms with PFAS industry clients. Your community may be one of them. Demand disclosure. Demand that your institutions adopt policies prohibiting contracts with firms that lobby for PFAS polluters.

Support the people on the front lines. In Farmington, Minnesota, a coalition of families has spent $100,000 of their own money fighting a proposed hyperscale data center near a trout stream, with a court date looming and $150,000 more in legal fees ahead of them. Groups like theirs exist in communities across this country. Find them. Fund them. Show up for them. The Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development is one place to start.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of loud. You don’t have to be a lawyer or a scientist or an advocate with 30 years of experience. You have to be a person who is unwilling to be quiet to these issues. That is enough.

I am not quiet. And I don’t think you should be either.

Keep the conversation going in the comments below. Do you see the same playbook being run in your backyard, whether it's PFAS, data centers, or something else entirely?

The political will to confront nuclear danger abroad seems inexhaustible. Washington has been consumed by Iran’s nuclear program for decades.

The will to confront it at home? That’s another matter entirely.

While the U.S. negotiates a fragile ceasefire on the specter of nuclear weapons in Tehran, the radioactive legacy of our own nuclear weapons program sits beneath apartment complexes in suburban St. Louis.

Children played in it. Families lived on top of it. And for decades, the government that built the bomb looked the other way.

While we spend billions policing Iran’s enriched uranium, we have spent 80 years ignoring our own.

The contamination near Coldwater Creek, a Missouri River tributary north of St. Louis that was polluted by nuclear waste from the development of the first atomic bomb, is one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history, impacting three generations and thousands of people across the region. So why have so few of us heard about it?

Subscribe now

Moms Cleaning Up Nuclear Waste?

For more than a decade, Dawn Chapman and Karen Nickel have been doing what moms do: protecting their children. The threat wasn’t a person or a policy they could march against. It was radiation, and the silence around it.

The U.S. government spent decades trying to hide the radioactive waste buried beneath the streets, schools, and backyards of north St. Louis County.

Now, the Army Corps of Engineers has announced it will demolish a former apartment clubhouse in Hazelwood, Missouri, because the ground underneath it tested positive for nuclear contamination.

It’s a validation the women of have fought years to receive. And it is also a warning that the worst may not be over.

A Secret Buried Under Suburbia

The story begins with the Manhattan Project. During World War II, Mallinckrodt Chemical Works processed uranium ore for the first atomic bombs at its downtown St. Louis facility. The radioactive byproducts were stored at a site near the St. Louis airport, at the headwaters of Coldwater Creek, and the waste spread into the waterway and beyond.

After the war, the waste from Mallinckrodt was trucked to the north side of the airport property, adjacent to Coldwater Creek, where it sat in the open for years, dispersed by wind and rainwater. As early as 1949, Mallinckrodt itself discovered that the radioactive waste in deteriorating steel drums risked leaking into the creek, but nothing was done.

The waste ended up at West Lake Landfill, where it remains today. The entire time, local residents had no idea. Read more about it here.

Subdivisions went up. Children played in the creek. Families planted gardens, built lives, and had babies. No one told them what was underneath.

Decades of Fighting

The women of JustMomsSTL did not start this fight. They inherited it.

The earliest effort to document the contamination was led by environmental activist Kay Drey in the 1970s, followed by a landmark seven-part investigative series in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1989 that raised serious public concern and prompted initial federal action. The Missouri Coalition for the Environment sent a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers as far back as 1985 demanding acknowledgment and cleanup, a demand that went largely unanswered for decades.

The fight never stopped. It just kept finding new people willing to carry it.

Karen Nickel’s parents moved to the banks of Coldwater Creek in Hazelwood without knowing the area was contaminated. Karen later raised her own family in nearby Maryland Heights, just 1.5 miles from West Lake Landfill, again unknowingly living near radioactive waste.

In November 2012, after learning the truth, she started a Facebook group about the West Lake Landfill, where she connected with Dawn Chapman.

In March 2014, the two founded JustMomsSTL, a grassroots organization dedicated to raising awareness about radioactive material in the St. Louis metro area as a legacy of the Manhattan Project.

They were not scientists. They were not politicians. They were mothers with binders full of government documents and a refusal to be quiet.

They were also not alone. A parallel grassroots group, Coldwater Creek – Just the Facts Please, worked to educate the community and healthcare professionals, and to fight for community inclusion in federal compensation programs. The STL Toxic Waste Alliance brought together community groups, concerned citizens, advocacy nonprofits, and decision-makers focused on the West Lake Landfill, Coldwater Creek, and Maline Creek, all contaminated by the same legacy waste.

State legislators including Rep. Cori Bush and state Rep. Chantelle Nickson-Clark became vocal allies, pushing for full creek testing and legislation to formally notify residents of their exposure.

In 2021, Chapman and Nickel got passed a trove of more than 15,000 government documents. The two women spent the next year analyzing and organizing them before turning the records over to journalists, leading to what became the most definitive public accounting yet of what really happened around Coldwater Creek.

The Science Caught Up

For years, families were told the risks were minimal. Official government studies downplayed the connection between the creek and the cancer clusters neighbors had noticed for decades. The coalition never stopped pushing back.

They were right to push. A landmark study published in JAMA Network Open found that children who lived near Coldwater Creek from the 1940s through the 1960s were more likely to be diagnosed with cancer over their lifetimes than those who lived farther away. The study’s senior author, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Weisskopf, described the findings as “quite dramatic” with not only elevated cancer risk, but one that increased steadily the closer childhood residents had lived to the creek.

Compared to those who lived 20 kilometers or more from the creek, those who lived less than one kilometer away had a 44 percent higher risk of developing any type of cancer.

Appendix cancer, also called appendiceal cancer, affects about 1 in a million people. Close to 200 cases of this rare cancer have been documented in the ZIP codes surrounding Coldwater Creek and the West Lake Landfill.

The Bomb Was Built On Someone’s Back

The nuclear chain that contaminated St. Louis didn’t begin in Missouri. It began on Indigenous land.

Between 1942 and 1985, Navajo tribal land became contaminated through the mining of more than 30 million tons of uranium ore, first for the Manhattan Project, then for the Atomic Energy Program. The U.S. government failed to tell the Navajo people their water was contaminated. Many Navajo homes were even built from uranium mine debris.

The EPA has documented more than 15,000 sites associated with uranium mining across the United States, including more than 4,000 mines in the Navajo Nation, of which more than 500 are abandoned. The communities harmed at every step of this chain, from extraction to processing to waste storage, were, by design or by indifference, Indigenous, of color, poor, or rural.
Source: Union of Concerned Scientists

St. Louis is no exception. Research from Washington University’s Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic has found that Black St. Louisans are exposed to considerably greater environmental risks than white residents. A 2016 study found a consistent pattern for 30 years of placing hazardous waste facilities in neighborhoods where poor people and people of color live. In the U.S., race is the single biggest factor that determines whether you live near a hazardous waste facility.

This is not an accident of geography. It’s the feature of a system. We see the same pattern playing out with data centers right now.

Dawn Chapman understood the impact of this systemic issue when she stood alongside Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren at the signing of the renewed RECA legislation. Together with activists from across the country, they celebrated the renewal and expansion of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, but the moment was shadowed by grief for those who had already died waiting.

“There are so many people that should be behind us, that have already passed on,” Chapman said at the news conference in 2025. “Our government made it harder. They did everything they could to hide the truth from us.”

The poison runs through different communities in different forms. The negligence and the cover-up is the same.

A Demolition & A Warning

This month’s announcement that the Army Corps will demolish the former clubhouse of the French Quarter apartment complex in Hazelwood is a milestone. The ground beneath the structure tested positive for radioactive contamination linked to Coldwater Creek’s nuclear waste. But for Chapman and the broader coalition that has fought alongside her, it is a bitter victory.

“There’s nowhere else in the United States where something like this is happening in a residential area,” she said. “This radioactive waste was already out and contaminating that whole area, and only now is it being looked for. This has had the chance to hurt this community for decades.”

The Army Corps is also planning to expand its cleanup area to 750 more acres and 600 more properties along Coldwater Creek, a scope that speaks to just how far the contamination spread, and how long it was ignored.

The cleanup is estimated to cost $400 million (and counting) and take up to 15 years, all for contamination that has sat there poisoning a community for 8 decades.

What You Can Do

The North County Community Advisory Group holds monthly public meetings to keep the community informed. Their next meeting is June 4 at 6:30 p.m. at the Black Jack Fire House in north St. Louis County.

To learn more or get involved, visit justmomsstl.org and moenvironment.org/our-work/hazardous-waste.

I can’t sugarcoat. It sucks when you’ve been working on a cause, trying to stop something terrible in your community, and it doesn’t go your way.

We do our best here to offer support, tips, and resources. We give a voice to thousands of communities across the country who feel silenced and feel like no one is listening to them.

In 2023, we featured a group of Colorado residents who were working to protect their families, homes, schools, neighborhoods, air, water, and community reservoir from the risks of fracking.

Save the Aurora Reservoir

Rachel was one of those people, who has been fighting for more than three years.

She and the rest of the group did everything right. They showed up to public hearings and navigated the labyrinthine machinery of oil and gas regulation. They fundraised and rallied public opposition to the project.

At the end of April, in a narrow 3-2 vote, the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission approved a plan to drill 24 wells on the State Sunlight-Long drill pad.

Fracking will proceed roughly 3,000 feet from the Aurora Reservoir and the families who live nearby.

Her email to us was short. She called it “a devastating update.” She wasn’t sure of next steps. She wanted to say thank you.

I’ve been thinking about her email ever since.

Kermit the Frog once lamented that, it’s not easy being green. I’d add that, it’s not easy being an advocate either.

The people I know who are fighting for their communities are not doing it from positions of comfort and abundance. They are doing it in the margins. In the hours between work and dinner or between school pickup and bedtime. They are doing it with bake sales and Facebook pages and borrowed expertise. They are doing it because nobody else will.

STAR, Save the Aurora Reservoir, organized nearly 2,500 active citizens. They raised more than $100,000. They hired legal representation. They brought in nationally recognized experts. They showed up, en masse, to every opportunity the process afforded them.

And they still lost.

There is a particular kind of grief in that loss. It’s not the grief of having failed. They didn’t fail. It’s the grief of having succeeded at everything within your control and discovering that the system itself was designed to produce a different outcome.

As STAR put it in their statement: “If a community is able to step up, learn about O&G in Colorado, figure out all of the agencies involved... and still have no ability to protect their families, then the system is badly broken.”

That’s not defeat talking. That’s clarity.

So why keep going?

Because even the commissioners who voted yes are watching.

Because Commissioner John Messner, who voted against the permit, said plainly: “I think this will create change. The amount of public interest, the amount of participation, is the same that ultimately created Senate Bill 19-181.”

That bill, the landmark 2019 legislation that reoriented Colorado’s oil and gas regulation around public health, didn’t come from nowhere. It came from communities like this one, from losses like this one, from people who refused to let a setback be the last word.

The record exists now, and that’s not for nothing. More than three years of testimony, expert analysis, and documented community harm will become the foundation the next fight is built on.

I think now about all those people in Aurora who know each other. They know how to organize. They know the regulatory process. They know their opponents’ arguments and how to counter them. Their knowledge doesn’t expire.

Community power, once built, doesn’t simply dissolve because a commission voted the wrong way.

Movements are not sustained by victories alone. They are sustained by the culture of people who keep faith with one another through the losses, who don’t disappear when the news is bad, and who hold the thread so the next person knows where to pick it up.

The fracking will likely move forward near the Aurora Reservoir. That is a real harm, and it deserves to be named as such. The families who live nearby will bear a risk they didn’t choose and couldn’t prevent even with extraordinary effort. We should be honest about that injustice and not rush past it toward a tidy silver lining.

But STAR said it themselves: “The people of our state are not done.”

If Rachel's story lit something in you, don't let that feeling sit idle. Find the issue in your own backyard—the zoning meeting nobody's attending, the permit application filed quietly on a Friday afternoon, or the neighborhood group that needs one more person to show up.

Democracy is not a spectator sport, and the corporate interests making decisions that impact your life are counting on your exhaustion. Disappoint them.

Keep the conversation going in the comments below. Share your thoughts on setbacks and what motivates you to keep going.

I’ve spent decades fighting for communities left in the dark about the very pollution destroying their health. They had no idea they were being poisoned. When they asked questions, they were told that what was happening in their water, their air, their soil was fine. It wasn’t fine then. And what’s happening right now, town by town across this country, deserves the same scrutiny.

The race to build AI infrastructure is real, and it’s moving fast. Data centers are going up in industrial parks, on the edges of neighborhoods, sometimes right next to schools. Some communities are welcoming them. Others are fighting back.

A whole lot of people in between don’t even know what’s happening, until the permits are already signed.

That’s exactly why I launched the AI Data Center Reporting Map yesterday. Within hours of going live, we were flooded, and I mean flooded, with submissions from communities across the country. So many people reported in so fast that the system briefly couldn’t keep up. That response tells me this issue is far more widespread and urgent than anyone in power is admitting.

This new map is intended to give us all a bird’s-eye view. It shows where these centers are operating, where they’re being built, and where communities like yours are already raising alarms. Go look at it. Report your concerns. Because the first step to protecting your community is knowing what’s in it.

Learn more here —> Brockovich Data Center

What’s the Problem, Exactly?

A data center is a physical facility that houses and runs large computer systems. Right now, Virginia, Texas, and California lead in the number of data centers they house. Companies choose data center locations based on many factors, like the availability of power and water, properly zoned land, and high-quality network access.

Let me be clear about something: this is not about attacking AI. AI isn’t going away, and honestly, it can be a powerful tool, even for answering some of the very questions we’re raising here.

The issue is about living in communities that support our well-being. We need to make sure that the infrastructure powering AI doesn’t come at the expense of the people living around it.

Here’s what I’m hearing from communities coast to coast:

Energy. These facilities consume enormous amounts of power. That doesn’t just mean higher utility bills; it means pressure on the grid, and in some places, pressure to bring in more fossil fuel generation to keep up. In Maine, the prospect of spiking electricity rates was one of the biggest reasons lawmakers moved to pump the brakes.

Water. Cooling systems for data centers can require staggering volumes of water. In drought country, such as California and the Southwest, that’s a major concern. And it’s not just the quantity. Remember Hinkley? The contaminated water that ran through those swamp coolers? Data centers are already being flagged for emitting PFAS plumes. We’ve seen this movie before.

E-waste. The hardware inside these facilities gets upgraded constantly. What happens to what’s left behind? Not enough people are asking that question.

Fire and safety. A fire at a lithium battery storage facility near Monterey reminded everyone: these aren’t neutral facilities. They need buffers. They need distance from homes and schools. They need to be somewhere that, if something goes wrong, it doesn’t become a community catastrophe.

Jobs vs. resources. Here’s the math that nobody wants to say out loud: data centers consume huge amounts of local resources including power, water, land, and they create very few permanent local jobs. Communities deserve to weigh that trade-off with open eyes. When developers come to your town promising an economic boom, ask them how many permanent positions they’re actually committing to. Then get it in writing.

What Can You Actually Do About It?

Here’s where I want to talk directly to city councils, county commissioners, and every concerned community member who thinks they don’t have any power. You have more power than you think.

Zoning and Land Use — Your Most Powerful Tool

Cities decide where these facilities are allowed to go. Full stop. You can restrict data centers to industrial zones only. You can require conditional use permits (CUPs) that force case-by-case approval, giving your community a seat at the table for every single project. You can set distance buffers, keeping these facilities away from housing, away from schools, away from sensitive areas. This slows projects down and gives you leverage to impose conditions. Use it.

Water Permitting, Especially if You’re in California

Water permitting authority is enormous, and in drought-affected states, it may be the single most effective lever you have. Cities can limit or deny high water-use cooling systems. You can also require that facilities use only recycled or non-potable water. Cap water usage and force detailed impact studies before a single permit is issued. Require air cooling or closed-loop systems. In the right circumstances, water restrictions alone can stop or redirect a project entirely.

Environmental Review

In California, CEQA exists for exactly this kind of situation. Projects can be challenged on energy use, emissions, water consumption, and noise because yes, data centers run fans around the clock, and that’s not nothing for the families living nearby. Environmental review won’t always stop a project, but it can delay it by years and force meaningful redesigns. That time matters. Use it to organize.

Power & Grid Accountability

Your city doesn’t run the electrical grid, but you influence the approval process for what’s built to support it. Require proof that new facilities won’t be powered by new fossil fuel generation. Push utilities to disclose the source of electricity going to these facilities and the projected impact on local rates. Some states are already exploring requirements that new loads must be matched with clean energy. Find out where your state stands and push it forward.

Tax Incentives — Don’t Give Them Away for Free

A lot of these projects depend on tax breaks and fast-track approvals to pencil out financially. You can refuse those incentives. Or you can attach strings: local jobs guarantees, renewable energy commitments, and contributions to local infrastructure. Make them earn it. Maine just passed a law prohibiting data centers from accessing the state’s business development tax incentive programs, and it’s a model other states and localities should follow.

Show Up & Speak Out

I cannot overstate how much community pressure matters. More than 140 local groups around the country have managed to block or delay more than $64 billion worth of data center investment, not by hiring expensive lobbyists, but by showing up.

Attend the public hearings. Bring your neighbors. Make your city council understand that their constituents are watching. The elected officials who sit on those councils are accountable to you, and you can remind them of that.

Maine: A Lesson in How Close We Can Get

Maine’s legislature made history earlier this month. Lawmakers gave final approval to a moratorium on data centers larger than 20 megawatts, what would have been the first statewide ban of its kind in the country, blocking new projects until November 2027. The bill passed with bipartisan support. That alone should tell you something: this isn’t a left or right issue. It’s a people issue.

The debate focused on the real trade-offs. On one hand, there were the potential benefits to a former mill town desperate for economic reinvestment, and on the other was the documented impacts on electricity rates, water supplies, and communities across other states where these centers have already landed.

Then the governor vetoed it.

Governor Janet Mills said she would have signed the bill, she called a moratorium “appropriate given the impacts of massive data centers in other states on the environment and on electricity rates,” but vetoed it because the final version lacked an exemption for a specific project in the Town of Jay, a former mill community still reeling from major job losses.

So let me be clear about what happened in Maine: the governor didn’t say the moratorium was wrong. She said the bill needed one carve-out, the legislature wouldn’t add it, and she pulled the plug. Maine Conservation Voters said she was “siding with AI data center developers over the bipartisan will of the Maine Legislature.” Source: Maine Public

That’s not a reason to give up. That’s a reason to get more organized. Because the next vote, in Maine or in your state or city, could go the other way.

Even a governor who vetoed the moratorium felt compelled to sign legislation stripping tax incentives for data centers and promised to establish a commission to draft new regulations. The pressure is working. Keep applying it.

Without a statewide moratorium, data center proposals are now moving forward in multiple Maine communities with local residents left to fight these battles one permit at a time. That’s exactly the situation we’re trying to prevent everywhere else.

Don’t wait for your state to act. Start at your city council. Start tonight.

A Note on What Comes Next

Some of these fights will end up in court. If your community has already experienced pollution, contamination, or health impacts tied to a data center, document everything. Future litigation around data centers is coming. The pattern is too familiar.

For our friends in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the same dynamics are playing out in your communities too. The goal isn’t to ban these facilities outright.

The most effective strategy, everywhere, is to slow the expansion and force it to be done right: conditional use permits, strict water limits, distance buffers, and environmental reviews. Find the balance.

Don’t let urgency become an excuse to skip accountability.

Take Action

Report & Track

• Brockovich Data Center Map — report your community’s concerns and see what’s happening nationwide

Toolkits & Organizing

• NAACP: Stop Dirty Data Centers — community benefits agreement templates, guides, and the People’s Report

• Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development — free Data Center Resistance 101 Toolkit and connections to other fighting communities

Read the Research

• Data Center Watch: The $64B Pushback — case studies on how communities have successfully blocked and delayed projects

• Harvard Gazette: Why Communities Are Pushing Back — expert analysis on the jobs myth and the transparency gap

• CNN: The Moratorium Movement — how the fight went statewide

Track Legislation in Your State

• MultiState: State Data Center Policy 101 — updated 2026 guide to moratoriums, tax incentive battles, and zoning fights across all 50 states

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. Go to brockovichdatacenter.com, check the map, and report what you’re seeing. We’ll keep updating on you on everything we learn and ways to continue to advocate for sustainable, secure, and efficient AI data center practices.

The 1960s were a decade of upheaval with civil rights battles, political assassinations, and a deeply unpopular war, and by the end of it, many Americans felt the country was coming apart at the seams. Out of that turbulence came something else: a reckoning with the world beneath our feet, above our heads, and running through our cities.

It started with a book. In 1962, marine biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a damning indictment of the chemical industry and its assault on the natural world. It was controversial and it was attacked. But it also lit a fuse.

Seven years later, a river caught fire.

The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, was so choked with industrial waste and sewage that, as Time magazine put it, it “oozed rather than flowed.” When it ignited in 1969, the images were impossible to ignore. How does water burn? The question forced a nation to confront what it had been willing to look away from for generations.

The outrage that followed was real and swift. The Clean Water Act passed. Environmental protection agencies were created at the state and federal level. On April 22, 1970, millions of Americans took to the streets, college campuses, and town halls for the very first Earth Day, the largest environmental demonstration the country had ever seen.

Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, the event’s chief architect, said the goal was simple but audacious: to generate “a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy” and force the issue permanently onto the national agenda.

It worked. The question now, more than fifty years later, is whether we’re willing to be shaken again.

The Myths We Need to Leave Behind

The environmental movement has never been more necessary or more misunderstood. A stubborn set of myths continues to cloud public conversation, slow meaningful action, and let the industries most resistant to change off the hook.

It’s time to name them, examine them, and let them go.

Myth 1: The movement is for “saving trees.”

The “tree hugger” label has long been used to dismiss environmentalists as sentimental and out of touch. Protecting the environment has always been about protecting people, and nothing makes that more clear than water.

In Flint, Michigan, a cost-cutting decision to switch the city’s water supply exposed tens of thousands of residents, mostly Black and low-income, to dangerous levels of lead. Children suffered irreversible neurological damage. Families couldn't drink from their own taps. It wasn’t a nature story, it was a human rights crisis. And it happened here in the United States (under a Democratic president).

Air pollution remains the leading environmental risk factor for death around the world, contributing to 7.9 million deaths in 2023, with the largest health impacts seen in low- and middle-income countries where people have higher exposures and limited access to healthcare and other services.

In the U.S., nearly half of us breathe unhealthy levels of air pollution, according to the American Lung Association’s 2025 “State of the Air” report. The report finds that 156 million people live in communities that received an “F” grade for either ozone or particle pollution. Extreme heat and wildfires contributed to worse air quality for millions of people across the U.S. as well.

Clean air, clean water, and a stable climate aren’t fringe concerns, they are fundamental human rights.

Myth 2: Environmentalists are out-of-touch elites.

I’ve met a lot of people in my work and most of them would not identify as “environmentalists” or “activists.” However, people’s perspectives change rapidly when they can’t drink their water.

One of the most contentious talking points from the current administration is the idea that the environmental movement is a product of rich elites and that regulations hurt working-­class people.

I speak with these same people every day, and I can tell you that they are not suffering because of regulations. Instead, they have been harmed by neglected infrastructure updates, corporate misdeeds, and bureaucratic hurdles.

The environmental movement’s most powerful voices have long come from frontline communities bearing the heaviest burden of environmental harm. The environmental justice movement emerged in 1982 in Warren County, North Carolina, when a predominantly Black community rose up against a hazardous waste landfill being built in their neighborhood.

Myth 3: Environmentalists want to drag us back in time.

This concept may be the most backward myth of all. Environmentalists aren’t trying to reverse progress. We are working to accelerate it beyond the limitations of outdated and polluting infrastructure.

Consider water treatment: modern filtration systems, green infrastructure like wetlands restoration, and smart monitoring technologies can deliver cleaner water more efficiently than aging industrial-era systems that leak, corrode, and contaminate.

The movement champions innovation. Solar panels, wind turbines, and advanced water purification aren’t a retreat from modern life.

They are modern life, upgraded.

Myth 4: Environmental protection kills economic growth.

I’ve never understood the idea that we must choose between a healthy planet and a healthy economy. Clean water itself is an economic engine. Tourism, fishing, agriculture, and real estate all depend on healthy waterways.

In 2025, global renewable energy generation surpassed coal for the first time, with roughly 91 percent of new renewable projects now cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives.

Bill Mckibben has been writing about it in his Substack.

“…solar last year supplied more power to the Texas grid than coal for the first time, and that new plans have been announced for a 21-gigawatt solar and battery project in California, much of it on land that’s been ruined by over-irrigation, and that coal generation has now fallen in India and China for the first time in a half-century.”

Clean energy jobs in the U.S. now outnumber oil, gas, and coal jobs by more than three to one. The cost of inaction is becoming impossible to ignore: weather-related disasters caused $55 billion in damages in 2025 alone.

The real economic risk isn’t going green. It’s waiting too long to start.

Myth 5: Going green means giving up.

Environmental action is too often framed as sacrifice. But in most cases, greener choices are simply smarter ones.

On water alone, the math is striking. The bottled water industry record $29.9 billion in sales in 2025. We spend billions each year on bottled water to avoid tap water we don’t trust, while generating mountains of plastic waste that end up back in our waterways.

Investing in clean, reliable public water systems and carrying a reusable bottle isn’t deprivation. It's a better deal. The assumption that our current way of doing things is optimal mistakes the familiar for the ideal.

Reusable water bottles, food containers, and shopping bags aren’t just for reducing waste; they also help us avoid microplastics that harm our health.

Myth 6: One person can’t make a difference.

It’s easy to feel small in the face of a crisis this large. But individual action is not just symbolic, it’s structural.

The Clean Water Act was born from public outrage. Ordinary citizens showed up to city halls, wrote letters, and marched through the streets until their government acted. Research published in Science suggests that when a committed minority reaches roughly 25 percent of a population, it can shift majority behavior.

Every conversation about water quality, every vote cast for infrastructure investment, every demand for corporate accountability over a polluted river or aquifer moves the needle.

Progress, however imperfect, compounds. Inaction, however comfortable, also compounds.

The Truth These Myths Are Hiding

These myths don’t circulate by accident. They serve the interests of industries resisting change and politicians avoiding hard choices. For everyone else, they simply delay solutions we already have.

The environmental movement has never been about going backward. From the burning of the Cuyahoga River to the crisis in Flint to the clean energy and clean water innovations underway right now, it has always been about building something better—a future where people and planet can thrive together.

The only thing standing in the way is what we’re willing to believe.

The Environmental Movement Is For Everyone

Since the first Earth Day in 1970, people from every walk of life from farmers and ranchers to faith leaders and scientists to students, families, and communities on the frontlines of environmental disasters, have driven action that prevented countless illnesses and saved millions of lives worldwide.

Economic prosperity and environmental protections are not competing goals. They are part of the same path forward.

Clean energy and sustainability have already created millions of jobs, lowered costs, and delivered healthier air and water. Governments will delay, corporate interests may distract, but they cannot ignore an organized, determined public.

Losing Our Right to Protest

We’re now facing a new and serious threat. Fossil fuel companies and their political allies have spent the last decade quietly working to make protest itself illegal.

Eighteen states have passed laws making it a crime to demonstrate near oil and gas pipelines and other “critical infrastructure.” Five states have approved legislation that can define an active protest as a “riot.”

Congress is now considering proposals that could criminalize protestors who wear masks, block traffic, and impede pipeline construction. Offenders who aren’t citizens could be deported. Nonprofit groups supporting protests could lose their tax-exempt status.

This wave of legislation traces directly back to the Standing Rock protests of 2016, when Indigenous-led resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline drew national and international attention, cost its developer billions, and briefly succeeded in halting construction.

The industry’s response was to buy influence in state legislatures, using groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to spread model “critical infrastructure” laws across the country.

Most recently, a North Dakota jury handed down a $660 million verdict against Greenpeace, later reduced to $345 million, for its role in supporting those protests. If Greenpeace is forced to pay, it could end 55 years of environmental advocacy. The message being sent is unmistakable: speak up, and we will bankrupt you.

The right to protest has always been one of the most powerful tools in the environmental movement. Earth Day itself was born from it. Protecting that right is now inseparable from protecting the water, land, and climate we march for.

Earth Day’s enduring legacy is people working together to shape a livable future and to never doubt that a dedicated group of people can change the world. That legacy depends on those people still being allowed to show up.

To learn more, check out the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), a Washington-based research group that tracks legislation in the U.S. that criminalizes public dissent.

This essay was inspired by this one from earthday.org and this piece from Circle of Blue.

Which myth about environmentalism did you once believe, and what changed your mind? Keep the conversation going in the comments below.

Ever wonder why good bills pass but nothing really changes? You might have an industry lobbyist to thank for that.

For decades, cigarette companies employed lobbyists who also worked for hospitals, medical associations, and cancer research groups. The arrangement wasn’t accidental. Tobacco lobbyists played both sides enjoying access to health-focused legislators who might otherwise have shown them the door.

The deal was transactional and corrupt. Ease off on the smoking bans, and they would help get funding for that hospital in your district.

That same dynamic is playing out today with PFAS, the “forever chemicals,” that have contaminated our water, our food, and our blood. PFAS stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. This family of manmade chemicals are known for their stamina, stain resistance, and more. They persist in the environment and in our bodies for decades or longer, accumulating over time, raising long-term concerns for ecosystems and public health.

Subscribe now

A new report by the watchdog organizations F Minus and Mothers Out Front, titled Bad Chemistry, has mapped the web of lobbying conflicts at the heart of the PFAS crisis in extraordinary detail. What they found should make us all furious.

The report looks across states and in Congress at lobbying firms representing the industries fighting to keep PFAS in our consumer products and working with the hospitals, water agencies, local governments, school districts, cancer organizations, and wildlife groups that are paying the price for that contamination.

Sounds like a double standard, right?

Take a look at the lobbying firm Holland & Knight, which in 2025 collected $520,000 from the American Chemistry Council (ACC), one of the most powerful forces in the country fighting to keep PFAS in consumer products and out of federal regulation.

That same year, Holland & Knight collected $80,000 from the City of Philadelphia.

Those two clients were not working toward the same goal. The Philadelphia Water Department had a $2 billion plan in place to comply with Biden-era drinking water standards for PFAS, standards that the ACC was simultaneously lobbying the Trump administration to roll back. The ACC won. The EPA weakened those standards in May 2025.

Philadelphia’s residents, who had been promised cleaner water, are now on the hook for whatever contamination costs follow.

Holland & Knight never had to choose sides. The firm didn’t have to, as no law requires it. It simply cashed checks from both sides of the issue.

This arrangement is a business model, and it is the central mechanism by which the PFAS industry has successfully delayed, weakened, and killed legislation that would protect public health across the country.

The new report documents the full scope of it, and the picture it paints is a direct echo of one of the darkest chapters in American lobbying history.

The Firms Playing Both Sides

The numbers are stark.

132 local governments and government agencies, including the cities of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, share lobbying firms with PFAS industry lobbyists, even as those local governments face staggering future clean-up costs that could be passed on to residents through higher taxes and utility bills.

11 public school systems in areas with PFAS-contaminated water are in the same boat.

26 hospitals and healthcare systems share lobbying firms with the trade associations fighting PFAS regulation, as do major cancer organizations including the American Cancer Society, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.

Don’t forget that a 2025 study found that PFAS in drinking water was responsible for up to 6,800 cancer cases a year in the U.S.

Even 15 wildlife conservation groups are unwittingly entangled, sharing lobbyists with the industry coalitions that are letting PFAS leach into the ecosystems these groups are trying to protect.

As mentioned above, Holland & Knight lobbies for the ACC but also the City of Philadelphia, Atlanta Public Schools, the American Cancer Society, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Brandeis University, Case Western Reserve University, the Black Women’s Health Imperative, and the National Parks Conservation Association.

And that’s just one firm.

The American Chemistry Council’s Web of Denial

The American Chemistry Council has long served as the command center for PFAS denialism. Emboldened by the Trump administration, which has appointed multiple former senior ACC staffers to key positions at the EPA, ACC now openly supports federal preemption of all state PFAS laws and regulations.

The revolving door is not subtle. Nancy Beck, a current senior EPA adviser on chemical safety, is a former ACC director and lobbyist. In a prior EPA stint, she worked to weaken regulations that track PFAS health consequences.

“Nancy Beck, E.P.A.’s ‘toxics czar’ during the first Trump Administration, is back to fulfill the chemical industry’s wish list,” Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told New Edge Times in 2025. “The weakening of health protections” from toxic chemicals “is just around the corner,” he said.

Lynn Dekleva, another former ACC lobbyist who spent more 30 years at DuPont, was placed in charge of approving new chemicals for market at the EPA, and federal reports documented that she retaliated against employees who raised concerns about chemicals she wanted to greenlight.

Steven Cook, a former lawyer representing PFAS polluters, now works as a principal deputy within the EPA and is actively seeking to scrap the “polluter pays” rules that would hold PFAS manufacturers financially responsible for cleanup.

The financial firepower behind this effort is staggering.

Almost 20 industry trade groups and companies representing PFAS polluters, the fossil fuel industry, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s pro-PFAS deregulation coalition collectively spent up to $60 million lobbying the EPA and more than $12 million lobbying the White House on PFAS-related issues in just the first half of 2025 alone, according to a September 2025 analysis by Food & Water Watch.

Since 2023, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce coalition against PFAS regulation has spent up to $272.8 million in PFAS-related lobbying. Major PFAS producers increased their EPA-focused lobbying spending by 25 percent compared to the first half of the prior year.

In September 2025, the Trump EPA asked a federal appeals court to throw out the regulations limiting four types of PFAS in drinking water, regulations that the Biden administration had spent years developing.

Internal EPA documents leaked to the New York Times revealed that the agency changed its position after meeting with industry representatives. The public will be left footing the bill for cleanup costs, and polluters are off the hook.

What This Looks Like on the Ground

The Bad Chemistry report traces these conflicts state by state, and the examples are damning.

In California, an estimated 25 million people are exposed to PFAS through their water systems, with health impacts costing the state between $5.5 billion and $8.7 billion annually.

When California’s legislature advanced SB 682, a bill that would have banned PFAS in several categories of consumer products, lobbying firms were simultaneously lobbying for the bill on behalf of water agencies and against the bill on behalf of chemical industry clients.

KP Public Affairs, for instance, lobbied for the PFAS clean-up fund on behalf of Western Municipal Water District while opposing the PFAS ban for the California Restaurant Association.

It collected $281,400 from the City of Los Angeles, a city with a 30 percent PFAS contamination rate in parts of its water system and $73,700 from its chemical industry clients.

California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed SB 682 in October 2025, allowing those double-dipping lobbying firms to claim a win with both sides.

In New York, five PFAS-related bills passed the State Senate overwhelmingly in 2025, one of them 53-0, only to die without a vote in the Assembly, blocked by Speaker Carl Heastie. Chemical and plastic industry lobbyists were widely blamed.

The firm Ostro Associates lobbied against a PFAS consumer products ban for the American Chemistry Council and the Cookware Sustainability Alliance, while simultaneously lobbying for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

The firm Actum lobbied for the Cookware Sustainability Alliance while also representing DoorDash, meaning a firm working to keep PFAS in cookware also represents the company delivering food in containers that may be contaminated with PFAS.

In Oregon, lobbying firm Tonkon Torp opposed a bill that would have phased out PFAS in consumer products (HB 3512) on behalf of Oregonians for Food and Shelter, a position co-signed by the ACC. At the same time, a Tonkon Torp lobbyist testified in favor of a bill to fund newborn disease screening.

The irony is not lost on anyone who has read the science: a January 2025 study found that exposure to PFAS in utero and through breastmilk is associated with birth defects, reduced birth weight, diminished immune response, and increased risk of cardiometabolic problems in children.

Tonkon Torp is helping to fund tests for one set of childhood diseases while working to block legislation that would reduce children’s exposure to the chemicals causing those diseases.

In Michigan, where PFAS contamination in drinking water is widespread and school districts sit within miles of contaminated military bases, the lobbying firm Kelley Cawthorne represents both the ACC and the Michigan Chemistry Council, and also represents multiple public school districts, Wayne County, and the Michigan Council on Foundations, which has called clean freshwater “essential for our health, environment, and economy.”

Michigan’s lobbyist disclosure laws are so weak that the full extent of these conflicts can’t even be fully documented.

Minnesota Showed What’s Possible. Now Industry Is Trying to Dismantle It.

Minnesota passed Amara’s Law, the strongest ban on toxic PFAS in the nation, in 2023. By January 2025, the law began implementation. Its goal: eliminate nonessential PFAS use by 2032 and create a public reporting system so consumers can know what’s in the products they buy.

Minnesota is not a fringe state acting recklessly. Japan, England, and France have sent documentary filmmakers to study Amara’s Law. Lawmakers from New South Wales, Australia have come to learn from Minnesota’s approach. The state has become a global model for confronting PFAS contamination at its source.

And yet, since the law passed, industry groups have been working methodically to dismantle it. They’ve pushed for loopholes, exemptions, and extended timelines, arguing for “flexibility” and “feasibility” while the chemicals keep contaminating groundwater and bodies.

State Representative Josh Heintzeman is carrying a bill that would further delay implementation of the requirement that companies report PFAS content in their products, information that is supposed to be publicly available so that parents can make informed decisions about what they bring into their homes.

The industry argument always looks the same. Delay, obscure, exempt, and run out the clock. Meanwhile, communities need new water treatment systems, filtration upgrades, and landfill mitigation. Taxpayers foot the bill to clean up contamination that manufacturers knew about, in some cases for decades.

Internal documents from multiple PFAS manufacturers show that companies knew these chemicals were toxic and persistent and continued to produce and sell them anyway. PFAS is, in the most direct sense, a Minnesota-made problem: 3M pioneered these chemicals, and Minnesotans are still living with the consequences.

Delaying Amara’s Law won’t make contamination disappear. It won’t make cleanup cheaper. It will only guarantee more exposure, more illness, and a larger tab for taxpayers.

The Disclosure Problem

One reason these conflicts have gone largely unexamined is that state lobbyist disclosure laws are profoundly weak.

Only 16 of the 36 states tracked in the Bad Chemistry report require lobbyists to disclose the specific bills they lobby on. Michigan discloses no compensation figures and no bill numbers. Oregon requires no disclosure of bills lobbied or positions taken, and its compensation disclosure system is described as confusing and opaque.

Even in California, which has one of the better disclosure systems in the country, lobbyists are not required to disclose what position they take on each bill, making it easy to play both sides without being caught. F Minus discovered firms lobbying simultaneously for and against SB 682 only by filing a public records request with the Senate Committee on Environmental Quality.

This opacity is not accidental. The regulatory environment is often shaped in part by the very industries that benefit from secrecy.

What Can Be Done

The Bad Chemistry report ends with a clear prescription: local governments, public school districts, hospitals, cancer organizations, and wildlife groups that are clients of PFAS-lobbying firms have the power to disrupt this dynamic.

By adopting policies that prohibit contracting with firms that also lobby for PFAS clients, these institutions can force lobbying firms to choose sides. That choice, multiplied across hundreds of clients, will impose real economic and reputational costs on firms that continue to represent the industries driving the contamination crisis.

That is how Tobacco’s double-agent strategy eventually broke down. It can break down here too, but only if the institutions being harmed by PFAS stop funding the firms fighting on behalf of the polluters.

We need the political will to hold the responsible parties accountable and stop letting them play both sides of the table while communities drink poisoned water and pick up the bill.

Subscribe now

Go to the Sources

F Minus and Mothers Out Front, “Bad Chemistry: The PFAS Lobbyists Who Also Lobby For PFAS Victims,” March 2026

Food & Water Watch, “PFAS Lobbying: Mid-2025 Update, September 2025

Clean Water Action, “Lobbying in PFAS: Big Money is Poisoning our Water,” April 2026

In Other News…

The EPA wants to weaken protections for groundwater near coal ash dumps.

Coal ash, the toxic waste from coal-fired power plants, is stored in massive unlined pits that leach arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and other heavy metals into groundwater, rivers, and lakes. U.S. coal plants produced roughly 63 million tons of it in 2024 alone, according to industry estimates.

The agency’s proposal, made at the behest of electric utilities, would allow site-by-site exemptions from national standards, eliminate volume limits on coal ash spread on land, push groundwater monitoring points further from the pits, and grant more time to remove ash from waste sites. The EPA is already structuring the rule to be legally “severable,” so that courts can’t strike it down all at once.

You can fight this. Public comments are open through June 12. Submit yours at regulations.gov, docket number EPA-HQ-OLEM-2020-0107.

Alright, everyone. That’s a lot to digest! Be kind in the comments to one another, and let us know if you have questions or just want to keep the conversation going down below.

Toxic & Vulnerable

When you live in California, like I do, fire season is always on your mind. Research from last year showed that it is indeed starting earlier and lasting longer in almost every region of the state than it did two decades ago.

Mild winter weather combined with hotter temps this spring mean wildfires could start even earlier this year, particularly in Southern California.

Not only is that a problem for the neighborhoods and businesses in the Golden State but also for the toxic waste. You see, it doesn’t stay put when disaster strikes.

You can bury it, cap it, fence it off, and slap a government seal on it, but the earth doesn’t care about your paperwork—and neither does a wildfire or a flood.

The EPA's own watchdog is sounding the alarm

Across the country federal Superfund sites, places so contaminated that the federal government has designated them national emergencies, are sitting in the path of disasters. We all know that wildfires and floods have become worse, more frequent, and more destructive. You can read more about it here and here.

The EPA’s own internal watchdog (the Office of Inspector General) released a series of three reviews last month to identify Superfund sites that may be at risk from sea-level rise or increased storm surge, inland flooding, and wildfires.

That means the agency itself wasn’t saying it loud enough.

The numbers tell a frightening story

Of 155 federal Superfund sites analyzed for wildfire exposure, 31 of them, or one in five, face real wildfire risk.

Seventy-one percent of those are out West, where anyone with eyes has watched the skies turn orange and entire towns disappear overnight. Of the sites that were supposed to be reviewing their wildfire vulnerability, two out of three hadn’t adequately addressed it. Two out of three. Uhhhh, WTF?!

On flooding, it’s even worse.

About one in three federal Superfund sites with sufficient data for analysis could be at risk from inland flooding. Most of them are on the Atlantic coast, which, last I checked, is not exactly known for being dry.

We already have a real-world preview of what this kind of disaster looks like. When Hurricane Harvey slammed Texas in 2017, floodwaters picked up dioxin chemicals from the San Jacinto River Waste Pits and carried them into neighborhoods. Into streets. Into yards. Into homes.

After the storm, officials checked dioxin levels in the river sediment nearby and found it was more than 2,000 times higher than EPA standards.

Your neighbors are in the crosshairs

I want to be clear about something. The contamination at these Superfund sites doesn’t disappear just because someone puts a fence around it.

These are federal facility sites, owned and operated by the U.S. government, and they average more than 6,000 acres each. About 3 million Americans live within a mile of one and 13 million live within three miles. These are your neighbors. Your kids. Your parents.

These sites are prioritized for environmental cleanups to contain or remove hazardous substances. They are full of asbestos, lead, radiation, and other hazardous materials, and they are not getting cleaned up fast enough.

When a wildfire rips through a site loaded with toxic materials, those contaminants don’t just burn up, they become airborne. They travel. They get into lungs.

When a flood overruns one of these sites, the poisons don’t stay put. They hitch a ride downstream into the water table, into the soil, into communities that had no idea the risk was coming.

The rules exist. Nobody's enforcing them.

The EPA guidance already requires that these sites conduct five-year reviews that address natural disaster threats. The rule exists. It’s on the books. The problem isn’t that nobody wrote it down. The problem is that nobody is making sure it’s being followed, and in the meantime, the climate is not waiting for anyone to get their act together.

It’s the same story, over and over. Someone knows. The data is sitting in a drawer somewhere. Yet the people who live in the shadow of these sites, the ones who drink the water and breathe the air and let their kids play outside, they’re the last to find out and the first to pay the price.

How did we get here?

The EPA’s Superfund program began in 1980 to help clean up some of the country’s worst hazardous waste sites and to respond to local and national environmental emergencies. But since then, how many areas have been thoroughly cleaned? How many people are even aware that they exist?

A Superfund site is any land that has been contaminated by hazardous waste and identified by the EPA as a candidate for cleanup because it poses a risk to human health and/or the environment.

Most of these sites are “discovered” when the presence of hazardous waste is made known to the EPA, meaning communities usually find them first because people get sick. Then, these sites get placed on the National Priorities List (NPL).

This is not a partisan issue. Toxic plumes don’t check your voter registration before they settle in your lungs. Floodwater doesn’t ask your income level before it carries poison into your basement. This is about whether the people we put in charge of protecting us are actually doing their job.

The fix isn’t complicated, even if it isn’t easy.

Every federal Superfund site needs a genuine, rigorous review of its climate vulnerabilities, wildfire, flooding, storm surge, all of it, and that review needs to drive actual action, not just paperwork.

The remedies that have already been put in place, often at enormous public expense, need to be protected from the disasters that are coming. Because the question is no longer whether these disasters will arrive. They’re already here.

Get loud before it's too late

We know what happens when we look away. We’ve seen it. We’ve lived it. I’ve spent my career sitting across from families who were told everything was fine, right up until it wasn’t.

The difference between a community that gets justice and one that gets poisoned is almost always this: whether enough people get loud before it’s too late.

So here’s what I’m asking you to do.

Find out if you live near a Superfund site. You can look it up right now at the EPA’s website. If you do, contact your local representatives and demand to know whether that site has had a current five-year review, and whether that review actually addresses natural disaster risks.

Don’t accept a form letter. Don’t accept “we’re looking into it.” Ask for the report. Read it. Share it. And if your representatives can’t answer you? That’s your answer.

The EPA has the authority to require these reviews. Congress has the authority to fund and enforce them. The only thing that’s ever made either of those institutions move is people who refused to be ignored.

I was a single mom with no law degree when I helped hold a corporation accountable for poisoning an entire town. I turned my anger into questions, and those questions into evidence, and that evidence into accountability.

You can do the same thing. The reports are public. The risks are documented. The people in charge are on the record.

Now they need to hear from you.

Source: Review of Federal Superfund Site Risks Due to Natural Disasters and Extreme Weather, U.S. EPA Office Of Inspector General, Reports 25-N-0040, 26-E-0019, and 26-E-0020 (March 2026).

I was out in Northwest Georgia last week holding town hall meetings on the ongoing PFAS contamination crisis there. Northwest Georgia carpet manufacturers used PFAS in their manufacturing process for years, discharging millions of gallons of toxic “forever chemicals.”

Communities can't defend themselves when they don't know the truth. Town halls help get information to the people.

PBS also produced a great documentary about the toxic legacy of the carpet industy. You can watch it here.

As always, thanks for reading and sharing this information with your friends and neighbors! Have a question or comment? Drop it in the comments below.

Laura McNamara-Smith has lived in Ashville, Ohio, for 50 years.

Three generations of her family call the village home along with more than 4,800 other residents. They all drink water drawn from the Teays Valley Aquifer, an ancient underground formation that flows beneath Pickaway County, less than 50 feet below the surface.

Now a global corporation wants to build an 800-megawatt industrial natural gas energy facility directly above the area’s aquifer—its sole source of drinking water. The facility would take up about 110 acres and provide power to the data center on the same site.

Ashville is a quiet place just 20 miles south of Columbus with a strong community bond, and the proposed EdgeConneX data center threatens to disrupt that tranquility.

Laura recently wrote to me expressing her overwhelm and concerns about the pace and scope of the project.

She said her goal in speaking out was simple: to ensure transparency, accountability, and a clear understanding of what is being proposed and how it may affect her community.

Laura wrote:

I know you understand what it feels like to be a regular person who knows something is wrong and cannot get anyone to listen. That is exactly where we are.

I am not asking you to solve this for us. I am asking you to shine a light on it. Our community is fighting as hard as we can. But we need someone with your voice to help people understand what is at stake, not just for Ashville, but for every community sitting above a vulnerable aquifer that a corporation decides it wants to use.

Laura, I hear you.

And I want you to know, what you are describing is not unusual. It is not a local quirk. It’s a pattern. Even before the data center boom, big corporations used a similar playbook for any project with questionable environmental values.

It looks something like this: identify a resource, move fast, work quietly through local channels, and by the time residents understand what’s happening, the paperwork is already done.

You’re not alone in these struggles. Ohio ranks 5th in the nation for data centers with about 200 sites, according to the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel.

Just 6 hours away in Joliet, Illinois, plans are moving forward to build the largest data center in the state. It also sits on top of an underground aquifer that has been steadily dwindling for the last 150 years.

In fact, reports say the aquifer that supplies Joliet’s drinking water is likely going to run too dry by 2030—a problem more communities face as the climate changes and groundwater declines.

While project supporters welcome advances in data center technology, many Joliet residents have expressed alarm over the potential environmental impact.

Another hastily built supercomputer in South Memphis sits on top of an aquifer with some of the best drinking water in the world. We wrote about it here:

So how do we balance economic and environmental priorities?

I tend to be a fan of the precautionary principle, which is a strategy used to prevent harm to the public or the environment when scientific knowledge is incomplete. It suggests taking preventive action in the face of uncertainty, rather than waiting for conclusive evidence of harm.

Corporations tend to take the opposite approach. Promise local government an influx of jobs and/or tax revenue and get a deal done with as little environmental assessment as possible.

Back To The Water in Ashville

The village’s own Consumer Confidence Report, the annual water quality document that public water systems are required to publish under federal law, tells you something important before you even look at what EdgeConneX is proposing.

The Ohio EPA has rated the Teays Valley Aquifer as having “high susceptibility to contamination” in 2023. The aquifer is separated from whatever happens above ground by a thin layer of clay. Ashville’s 2023 report identifies an existing natural gas line as contamination source number five within the one-year capture zone of the village’s wells, and that’s before any new industrial construction begins.

In February 2026, the Ohio EPA issued a Notice of Violation to Ashville’s water system following a routine inspection, citing a leaking 100,000-gallon storage tank, a well that has been offline since August 2024 with no backup in place, and multiple operational deficiencies. The village’s water infrastructure, in other words, is already under strain.

Now consider what an 800-megawatt natural gas power plant requires on top of that. I’m spit balling here but probably some transmission-scale pipelines, fuel storage, chemical treatment systems, and continuous industrial operations running 24 hours a day, every day.

The routing of the gas pipeline that would serve the facility has not been publicly disclosed. No one in the community has been shown a map of whether it crosses the one-year capture zone of their wells.

Resolution 06-2026, the development agreement the village council voted on, is 8 pages long. It contains zero binding groundwater protections, zero monitoring requirements, and zero enforceable standards for the aquifer.

There Is a Public Meeting. Show Up.

On Wednesday, April 1, PowerConneX is hosting its first public information meeting about the Ashville Energy Center at the Teays Valley High School Cafeteria from 5 to 7 p.m. It will be an open house format.

A second public information meeting will be held at a later date. PowerConneX has stated it anticipates filing its application with the Ohio Power Siting Board within 90 days of that second meeting.

Here is what I want you to do at that meeting: Ask the questions that haven’t been answered yet.

Ask where the gas pipeline goes.
Ask whether it crosses the one-year capture zone of your wells.
Ask what binding protections for the aquifer will be written into any permit.
Ask why those protections weren’t in Resolution 06-2026.
Ask them to show you the map.

You can also reach the project team ahead of the meeting at (703) 935-2452 Ext. 10141 or pcxenergyashville@edgeconnex.com.

The Ohio Power Siting Board is the agency that will ultimately decide whether this facility gets built. The OPSB accepts written public comments at any time. You do not have to wait for a hearing. Case No. 26-196-EL-BGN.
Send comments to: Ohio Power Siting Board, 180 E. Broad St., Columbus, OH 43215. Email: contactOPSB@puco.ohio.gov. Phone: 1-866-270-6772.

Every individual comment matters. Volume matters. Specificity matters. Don’t just say you’re worried. Cite the EPA’s rating, cite the absence of independent hydrogeological studies, and ask the Board what standards will protect the aquifer. Make them answer on the record.

If you want to do more: seek out independent technical expertise. Environmental law clinics, organizations like Earthjustice or the Ohio Environmental Law Center, and university hydrogeology departments are places to start. The company will have its own experts. You need yours.

And tell your story. To your local paper. To your state legislators. To your neighbors. The aquifer is in the floor of your school. It is 50 feet below the ground where your families have lived for generations. That is worth fighting for.

Congress Is Starting to Pay Attention

Ashville is not alone, and the pattern Laura is describing is now registering at the federal level.

Last week Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act, legislation that would place an immediate federal pause on new AI data center construction until strong national safeguards are in place.

“Data center construction inflate electric bills in communities across the country,” Ocasio-Cortez said in announcing the bill. “Congress has a moral obligation to stand with the American people and stop the expansion of these data centers until we have a framework to adequately address the existential harm AI poses to our society.”

Sanders was equally direct.

“We cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy and the future of humanity,” he said. “We need a federal moratorium on AI data centers.”

The legislation would require that before development resumes, AI must be demonstrated to be safe and effective, that its economic gains benefit workers and not just tech investors, and that data centers do not increase utility prices, harm communities, or damage the environment.

The bill is part of a broader national reckoning. More than 100 local communities around the country have already enacted moratoriums on data centers, and 12 states are currently advancing statewide moratorium proposals.

In 2023, more than 1,000 industry leaders and scientists called for AI labs to pause development for at least six months. Since then, prominent voices inside the industry itself, including the heads of Google DeepMind and Anthropic, have said they would support slowing AI development if other countries and companies did the same.

What’s happening in Ashville isn’t a local anomaly. It’s one instance of a national problem that Congress is only now beginning to confront.

Upcoming Opportunities To Show Up & Use Your Voice

The first public information meeting will be held:
Wednesday, April 1, 5–7 p.m.
Teays Valley High School Cafeteria, 3887 State Route 752, Ashville, OH 43103

Written comments to the Ohio Power Siting Board may be submitted at any time. OPSB Case No. 26-196-EL-BGN. Contact: contactOPSB@puco.ohio.gov or 1-866-270-6772.

The final village council vote is on Monday, April 6th. I’m always telling people to get to local meetings and show your elected officials that you care about these issues.

See our tips for attending a town hall meeting here.

What’s happening in your community? Are you concerned about data centers? Do you support putting a pause on new facilities?

Spring cleaning? Good. While you're at it, check the tags on your kids’ shirts because researchers just revealed something wild.

At a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), undergraduate researchers from Marian University presented findings that many kids clothes contains an unwanted, toxic ingredient: lead.

They tested fabric from children’s fast fashion shirts sold by multiple retailers and found that every single sample exceeded U.S. federal regulatory limits for lead. Every. Single. One.

Let me say that again. Not some of them. All of them.

The researchers also estimate that even briefly chewing on these fabrics (which young children tend to do) could expose them to dangerous lead levels.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission sets a lead limit of 100 parts per million for children’s products which includes toys, clothing, and more. These shirts blew past that.

Unfortunately a good wash doesn’t get the lead out. The metal binds with dyes and fibers in a way that a typical washing machine cycle cannot eliminate.

And here’s the thing: we already know what lead does to children. Lead exposure at any level can cause behavior problems, brain and central nervous system damage, and a host of other devastating health effects. Children under 6 are considered the most vulnerable.

So why is it in their clothes?

Some manufacturers use lead(II) acetate as a cheap way to make dyes stick to fabric and keep colors bright and long-lasting. Cheap for them. Not so cheap for your kid’s developing brain.

The researchers didn’t stop at measuring lead levels. They simulated stomach digestion to calculate what a child could actually absorb, modeling the kind of mouthing behavior that young children do every day, like sucking, holding, or chewing on fabric.

Their findings suggest that this kind of exposure could exceed the daily lead ingestion limit set by the FDA. Kids chew on their shirts. We all know this. And apparently the industry has been betting that no one was paying attention.

Brightly colored items, especially reds and yellows, showed the highest lead levels, though no color was completely off the hook.

Now here’s what really gets me. Safer alternatives already exist such as natural mordants from plants like oak bark, pomegranate peel, and rosemary, which are environmentally safe. But switching costs money. And without pressure from consumers or policymakers, the industry has zero incentive to change.

This is the same story I’ve seen my entire life. The harm is known. The alternatives exist. But until someone forces the issue, nothing moves.

The good news? This research was driven by a principal investigator who got into this work after her own daughter showed elevated blood lead levels, along with undergraduate students on pre-medicine tracks who saw an overlooked health issue and decided to act. That’s how change starts. Regular people who refuse to look away.

So here’s what I’m asking you to do: share this. Talk about it. Ask the retailers where your kids’ clothes come from and how they’re dyed. Demand answers. Because as one of the student researchers said, “Everything that we’re doing is only important and helpful if we talk about it.”

She’s right. So let’s talk.

Research presented at ACS Spring 2026, March 22–26, 2026. Study title: “Lead contamination in fast fashion children’s clothing,” Marian University.

What To Do Now

Listen, I know a lot of parents need budget-friendly options for fast-growing kiddos. I’ve been there! So here’s a few alternatives to consider.

Buy secondhand first. Thrift stores, consignment shops, Facebook Marketplace, ThredUp, and Poshmark are goldmines for kids’ clothes. Since children outgrow things so fast, secondhand items are often barely worn. You can frequently find name-brand, better-quality pieces for a fraction of the price.

Organize or join a clothing swap. Many communities, schools, and parent groups host kids’ clothing swaps where families trade outgrown items. It costs nothing and you walk away with a new wardrobe.

Shop end-of-season sales at quality retailers. Stores like Land’s End, L.L. Bean, and similar brands run deep discounts (50–70% off) at the end of each season. Buy the next size up in coats, boots, and basics for next year. These items are built to last and often hand-me-down well.

Embrace hand-me-down networks. If you have friends or family with slightly older kids, get yourself on the hand-me-down list. Offer to return the favor when your child grows out of them.

Focus spending on quality basics, not trends. Kids don’t need trendy pieces. They need sturdy everyday basics. Spend a little more on well-made jeans, a good coat, and durable shoes, then fill in the rest secondhand. Trendy tops are exactly what fast fashion does worst from a safety and durability standpoint.

Stick to neutral and muted colors when buying new. Based on the research in the article, brightly colored items, reds and yellows especially, showed the highest lead levels. Choosing more muted tones when buying new clothing adds a small layer of caution while the industry catches up.

Wash new clothes before wearing them. This is a good general rule regardless of brand. It won’t eliminate lead if it’s embedded in the fibers, but it can reduce surface-level chemical residues from manufacturing and shipping.

Look for OEKO-TEX certified clothing. The OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certification means a fabric has been tested for harmful substances including heavy metals. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s a meaningful signal that a brand is paying attention to what’s in their textiles.

The bottom line is that kids’ clothes don’t need to be new to be safe, and often the older, more durable pieces from quality brands that end up at thrift stores are better than what’s being manufactured cheaply today.

Learn more about fast fashion and its impact on water here.

What do you think? Are you surprised that researchers found lead in kids’ clothing? Or just life as usual in the good ole’ chemical-laded USA?

Right now, across this country, something extraordinary is happening, and most people haven't heard about it yet. I know, we’ve got a lot going on these days.

States are done waiting. They are acting boldly and with mounting sophistication to protect families from the toxic chemicals that have been quietly contaminating our food, our water, our clothes, our children's toys, and the products we use every single day.

At least 15 major state laws are taking effect in 2026 alone. More than 275 policies are moving through legislatures in 33 states. These protections will reach more than 62 million people, addressing toxic chemicals and plastics.

Last month, Safer States released its 2026 Analysis of State Policy Addressing Toxic Chemicals and Plastics, finding that a wave of state health protections is moving from adoption to implementation this year.

Safer States is a national alliance of environmental health organizations and coalitions from across the nation working to safeguard people and the planet from toxic chemicals.

These state actions reflect a growing shift toward health-first, prevention-based policy and demonstrate how state leadership is reshaping national markets.

“Toxic chemicals and plastics are contaminating our lives without our consent,” Sarah Doll, national director of Safer States said in a statement. “The good news is that this harm is preventable. The protections taking effect this year show what strong, health-centered leadership can achieve and why state action is as important as ever.”

The forever chemical reckoning

For decades, PFAS have been in everything from firefighting foam and cookware to food packaging and cosmetics. These harmful substances don’t break down. They build up in our bodies. And for years, the companies making them knew it, and said nothing. I’ve met the firefighters whose colleagues died of cancer at alarming rates. I’ve talked to the farm families whose land was contaminated by sludge they thought was fertilizer.

Nine of the 15 major policies taking effect this year directly target PFAS.

States are phasing them out of consumer products, requiring disclosure, protecting highly exposed workers, and putting cleanup money on the table. They’re not addressing PFAS one chemical at a time; they’re going after the entire class.

That’s a smarter, stronger approach, and it’s working. Supply chains are already changing. Products are being reformulated across the country, not just in the states where the laws passed.

When one state sets a health-based standard, companies don’t typically make a special version just for that state. They change the product. That’s how state action reshapes national markets. Here’s what that looks like on the ground right now.

PFAS Bans & Disclosure Laws in 2026

Maine

Broad PFAS ban across clothing, cookware, food packaging, dental floss, children’s products, menstrual products, personal care, ski wax, and textiles.

Protects 1.4 million people

Colorado

Bans PFAS in artificial turf, cookware, carpeting, cleaning products, menstrual products, dental floss, and ski wax.

Protects 6 million people

Vermont

Bans PFAS in artificial turf, clothing, children’s products, menstrual and incontinence products, personal care products, and textiles.

Protects 648,000 people

New York

Bans PFAS and other toxic chemicals in menstrual products.

Protects 20 million people

Minnesota

Requires manufacturers to report their use of forever chemicals in all products sold in the state, making it the broadest PFAS disclosure requirement in the world.

Protects 5.8 million people

Rhode Island

Requires testing of biosolids for forever chemicals before land application, closing a loophole that let PFAS spread from wastewater back onto farmland and into food.

Protects 1.1 million people

Maine and Minnesota have both set a target of banning all unnecessary PFAS uses by 2032. These aren’t one-off fixes. They’re the beginning of a systematic phase-out.

Plastics are a public health crisis too.

I want you to think about everything you touched today that was plastic. Your coffee cup lid. A receipt at the pharmacy. Your child’s lunch container. You spinach container. Each of those items can leach toxic chemicals like endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, and microplastics directly into food, drink, and bodies.

States are now treating plastics as what they are: a public health problem, not just a litter problem. The policies advancing in 2026 target toxic chemical additives in plastics, restrict microplastics in everyday products, and push for upstream prevention. This action works to stop the harm before it spreads rather than managing the mess after the fact.

Some changes are already becoming visible in daily life. New Jersey is now requiring restaurants to serve dine-in customers with reusable utensils, disposable ones only available on request. Michigan is requiring filtered water refill stations in all schools, protecting 1.2 million students. Oregon’s ban on polystyrene in food packaging is in effect.

These policies succeed because they don’t ask individuals to make better choices. They make the safer option the default. That’s how you get lasting change.

Your lipstick, your lotion, your period products

Why are the products marketed most aggressively to women, such as cosmetics, personal care items, and menstrual products, had the least oversight and the most dangerous chemical ingredients? Am I the only one that thinks about these things?

Additionally, women of color are specifically and disproportionately targeted with products that contain higher levels of harmful chemicals. That is an injustice piled on an injustice.

States are fighting back. Washington State has enacted first-in-the-nation rules banning nine chemical classes from personal care products and cosmetics, including PFAS, phthalates, and formaldehyde-releasing chemicals.

California has banned all bisphenols from children’s feeding products, protecting 5 million children under 12.

Washington’s rules also ban bisphenols from receipt paper, those little slips of paper cashiers hand you that have been shown to transfer hormone-disrupting chemicals through skin contact.

Cosmetics, Personal Care & Everyday Product Laws in 2026

Washington

Nine chemical classes banned in personal care products and cosmetics, including PFAS, phthalates, and formaldehyde. Bisphenols banned in receipt paper.

Protects 8 million people

California

All bisphenols banned from children’s feeding products including bottles, cups, plates, utensils.

Protects 5 million children under 12

New York

Bans forever chemicals and other toxic chemicals in menstrual products.

Protects 20 million people

Michigan

Requires filtered water refill stations in all schools.

Protects 1.2 million students

These are not radical demands. They are basic dignity. And 19 major retailers have already restricted bisphenols in receipt paper nationwide in response to state action. The market is listening.

Washington is moving backward. States are charging forward.

I’ll be honest with you about the threat we’re facing. While states are stepping up, there are industry-backed proposals in Congress right now trying to gut the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), the primary U.S. chemical safety law.

This law passed in 2016 with bipartisan support. Industry wants to kneecap the EPA’s authority to restrict dangerous chemicals, shortcut safety reviews, and strip states of their power to protect their own people.

The corporations funding those rollback efforts are the same ones that have known for years what their chemicals do to human bodies. They are not confused about the science. They are betting that we won’t fight back hard enough. They have been wrong before.

So what can you do right now?

Here’s how to start:

• Find out if your state is one of the 33 considering toxic chemical legislation in 2026, then contact your state legislator and say you support it.

• Call or email your U.S. Representative and Senators and tell them to oppose any weakening of the Toxic Substances Control Act.

• Look up Safer States and your state’s environmental health coalition, sign up, show up, speak up.

• Talk to your neighbors, your school board, your local elected officials. Local pressure is where movements are built.

• When a company claims their product is safe, ask for the evidence. You have a right to know what is in the things you bring into your home.

Know that you are not alone in caring about these issues. A 2025 poll from Environmental Defense Fund found that 92 percent of U.S. adults feel that protecting clean air and safe drinking water should be treated as a top public health priority, just like preventing disease.

We can never accept “that’s just how it is” as an answer. That’s what’s happening right now in statehouses across this country.

Mothers, firefighters, farmworkers, doctors, and yes, ordinary people who are just plain fed up are working to changing the law for the better.

The states are leading. The question is whether enough of us will follow.

Keep the conversation going. What’s happening in your state?

First, they pollute. For years. Decades, even.

Plastic pellets, powder, flakes, foam, pouring out of a 4,700-acre complex on the Texas Gulf Coast into the waterways that feed the San Antonio Bay.

Nurdles sound like something cute. But when these tiny plastic pellets wash up on the banks of the canal, they pile up in the sand right where kids swim.

Microplastics, like nurdles, do not dissolve or disappear with time. They linger downstream, impacting sealife, marine birds, and even potentially human health.

Every single day that production plants are running, the plastic goes in the water.

Then someone notices. Someone like Diane Wilson, a 78-year-old retired shrimper and Goldman Prize-winning activist, who spent a year boating up and down that canal, collecting bags and buckets full of evidence. She didn’t go to law school, didn’t work for a lobbying firm, didn’t have a corporate expense account. A woman who knew her water, knew her bay, and knew something was deeply wrong.

Then they get sued. And here’s where it gets wild.

When Dow Chemical found out that the San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper was about to take them to court, and they saw the buckets of pellets and the 25-page legal notice, they didn’t clean it up. They didn’t apologize. They didn’t even pretend.

They filed a 320-page application to make it legal.

That’s right. Dow went to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and asked them to rewrite the rules.

The current wastewater permit says chemical plants can only discharge “trace amounts” of “floating solids.” Dow’s argument? That language is “vague.” That it has “the potential to be more stringent than necessary.” They want to discharge an unspecified amount of plastic into public waterways, and they want the state’s blessing to do it.

I’ve seen a lot in my years fighting for people whose water has been poisoned and whose complaints have been ignored. But the audacity of this move still stops me cold. You spend decades fouling a bay, and when you finally get caught, your solution is to change the definition of “caught.”

And the state? Well, the state stepped right in, but not in the way you’d hope.

Just 58 days after the Waterkeeper filed its notice of intent to sue, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office swooped in with its own lawsuit against Dow.

Sounds like justice, right?

Except under the Clean Water Act, once regulators file suit, citizens can’t. The state effectively used its own lawsuit as a lid, something to slam down on top of the Waterkeeper case and smother it.

Here’s the play: Sue the polluter, then negotiate a quiet settlement, all while keeping the environmentalists out of the courtroom.

Convenient.

Wilson called the state’s lawsuit “a sweetheart deal with industry.”

And let’s talk about who’s making the decisions here. Dow’s permit amendment will eventually go to a vote by three commissioners at the TCEQ, all appointed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Learn more here.

Dow contributed $20,000 to Abbott’s inaugural committees. Another $5,000 to his 2026 reelection campaign and $100,000 to the Republican State Leadership Committee.
Source: The Texas Tribune

I’m not saying money buys outcomes. I’m saying it buys access. It buys a phone call that gets returned. It buys the kind of relationship where nobody’s in a hurry to say no.

Meanwhile, Diane Wilson and a bunch of volunteers are out on a boat.

The people who actually protect our water aren’t usually the ones with the permits and the lawyers and the campaign contributions. They’re the retired shrimpers. The volunteers collecting evidence in rubber boots. The citizen groups with nonprofit attorneys who outwork everyone in the room because they have no other choice.

Groups like Waterkeeper already proved this works. They sued Formosa Plastics in 2016, won a landmark settlement in 2019, and forced the company to pay more than $100 million into an environmental trust. Similar groups won settlements in South Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Every one of those victories started with ordinary people who refused to look away.

The science is catching up, too. We’re slowly beginning to understand how long plastics facilities have been pumping microplastics into our waterways, and how serious the damage is.

As one attorney put it, the governments are following in the wake of citizen activists on this issue. Think about that. The people who are supposed to protect us are being dragged forward by the people they’re supposed to protect.

Dow’s permit amendment is open for public comment right now. If it’s approved, it could set a precedent for plastics facilities across the state, and potentially beyond, to discharge whatever they want and call it permitted.

Legal experts say it would face serious challenges under the Clean Water Act’s anti-backsliding provisions. But challenges take time, and time is something the bay doesn’t have.

They’re counting on you not paying attention. They’re counting on the process being boring enough, technical enough, slow enough, that you tune out before the vote happens. They’re counting on Diane Wilson being alone out there on that canal.

Don’t let her be.

Texas is the nation’s largest chemical-producing state, with most industry located on the state’s Gulf Coast. About 46 petrochemical plants operate in the region—the largest concentration in the country—constituting 42 percent of the U.S. petrochemical capacity.

More than 400 million tons of plastic are produced globally each year by converting fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas into tiny plastic pellets called nurdles, which are used for manufacturing every kind of plastic from water bottles to car parts.

An estimated 230,000 tons of nurdles enter the world’s oceans annually due to spills and discharge from petrochemical facilities. By 2050, experts predict that there may be more plastic by weight than fish in the world’s oceans.

What To Do

If you live in Texas, you can help by requesting a public hearing on Dow’s permit. Please fill out the form at this link.

Tell the TCEQ what you think about legalizing plastic pollution.

Follow and support the work of San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper for updates here. Show up for the people who’ve been showing up for all of us.

Because here’s the truth they never want you to know. You have more power than they want you to think. And every single time ordinary people have used it, things have changed.

The water is worth fighting for, as are the people who’ve been fighting for it alone for far too long.

Learn more about nurdles here:

Read more about this issue in The Texas Tribune.

Have you heard of nurdles? Concerned about plastic pollution? Keep the conversation going in the comments below.

Let me tell you something I don’t say very often. I’m cautiously hopeful about something the government just did.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has launched the California Water Plan 2028, and for the first time in this state’s history, there’s a real, measurable target attached to it—9 million acre-feet of additional water supply by 2040.

That’s not a press release talking point. That’s a number. And numbers, unlike promises, can be held to account.

Now, I have been publicly critical of Newsom and his administration on many issues in the state through the years, so I do stress the cautious part of my optimism.

I’ve spent decades watching communities get handed official-sounding documents while their tap water turned every color of the rainbow. When Sacramento starts talking about “the most ambitious water plan in state history,” I don’t reach for the champagne. I reach for my reading glasses and a highlighter. Because the devil, as always, is in the details.

But here’s the thing, what I’m reading in SB 72 and the framework around the 2028 Water Plan is different from the usual political theater. It’s got measurable benchmarks, a mandate to set localized targets, and an advisory committee that’s supposed to include tribal representatives, environmental justice groups, and labor, not just the water districts and agricultural lobbyists who’ve been running the show for generations.

That’s real.

Why This Plan Matters

California is in a genuine water crisis, whether or not you live in a county that’s feeling it yet. The state swings between biblical floods and multi-year droughts with almost nothing in between. Snowpack, the natural reservoir that’s fed this state’s farms and cities for centuries, is shrinking. And a shrinking snowpack isn’t just an inconvenience for skiers; it’s an existential threat to the 4th largest economy in the world.

“California’s hydrology is changing,” Department of Water Resources (DWR) director Karla Nemeth said in a statement. “We’re living that now. Extreme wet swings to intensely dry within the same season.”

The fact that someone at the top of California’s water apparatus is saying it out loud, on the record, is noteworthy.

California State Senator Anna Caballero, who authored SB 72, put it plainly: for the first time, California is setting a clear statewide target and establishing measurable benchmarks.

The mandate to transform the Water Plan from a passive descriptive document into an action-forcing directive is real. It’s in the law. That’s not nothing. That’s significant.

The Parts That Gives Me Pause

Now. Here’s where I put down my cautious optimism and pick up my magnifying glass. Because there are real questions this plan does not yet answer—and the communities that need clean, reliable water the most can’t afford to wait until 2028 to find out the plan has gaps in it.

Who enforces the targets? The 9 million acre-feet goal is described as an “interim statewide planning target.” Planning targets without enforcement teeth have a long history of being quietly set aside when they become inconvenient. What happens if California is 2 million acre-feet short in 2039? Who pays? Who’s held accountable?

Environmental justice isn’t window dressing. The advisory committee is supposed to include EJ representation, and that’s a step forward. But historically, these seats get filled with organizations that are well-networked in Sacramento but disconnected from the communities actually drinking polluted water. Hinkley wasn’t on anybody’s committee. Make sure the right voices are in the room, and that they have real power, not just a seat.

Agriculture’s water footprint needs honest math. The plan talks about supply, conservation, recharge, and storage. Agriculture accounts for roughly 40 percent of California's total water use, and about 80 percent of all developed water, the kind that gets collected, managed, and conveyed by agencies.

On top of that, agriculture draws on vast quantities of groundwater, with about 40 percent of its needs met through subterranean sources. That overdraft is hollowing out aquifers that communities depend on for drinking water and causing measurable ground subsidence across the Central Valley. If those realities aren't woven explicitly into the localized targets and cost-benefit analyses, this plan risks being a masterwork of creativity around the edges of the real problem.

Data collection is not the same as action. One of the three primary workstreams is improving data. We need that, absolutely. But data collection has a way of becoming a substitute for decision-making. I want to see aggressive timelines that prevent “we’re still gathering data” from becoming a decade-long delay tactic.

2040 is 14 years away. Not all communities have 14 years to wait. They need interim milestones that matter now, not just a finish line that politicians in 2040 may never have to answer for.

What Gives Me Hope

Despite those concerns, which I raise not to tear this plan down but because I’ve earned the right to ask hard questions, there are genuine signals that something different is happening here.

The language coming from DWR Deputy Director Joel Metzger gives me pause in a good way.

“The new California Water Plan is where vision meets accountability,” he said in a statement. “I’m inspired by the partnerships forming around this work and the shared commitment to long-term water resilience. Relationships, trust building, and compelling storytelling will be essential to moving this work forward successfully.”

He’s right. The communities that have been left out of water planning don’t need another technical document dropped on their doorstep. They need to be part of crafting the story. If DWR actually means that, it changes the nature of what this plan can become.

What You Can Do Right Now

The thing about these plans is that they become what the public makes them. The advisory committee holds its inaugural meeting in April, and those meetings are public. CaliforniaWaterPlan.com is live. The engagement window is open right now.

If you live in a community that’s been dealing with contaminated water, inadequate infrastructure, or systematic exclusion from water policy decisions, show up. Bring your neighbors. Make sure the people crafting this plan understand that accountability isn’t a footnote; it’s the whole point.

California is staring down a water future that is genuinely frightening if we don’t act with both ambition and honesty. The 2028 Water Plan represents a real attempt to do both. Governor Newsom and Senator Caballero deserve credit for putting a number on the wall and a legal mandate behind it.

Now comes the harder part. The follow-through. Fourteen years of follow-through, across changing administrations, in the face of drought years and flood years and all the lobbyists and competing interests that will try to water this plan down—pun fully intended!

I’ve been fighting for clean water long enough to know that the difference between a plan and a result is people who refuse to let the plan die quietly. Be those people. California’s water is worth fighting for. It always has been.

Meanwhile in Mississippi…

U.S.EPA and Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) will hold a community meeting on Thursday, March 5, to inform the community of the agencies’ response to trichloroethylene (TCE) contamination in private drinking water wells.

EPA is assisting MDEQ by working to provide bottled water and whole house filters to properties with TCE contamination above the Federal Drinking Water Maximum Contaminant Level for TCE of 5 parts per billion (ppb). EPA is continuing to sample residential wells in the area of interest and MDEQ is working to determine the source and extent of contamination.

When:
Thursday, March 5 at 6 p.m.

Where:
Byhalia Town Hall    
225 MS-309
Byhalia, Miss. 38611 

In Case You Missed It:
Community members in Marshall County are dealing with contaminated well water issues after high levels of TCE, a known carcinogen, were found when a resident recently tested their well water and detected dangerous.

EPA has distributed bottled water to homes with high levels of TCE and met with concerned homeowners. This water contamination specifically impacted those with private well water.

The mayor of Byhalia said that those on the public water system in Byhalia are safe.

Trichloroethylene, also known as TCE, is a colorless, nonflammable liquid solvent used in commercial, and consumer products, such as industrial cleaners, degreasers, lubricants, adhesives, automotive care products, and cleaning and furniture care items.

EPA issued a final rule regulating TCE under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) in December 2024 to help protect people from health risks including liver cancer, kidney cancer, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. TCE also causes damage to the central nervous system, liver, kidneys, immune system, reproductive organs, and causes fetal heart defects.

Let this be a reminder to everyone with private well water to regularly get your water tested at least once a year.

For those in the area impacted, our friends at MyTapScore have told us they’ve been fielding calls from residents about how they are being tossed from company to company trying to track down reliable testing for this contaminant.

They recommend that private well owners in the impacted areas use the VOC Water Test, which includes TCE in addition to a range of other VOCs.

Many well owners have either never tested their wells or have not tested in decades. If that’s the case, you might want to consider a more comprehensive test such as the Advanced Home Water Test, which also includes TCE.

This is not any kind of sponsored ad, we just know the people over there, and that their tests work. You can also check out this U.S. EPA site for more information about private water wells.

Stay safe, everyone! Suzanne always talks about a saying she leaned in journalism school, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

The same applies to your water. Always check your water report, and if you have private well water, it’s on you to get it tested and make sure it’s safe.

I’ve spent much of my life standing next to rivers that people told me were “fine.”

Rivers where the water looked a little off, smelled a little wrong, and the officials kept saying, “don’t worry about it.” I know what it looks like when a community is being failed by the very systems built to protect it.

And right now, I want us all to take a good hard look at the Potomac River.

More than 200 million gallons of raw sewage poured into one of the most storied waterways in America after a section of the Potomac Interceptor collapsed in January.

It’s the largest spill in U.S. history. To attempt to visualize it, you’d have to picture 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools filled with untreated wastewater.

People in Cabin John, Maryland, are calling it the “Pooptomac” now, and I get it. Dark humor is how you cope when your government lets you down.

I want to shine a light on what’s really been lost here, because this crisis isn’t a punchline. It’s a catastrophe unfolding in slow motion, and the American people deserve better.

George Washington could have built his home anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard. He chose the Potomac River, forever identifying it as the Nation’s River. It has earned that name in every generation since.

This river—all 380 miles of it, running from the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia through the hills of Virginia and Maryland, draining a watershed of nearly 15,000 square miles—feeds the Chesapeake Bay, the most important estuary on the East Coast.

It provides 90 percent of the drinking water to the Washington, D.C. metro area. Four million people a year come to its banks just to be near it. Olympic paddlers train on it. Families tube down it on hot summer afternoons. Fly fishermen. Kayakers. Wildlife watchers. This river is not just beautiful; it’s alive, and it’s essential.

David Hearn, an Olympic canoeist who has paddled these waters for almost 60 years, told the media he is “heartbroken” over what happened. That word broke something open in me as well. It’s not just one man’s loss. A whole community’s soul has been washed away in filth.

This contamination didn’t have to happen, and most times it doesn’t. The Potomac has been fighting for its life for decades.

President Lyndon Johnson stood on its banks in 1965 and called it “a national disgrace” because of the pollution choking it. He was right. Wetlands bulldozed. Algae blooms. Trash. The river that carries the weight of this nation’s history was being treated like a dump.

Then the Clean Water Act of 1972 came along, and slowly—painfully, imperfectly slowly—the Potomac started to breathe again. Bass came back. Shad returned. White perch too. The Potomac Conservancy started giving it better marks. It was working.

And now a 60-year-old pipe that collapsed, because nobody replaced it, and millions of gallons of human waste are flowing through what was supposed to be a crown jewel of wilderness. Researchers are already finding E. coli. Staph bacteria. The kind of pathogens that don’t care what party you vote for. They just make you sick.

I’ve heard the official reassurances. I’ve heard “no new sewer overflow has gone into the river since January 29.” But I’ve also heard residents say the smell still wafts into their homes. I’ve heard them say they won’t let their dogs or their kids near the water. And I’ve heard a community leader say that hope “has dimmed a little bit.”

I know what it sounds like when people have been told to wait long enough that they’ve stopped believing things will change.

The real repairs to the collapsed pipe can’t even begin yet. The rocks blocking the line have to be removed one by one. The bypass system has to be strengthened first. This is going to take months. Months, while fecal bacteria seeps into the ecosystem. While underwater grasses, already slow to recover from decades of damage, absorb the blow.

What are we doing about it politically? Fighting over who to blame. The president is pointing fingers at Democrats. The governor’s office is firing back. Meanwhile, the people of Cabin John just want to be able to walk their dogs by the river again.

I’ve been called a troublemaker. I’ve been told I don’t understand science, don’t understand law, don’t understand how these things work. But I understand that when a community stands next to a river full of sewage and the people in charge are holding a press conference instead of a wrench, something has gone very wrong.

The Potomac doesn’t belong to any politician. It doesn’t belong to any utility authority. It belongs to the millions of people who visit its banks every year. It belongs to the millions of others downstream whose drinking water flows through it. It belongs to the shad and the bass and the white perch who spent 50 years coming back from the brink. It belongs to every child who has ever dangled their feet in its current.

President Clinton recognized the Potomac as an American Heritage River in 1998. Heritage. That means it belongs to the future too. To our kids. To their kids.

I’m asking you not to let this moment pass. Don’t let them spin it or bury it or wait until the cameras move on.

Make The Ask

Ask who was responsible for maintaining that pipeline. Ask why a 60-year-old pipe was carrying an ever-increasing load with no long-term plan. Ask why a community is being told to wait, again, while their river suffers.

Demand that the rehabilitation of that pipeline, all 2,700 linear feet of it, is done right and done with urgency. Demand a real long-term plan for aging infrastructure before the next collapse, because there will be one.

The Potomac has survived coal country runoff. It has survived nitrogen and phosphorus loading from farms. It survived being called a national disgrace and came back from it. It is resilient. But resilience has limits.

They nicknamed it the “Pooptomac,” but this river was named after a people who lived along its banks for centuries before anyone built a nation around it. It deserves better than 200 million gallons of waste and a political argument.

It deserves what every river in this country deserves. It needs to be treated like it matters. Because it does. Because you depend on it, whether you know it or not.

And I, for one, am not going to let anyone forget that.

Rivers Aren’t Just Scenery…

Let me tell you something that gets lost in the political noise every single time something like this happens. Rivers aren’t just scenery. They aren’t just recreational assets or tourist attractions or pretty backdrops for real estate listings.

Rivers are the original infrastructure—the one that every other system we’ve built depends on, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Right now, about 70 percent of all the freshwater used in the United States comes from surface water such as rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. More communities in the U.S. get their tap water from surface water systems than from groundwater.

Think about that the next time you turn on your tap to fill a glass, brush your teeth, or boil water for your kids’ pasta. That water might have come from a river. And if that river is compromised—by sewage, by runoff, by neglect—the treatment systems downstream are working that much harder, and the margin for error gets that much thinner.

We’ve been lulled into a false sense of security by the miracle of modern water treatment. We trust that the water coming out of the faucet is safe.

But treatment plants aren’t magic. They are designed to handle a certain load, a certain type of contamination. Dump 200 million gallons of raw sewage into a watershed, introduce E. coli and staph bacteria at scale, and you’re stress-testing a system that was never meant to absorb that kind of shock.

The people of Flint, Michigan, know what happens when water infrastructure fails, and officials look the other way. The people who worked and lived at Camp Lejeune know. The people of Hinkley, California, know. Ask the people of Jackson, Mississippi, too.

Beyond drinking water, rivers hold communities together in ways that are harder to measure and just as real. A healthy river is an economic engine thanks to all the fishing guides, the outfitters, the riverside restaurants, the marinas, and hotels.

In the Potomac basin alone, recreational water use generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually. When a river gets sick, those livelihoods get sick too. When parents won’t let their kids swim, when anglers can’t eat what they catch, when paddlers stay off the water, the damage ripples out far beyond the riverbank.

Something that’s even harder to put a dollar figure on is how rivers give people a reason to show up for where they live. They create belonging. They are where families spend Sunday afternoons ,and where kids learn that the natural world is something worth protecting.

When a river is poisoned, something in the community’s sense of itself gets poisoned too.

That’s why we can’t treat this incident as an isolated infrastructure failure and move on. Every river in this country is downstream of every decision we make whether that’s about development, about funding, or what we’re willing to demand from the people who manage our public systems.

The Potomac is telling us something right now. It’s telling us that aging pipes and political finger-pointing are no match for the basic needs of millions of people who depend on clean water to live.

It’s telling us that the progress we’ve made since 1972 is real but fragile. It’s telling us that rivers remember everything we do to them, and so do the communities that love them.

We must LISTEN.

The Potomac Conservancy is calling on DC Water to:

Immediate & Short-Term Actions:
Provide transparent, ongoing updates regarding the volume of sewage released, the duration of the spill, and the effectiveness of the containment measures.

Investigation & Accountability:
Identify other known or potential weak points within the system and provide a clear, swift timeline and plan for addressing them.

Restoration, Mitigation, & Long-Term Prevention:
Commit to comprehensive environmental mitigation and restoration efforts to address ecological harm to the C&O Canal and Potomac River, both in the immediate aftermath and over the long term.

You can learn more here.

Keep the conversation going in the comments below. What does your local river mean to you?

Before we get into the “meat” of today’s story, I want to address two other oil spills that occurred in the last month, in addition to our last story:

Newport News, Virginia. More than 7,700 gallons of jet fuel spilled into the James River last Friday near Newport News Shipbuilding during a transfer to an aircraft carrier.

The spill happened around 1 p.m. on February 13, and as you can see from the news story below, over the weekend, residents started to smell it.

The city of Newport News confirmed in a statement Sunday evening that the cause of the spill was under investigation and that nearby residents may smell the odor.

“Out of an abundance of caution, residents and boaters are advised to avoid areas of the river where fuel sheen is visible or where odors are especially strong,” the statement advised. “Individuals who experience persistent symptoms are encouraged to seek medical guidance.”

SMH. 🤦‍♀️

Local drinking water remains safe, according to the Virginia Department of Health.

Wayne, West Virginia. About 2,400 homes were without water service for 3 WEEKS because of alleged vandalism at a substation that led to the leak of nearly 5,000 gallons of oil into Twelvepole Creek, which runs through Wayne before draining into the Ohio River.

Wayne water customers were under a Do Not Consume order from January 16 to February 6. Hydrocarbons were found in the Wayne water system, according to the state Department of Health.

A class action lawsuit claims the town knew its water system was vulnerable to contamination because of the substation location. The plaintiffs say the town’s water system has been subject to failures, leaks, breaks and maintenance conditions that hat could delay or complicate mitigation and restoration of water service following contamination.

The Fight For Who Should Pay For Increasing Insurance Premiums

Let me tell you something I’ve learned after decades of fighting corporate giants who think they can poison our communities and walk away clean: they always know. And they always count on us being too tired, too broke, or too scared to fight back.

Well, guess what? We’re not backing down anymore.

Right now, families in California, Hawaii, and New York are getting crushed by skyrocketing insurance premiums. Not because they did anything wrong. Not because they’re bad at managing their money. But because the fossil fuel industry has spent the last 50 years turning our planet into a tinderbox while lying about it every step of the way.

And who’s paying the price? You are. The single mom in Altadena who lost everything in the Eaton fire. The condo owner in Maui watching their premiums shoot up 50% in a single year. The Brooklyn family whose insurance just doubled in three years. Meanwhile, ExxonMobil posted more than $28 billion in profits last year.

It’s sick.

That’s why lawmakers in California, Hawaii and New York have introduced measures to authorize their attorneys general to sue fossil fuel companies on behalf of residents whose insurance premiums have soared amid climate disasters.

They Knew What They Were Doing

These oil companies knew exactly what they were doing. Internal documents show they understood the climate crisis they were creating back in the 1970s. Their own scientists warned them that burning fossil fuels would warm the planet and cause exactly the kind of catastrophic weather we’re seeing now.

And what did they do with that information? They buried it. They launched massive PR campaigns to sow doubt. They spent billions convincing the public that climate change was a hoax while they quietly prepared their own facilities for rising seas and extreme weather.

Every time I talk about climate and weather in this newsletter, I get a barrage of folks telling me I’ve been “compromised” and that climate change is a “not real.” Kids, follow the money!

What incentive do I have to talk about these insane, worsening weather events and what incentive does Big Oil have to bury this critical information?

They protected themselves and left the rest of us to drown, sometimes literally.

Insurance companies are fleeing California so fast it makes your head spin. In less than ten years, reliance on California’s Fair plan, the insurance of last resort, has grown 500%.

Five. Hundred. Percent.

That’s what happens when private insurers decide covering climate disasters isn’t profitable enough and just abandon people.

“They just packed up and left,” Hawaii State Senator Jarrett told The Guardian. He’s talking about insurers fleeing Hawaii after the devastating 2023 Maui fires caused more than $2.3 billion in claims.

But he could just as easily be talking about how fossil fuel companies have abandoned any sense of responsibility for the crisis they created.

The Real Refugees

Rasheed Ali stood at a press conference in California earlier this month and said something that should shake every one of us, “We became refugees overnight.”

This is America. And we’re creating climate refugees in our own country.

Rasheed had insurance. He did everything right. But his decades-old policy never got adjusted to reflect his home’s real value. So when the Eaton fire took everything, insurance didn’t come close to covering it. There’s a “massive financial gap” his family is struggling to fill, a gap that shouldn’t exist. That gap was created by an industry that knew this was coming and did it anyway.

You know what the American Petroleum Institute (API) had to say about bills that would hold their member companies accountable? They called it a “coordinated campaign against an industry that powers everyday life.”

Are you kidding me?!?

You know what else powers everyday life? Having a roof over your head that doesn’t burn down in climate-fueled wildfires. Having insurance you can actually afford.

California housing prices are already outrageous, and now many families face challenges affording their home insurance due to rising premiums and limited options, especially in high-risk areas affected by wildfires.

It’s time to make polluters pay for the mess they created—a mess they knew all about.

Here’s how it would work: These new state bills target fossil fuel companies worth at least $500 million that do business in those states. Money recovered in court would go directly to covering residents’ rising insurance rates. It would help fund the Fair plans that have become the only option for thousands of families after private insurers bailed. In California, funds could even help to fire-proof low- and middle-income homes.

In Hawaii and New York, the bills go even further, giving insurance companies themselves the legal right to sue the fossil fuel industry after a climate disaster. That’s important. Because when insurance companies have to pay out billions for climate-fueled disasters, they either raise everyone’s rates or they leave. Either way, regular people get screwed while oil companies count their profits.

The LA wildfires in January 2025 destroyed more than 18,000 homes and properties. The fires were named the most destructive in the modern history of the city of Los Angeles and estimated to be one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history.

California’s Fair plan expects to pay out $4 billion in losses. To cover that, they had to ask insurers for $1 billion, and half of those costs will likely be covered by jacking up rates.

Sierra Kos, who founded the disaster survivor network Extreme Weather Survivors, put it perfectly, “Survivors should not be the ones forced to carry the financial burden of disasters that fossil fuel companies knowingly helped create.”

The Usual Playbook

Of course, the oil industry is fighting back. They always do. It’s the same tired playbook.

We’re talking about an industry that made hundreds of billions in profits while creating an existential crisis. They can afford to pay their fair share. They just don’t want to.

The API’s spokesperson said these bills would set “a dangerous precedent of state overreach” by “retroactively penalizing companies for meeting consumer demand.”

Meeting consumer demand? They created the demand! They spent decades making sure we stayed dependent on fossil fuels, while hiding what it was doing to the planet. That’s not meeting demand. That’s manufacturing dependence while suppressing the truth.

“There’s going to be a lot of pushback. We know that the oil companies have tons and tons of money, and they are going to put a lot of pressure on our legislators and policymakers not to pass this legislation. So that means that we now have a big job to do. We have got to get out there. We’ve got to organize,” said Dolores Huerta, the legendary labor organizer who’s fought corporate power for longer than most of us have been alive, at a California press conference.

She’s right. This is going to be a fight. Big Oil doesn’t give up easy. They’ll spend millions lobbying against these bills. They’ll run ads. They’ll make threats. They’ll do whatever it takes to avoid accountability.

But here’s the thing they always forget: we’ve got something they don’t. We’ve got the truth on our side. We’ve got families who’ve lost everything. We’ve got communities that have been abandoned. We’ve got mountains of evidence that they knew exactly what they were doing.

And increasingly, we’ve got lawmakers who are fed up with watching their constituents get destroyed while oil executives give themselves bonuses.

State Senator Scott Wiener, who introduced California’s bill, said, “We know that the years ahead are going to be dramatically more dangerous, tragically, when it comes to climate disasters, and we can’t allow Californians, our residents, our small businesses, to be left holding the bag.”

He’s absolutely right.

Then EPA Made It Worse

Just as states are trying to hold polluters accountable, the EPA decided to throw gasoline on the fire.

Last week, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin stood in the White House Roosevelt Room and announced what he called “the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.” He eliminated the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and all federal emission standards for vehicles.

They’re calling it a win for taxpayers. They claim it’ll save Americans $1.3 trillion.

Let me tell you what it’s really going to cost us.

Zeldin called the Endangerment Finding the “Holy Grail of the climate change religion.”

Religion. As if the science of climate change is some kind of faith-based belief system instead of documented fact. As if the families losing their homes in wildfires or giant, once-in-a-lifetime storms and floods, are just making it up. As if insurance companies fleeing entire states is mass hysteria.

Here’s what the Trump EPA won’t tell you: eliminating vehicle emission standards doesn’t make climate disasters go away. It makes them worse.

When those disasters get worse, you know who pays? Not the EPA. Not Trump. Not the oil companies celebrating this decision.

You do! Through your insurance premiums. Through your tax dollars when disaster relief runs out. Through your home equity when your neighborhood becomes uninsurable.

The Real Math

The EPA claims they’re saving Americans more than a trillion dollars by eliminating vehicle emission standards. They say it’ll cut $2,400 off the cost of each new car.

But they’re not counting the other side of the ledger. They’re not counting what it costs when we make climate change worse instead of better.

California’s Fair plan is expecting to pay out $4 billion just from the January 2025 LA wildfires. The Maui fires caused $2.3 billion in claims. And those disasters are happening in a world where we HAD emission standards trying to slow climate change.

Now imagine what happens when we accelerate it instead.

Your insurance premium isn’t going to drop $2,400 because your neighbor bought a cheaper car. But it sure as hell is going to keep climbing when the wildfires get bigger, the hurricanes get stronger, and the floods get worse because we decided to pump even more carbon into the atmosphere.

The EPA claims that “even if the U.S. were to eliminate all GHG emissions from all vehicles, there would be no material impact on global climate indicators through 2100.”

Let’s review.

We’re ignoring that vehicle emissions are a major contributor to overall U.S. emissions, accounting for nearly 30% of our total greenhouse gas output.

Second, let’s get back to the classic polluter’s playbook: “Well, we’re just one country, so why bother?” as if that excuses making things worse.

Most importantly, it completely ignores that every bit of warming we prevent matters. Every tenth of a degree matters. Every wildfire we don’t have matters. Every home that doesn’t burn down matters.

Who Really Pays?

Here’s what’s going to happen now that the Trump administration has eliminated federal vehicle emission standards.

More carbon in the atmosphere means worse climate disasters. Worse climate disasters mean higher insurance payouts. Higher insurance payouts mean insurance companies either raise premiums or flee the state entirely. When they flee, residents are forced onto Fair plans funded by taxpayers.

The EPA says they’re “returning the American Dream” by making cars more affordable. But what good is saving $2,400 on a car if you lose your $300,000 home because it became uninsurable?

What good is a cheaper vehicle if you’re paying an extra $5,000 a year in insurance premiums? Or your property taxes go up because your state has to bail out the insurance system?

This is exactly the kind of short-term thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.

Administrator Zeldin also eliminated “off-cycle credits” including the start-stop feature he calls “almost universally despised.” Fine. I don’t care about the start-stop button.

But gutting emission standards entirely? That’s not about consumer choice. That’s about letting automakers pollute more while Americans pay the price through climate disasters.

The Timing Couldn’t Be Worse

Think about the timing here. States are introducing bills to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the insurance crisis their emissions created. And the Trump administration responds by... making it legal to emit even more?

It’s like watching someone’s house burn down, and instead of helping put out the fire, you show up with a can of gasoline.

A few states are trying to recover costs from past climate damage, but the Trump EPA just guaranteed there will be a lot more damage in the future.

Because here’s the thing about climate change: it’s a multiplier. It makes everything worse. Worse air quality during heat waves. Worse flooding that spreads pollutants. Worse wildfires that fill the air with toxics. You can’t separate climate from public health. They tried to pretend you could, and people are dying because of it.

And It Gets Even Worse

You thought your insurance premiums were the only thing fossil fuels were destroying? Think again.

While we’re talking about holding Big Oil accountable for the insurance crisis, let’s not forget about the other ways they’re poisoning us. Fossil fuels aren’t just burning down our homes through climate disasters. They’re also contaminating the water we drink.

See the examples of spills we talked about at the beginning of this article.

Fossil fuels make up about 79% of total U.S. primary energy production. That’s a lot of drilling, a lot of mining, and a whole lot of opportunities to pollute our water supply.

Look at fracking, a process where they inject high-pressure chemical fluids into the ground to extract natural gas. Those chemicals don’t just stay put. They leach into aquifers. They contaminate groundwater. A study found that in areas with shale gas development, there’s 17 times more methane in the drinking water.

The EPA has identified more than 1,000 contaminated sites related to coal ash in the U.S. alone. Coal ash ponds, which contain arsenic, mercury, lead, and other heavy metals, leak into rivers and streams. They seep into groundwater. They poison wells. Communities living near these sites have elevated cancer rates, but the coal companies keep operating because cleaning up their mess would cut into their profits.

And oil spills? Don’t even get me started. The Exxon Valdez disaster released millions of gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989. That was 35 years ago, and they’re still finding contaminated areas. Marine ecosystems destroyed. Fishing industries devastated. Water that was clean for thousands of years, ruined in a matter of hours.

But big spills like that make headlines. You know what doesn’t? The everyday contamination. The pipeline leaks. The storage tank ruptures. The runoff from mountaintop removal mining that’s laden with heavy metals and toxins. All of it flowing into streams, into rivers, into the water supply.

And don’t forget industrial runoff discharges heavy metals, hydrocarbons, and toxins directly into waterways.

As many as 1 in 10 American deaths today are caused by air pollution from fossil fuels, according to Bloomberg. But water pollution from the same industry? That’s harder to track, harder to prove, and a lot easier for companies to deny. Which is exactly why they keep doing it.

Gasoline and oil spills from vehicles seep into soil and eventually make their way into water supplies. Small spills seem insignificant, but they add up. Across millions of vehicles, across decades, it’s massive contamination that we’ve just normalized.

So when we talk about holding fossil fuel companies accountable, we’re not just talking about insurance premiums. We’re talking about the air our kids breathe. The water they drink. The food they eat. The planet they’re going to inherit.

The fossil fuel industry has been poisoning us for decades, and they’ve known about it the whole time. They studied it. They documented it. And then they buried the evidence and kept drilling.

States Are On Their Own

The EPA’s latest action sends a clear message to states: you’re on your own.

The federal government isn’t going to help slow climate change. It isn’t going to help make cars cleaner. It isn’t going to help prevent the disasters that are bankrupting your insurance markets.

Good luck with that insurance crisis! We’re too busy eliminating “climate change religion” to care that your residents are losing their homes.

This is exactly why the bills in California, Hawaii, and New York are so critical right now. With the federal government actively making things worse, states have to take matters into their own hands. They have to hold polluters accountable because the EPA sure isn’t going to do it.

These three bills are part of something bigger. Seventy state and local governments across the US have already sued Big Oil for deceiving the public about the climate crisis. Vermont and New York passed “climate superfund” bills requiring the largest oil companies to help pay for climate adaptation.

Now, with the federal government abandoning any pretense of addressing climate change, these state-level actions aren’t just important, they’re essential.

The walls are closing in.

For decades, fossil fuel companies privatized the profits and socialized the losses. They made money hand over fist while the costs of their business model--the fires, the floods, the hurricanes, the uninsurable homes—got dumped on regular people.

That’s not capitalism. That’s not free market economics. That’s theft.

They stole our climate stability. They stole our sense of security. And they’re trying to steal our ability to hold them accountable.

What You Can Do

If you live in California, Hawaii, or New York, call your state legislators. Tell them you support these bills. Tell them about your insurance premiums. Tell them you’re tired of paying for a crisis you didn’t create.

If you live anywhere else, demand similar legislation in your state. Because this isn’t just a California or Hawaii or New York problem. Insurance premiums are rising everywhere. Climate disasters are hitting everywhere. And fossil fuel companies are profiting everywhere.

Get loud. Get organized. Get involved.

The oil industry is counting on us being too overwhelmed to fight back. They’re counting on us accepting that skyrocketing insurance premiums are just the “new normal.”

But I’ve learned something fighting corporate polluters for the last thirty years. They can only get away with what we let them get away with. The moment we stand up, the moment we organize, the moment we demand accountability, that’s when things start to change.

The Bottom Line

The EPA claims they’re saving you money by making cars cheaper. But they’re costing you a fortune in insurance premiums, disaster recovery, climate damage, water treatment, healthcare costs from pollution-related illnesses, and environmental cleanup. They’re just hiding those costs and pretending they don’t exist.

That’s the polluter’s playbook, and it’s worked for decades. But not anymore.

The fossil fuel industry needs to pay. Not with meaningless PR campaigns about how green they’re becoming. Not with token investments in renewable energy while they keep drilling and keep poisoning our water. With actual money. Money that goes to the people whose lives they’ve destroyed. Money that helps communities adapt to the crisis they created. Money that fire-proofs homes and funds insurance programs and rebuilds what their business model burned down. Money that cleans up contaminated water and treats the illnesses their pollution caused.

Senator Keohokalole said something that really resonated with me, “Without a doubt, the increasing incidence of really devastating natural disaster events is what’s driving the insurance crisis. Whose fault is that? We know.”

We have the receipts. We have the science. We have the truth.

And more importantly, we have each other. We have survivors who are willing to stand up and tell their stories. We have lawmakers who are willing to take on Big Oil and Big Energy. We have organizers who know how to build movements.

The insurance crisis isn’t just about premiums. It’s about power. It’s about who gets to profit from destroying the planet and poisoning our water and who gets stuck with the bill. It’s about whether we’re going to let corporations get away with knowingly creating multiple crises and then walking away clean.

I’ve spent my life fighting for communities that powerful corporations thought they could ignore. Communities whose water was poisoned. Communities whose children got sick. Communities who were told their health problems were their own fault, not the fault of the companies dumping toxins in their backyard.

And I can tell you this: they always think they’re going to win. Right up until they don’t.

Additional Resources

How ‘Big Oil’ works the system and keeps winning

Oil & Gas Action Network

Center for Climate Integrity

350.org

Fossil Fuel Industry’s Influence on Public Opinion, Policy, and Media Narratives

Fossil fuel companies’ climate communication strategies: Industry messaging on renewables and natural gas

Networks of climate obstruction: Discourses of denial and delay in US fossil energy, plastic, and agrichemical industries

U.S. Senate Committee On The Budget

Let’s keep the conversation rolling in the comments below!

Last week, while most people in Griffin, Georgia, were getting ready for work, pouring coffee, and brushing their teeth—someone at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport had a little problem.

A fuel spill. How much fuel? They would’t say for days.

[Earlier today, the EPA said it was 10,000 gallons.]

Why did it happen? They can’t tell you that either.

But here’s what I can tell you: more than 20,000 people in Griffin were suddenly told not to drink their tap water. Not even if they boiled it. Do NOT Drink.

Think about that for a moment. You turn on your faucet, the same faucet you’ve used your whole life, and suddenly the water that comes out might poison you.

This Isn’t the First Time (And That’s the Problem)

This incident isn’t some freak accident. The Flint River’s headwaters start right near the airport. Actually, let me be more specific—they’re under the airport, hidden in pipes beneath one of the world’s busiest airfields. Jet fuel and sewage from Hartsfield-Jackson have “repeatedly” contaminated these headwaters, according to reports.

Repeatedly.

That’s not the word you use for an accident. That’s the word you use for a pattern. That’s the word you use when nobody’s been held accountable.

The spill is still being quietly cleaned up. But news reports continue to point out the visible sheen of petroleum contamination can still be seen on the Flint River.

Gordon Rogers, the Flint Riverkeeper, told CBS News that both airport and Atlanta city officials have been unusually tight-lipped about the spill.

“The longer this goes, the more concerned we are about the magnitude of it,” he said. “We don’t know its duration and we don’t know its volume.”

The “do not consume” advisory in Griffin has been lifted but questions remain.

The Timeline of a Cover-Your-Ass Operation

Let’s walk through Friday’s events, because the timeline tells you everything you need to know about priorities:

8:30 a.m. - County fire officials notice something’s wrong

11:00 a.m. - Emergency management finally gets looped in (two and a half hours later)

Sometime after that - Griffin’s 20,000+ residents get told their tap water might poison them

Meanwhile, airport spokesperson Alnissa Ruiz-Craig said, that cleanup and mitigation were underway. That’s corporate-speak for “we’re really hoping this blows over quickly.”

Who Pays the Price?

Griffin shut down their water intakes from the Flint River. They scrambled to pull water from a Pike County reservoir instead. They opened fire hydrants to flush their entire system. They’re running tests to see if the water is safe.

All of this costs money. Money that comes from a city budget, which means it comes from taxpayers. The same taxpayers who can’t drink their water. The same taxpayers who have to buy bottled water for drinking, cooking, brushing teeth—all the things we take for granted every single day.

And who’s footing the bill for the airport’s “cleanup and mitigation”? I’d love to know.

The River Keeps Flowing

Here’s the kicker: the Flint River doesn’t stop at Griffin. It flows southwest, becomes one of Georgia’s major rivers, and eventually merges into the Apalachicola River in Florida.

How many more communities downstream are at risk? How far does this contamination spread?

When you dump jet fuel into a river system, you don’t just poison the water at the spill site. You send a toxic wave downstream to every town, every family, every kid who plays in that water.

What “Repeatedly” Really Means

Let’s go back to that word: “repeatedly.”

When something happens repeatedly, it means:

• Someone knew it could happen

• Someone didn’t fix it

• Someone decided the risk was acceptable

• Someone was wrong

The Flint River’s headwaters are buried under the airport. This isn’t a design that happened by accident—someone built it that way. And when you put critical water sources under an operation that uses jet fuel and generates sewage, you better have a failsafe. You better have a system so airtight that contamination is impossible.

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is one of the busiest airports in the world. They have the resources to fix this mess. They have the engineering expertise. They have the money.

What they apparently don’t have is the will to fix this.

The Questions Nobody’s Answering

Since the airport can’t (or won’t) tell us how much fuel spilled or why it happened, let me ask the questions they should be answering:

1. What systemic failures allowed this to keep happening?

2. What’s the total environmental cost of this spill and all the previous ones?

3. What communities downstream have been exposed to contamination over the years?

4. What are you doing—RIGHT NOW—to make sure this never happens again?

This Is About Trust

When you tell 20,000 people they can’t drink their tap water, you’re not just creating an inconvenience. You’re breaking a fundamental social contract.

We pay our water bills. We pay our taxes. We trust that when we turn on the tap, what comes out won’t hurt us. That trust is sacred. And once it’s broken, it’s almost impossible to rebuild.

Ask the people of Flint, Michigan. They’ll tell you.

What Happens Next

Griffin is testing their water. The airport says cleanup is underway. Officials are monitoring the situation.

But let me clear monitoring isn’t preventing. Testing isn’t protecting. And “underway” isn’t the same as “completed and will never happen again.”

The people who live nearby this spill deserve answers. They deserve accountability. They deserve a guarantee that their tap water will never again carry jet fuel from an airport that can’t even tell them how much spilled or why.

And every community downstream on the Flint and Apalachicola rivers deserves the same.

We’ve Seen This Movie Before: The Red Hill Disaster Should Have Been Atlanta’s Wake-Up Call

If you think what happened in Atlanta is an isolated incident, let me tell you about Hawaii.

In November 2021, the U.S. Navy’s Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility in Hawaii leaked jet fuel into the drinking water system serving thousands of military families and Oahu residents. Nearly 20,000 gallons of JP-5 jet fuel spilled when a cart hit and cracked a fire suppression pipe—a pipe that had been holding fuel from an earlier leak that same year.

Sound familiar? It should.

The parallels between Red Hill and Atlanta:

1. “Repeatedly” is the operative word

Just like Hartsfield-Jackson has “repeatedly” contaminated the Flint River, the Navy’s records show at least 72 documented fuel releases from Red Hill its 80-year history. That’s more than 180,000 gallons of fuel released into Hawaii’s groundwater. The Navy has accepted 58 of those claims as legitimate spills.

Seventy-two releases. Let that sink in.

And just like Atlanta, officials kept assuring everyone it was fine. In 2014, after a 27,000-gallon spill at Red Hill, Navy officials looked concerned citizens in the eye and said, “We drink from the same aquifer as everyone, we would never poison our own people.”

Then in 2021, thousands of people got poisoned anyway.

2. The warnings were ignored

As far back as 2017, the EPA warned that Red Hill posed a “significant environmental threat” to Oahu’s groundwater. In 2019, the Navy’s own risk analysis found a 27.6% chance of a fuel release between 1,000 and 30,000 gallons.

They knew. Just like someone at Hartsfield-Jackson had to know that burying the Flint River’s headwaters under an active airport was a disaster waiting to happen.

In both cases, warnings were issued. In both cases, nothing changed. In both cases, people paid the price.

3. Critical water sources put at risk by design

Red Hill’s 20 massive underground fuel tanks—each 250 feet tall, capable of holding 12.5 million gallons—were built directly above Oahu’s aquifer. The Flint River’s headwaters run in pipes underneath Hartsfield-Jackson’s runways.

In both cases, someone made a conscious decision to put vital water sources in harm’s way. And in both cases, when the inevitable happened, thousands of people suddenly couldn’t drink their tap water.

4. The same health nightmare?

In Hawaii, families reported the same terrifying symptoms we should be watching for in Georgia: neurological issues, skin problems, respiratory distress.

Mai Hall, a Native Hawaiian military spouse, described putting tape over her faucets because she couldn’t believe the water—water that had been there for centuries—was poisoned.

“We were all fighting over water,” she said. “The system has failed us.”

5. The victims are still suffering

Here’s the part that should terrify all of us: As of April 2024—more than two years after the 2021 spill—Red Hill victims are still in court seeking compensation. Many are still dealing with health impacts. Children are still sick.

The DOJ admitted the U.S. “does not dispute” the spill “caused a nuisance” and that the government “breached its duty of care.” But admission isn’t the same as accountability. Admission doesn’t make sick kids healthy again.

6. It takes a catastrophe to force action

Despite 72 documented releases, despite EPA warnings, despite a 2014 spill of 27,000 gallons, it wasn’t until the 2021 disaster that officials finally ordered the permanent closure of Red Hill.

Seventy-two times wasn’t enough. It took thousands of sick people—including military families who were supposed to be protected—before anyone with power said “enough.”

How many spills will it take at Hartsfield-Jackson? How many communities like Griffin have to be told their tap water is poison before someone shuts this down permanently?

7. The cover-up is standard operating procedure

After the 2014 Red Hill spill, the Navy didn’t verbally notify the EPA for three days. Written notification took 10 days. In 2012, Navy facilities were fined $80,000 for disposing of hazardous waste in the trash and storing hazardous materials in open containers.

In Atlanta, airport officials can’t (or won’t) tell us how much fuel spilled or why. The pattern is identical: when something goes wrong, minimize, delay, and hope it blows over.

If we don’t learn from Red Hill & Atlanta, here’s what we can expect:

• More spills (because “repeatedly” means it’s not going to stop on its own)

• More communities affected (because rivers flow and contamination spreads)

• More sick people (because the health effects are real and long-lasting)

• More legal battles (because getting accountability and compensation takes years)

• More excuses (because powerful institutions protect themselves, not people)

Since April 2024, most of the 104 million gallons of fuel in Hawaii have been removed, but cleanup will take years. There’s still an estimated 28,000 gallons of sludge in 14 tanks and 4,000 gallons of residual fuel in nearly 10 miles of pipelines.

That’s what “cleanup” looks like: years of work, millions of dollars, and a community that will never fully trust their water again.

The question we should be asking:

Here’s what I want to know: How many Red Hills do we need before we stop putting critical water sources under facilities that handle millions of gallons of toxic fuel?

Atlanta has already had multiple contamination events that we know about.

Are we really going to wait for our own catastrophic spill—one that sickens thousands, contaminates the water for years, and requires decades of litigation—before we decide that “repeatedly” is too many times?

Because that’s the choice we’re making right now. We can learn from Hawaii’s nightmare, or we can wait to live through our own.

I know which one I’d choose.

What You Need to Know About Jet Fuel Spills

Before we talk about what to do, let’s talk about what you’re actually dealing with when jet fuel spills into your water. Because “fuel spill” sounds abstract. What’s really happening is a lot more specific—and a lot scarier.

What’s actually in jet fuel?

Jet fuel isn’t just one chemical. It’s a complex cocktail of hundreds of different hydrocarbons. The specific types used at commercial airports like Hartsfield-Jackson include JP-5, JP-8, and Jet A. These fuels contain dangerous components you might have heard of:

Benzene - A known human carcinogen that causes leukemia

Toluene - Damages your nervous system, liver, and kidneys

Ethylbenzene - A possible human carcinogen

Xylene - Affects your nervous system, heart, liver, and kidneys

These four chemicals are often grouped together and called BTEX. When they contaminate drinking water, health effects include dizziness, headache, nausea and vomiting, fatigue, blurred vision, loss of muscle coordination, and irregular heart rate. That’s just from short-term exposure. Long-term exposure is worse.

What happens when jet fuel hits water?

When jet fuel spills into a river or stream, several things happen fast:

1. It spreads quickly - Jet fuel spreads very quickly to a thin film on water, covering massive areas almost instantly.

2. Some of it evaporates - The volatile components evaporate from spills to open water, which sounds good until you realize people downstream might be breathing those fumes.

3. Some of it dissolves - The chemicals that don’t evaporate can dissolve in water. These dissolved chemicals are what contaminate drinking water supplies.

4. The rest sinks or sticks - The chemicals that bind to sediment may settle to the bottom of the water and stay there for a long time. This creates long-term contamination even after the visible fuel is gone.

5. It kills wildlife - Fish and invertebrates in small streams can be affected for miles downstream of a jet fuel release into the water.

What about when it soaks into soil?

This is where it gets really nasty. When jet fuel spills onto soil—like, say, under an airport—it seeps into the ground, contaminating local soil and aquifers. And according to environmental engineers, that type of contamination can be very difficult to remediate and can create water quality problems for years for local communities relying on well water.

Some of the components evaporate. But many don’t. Components that do not break down easily and components that stick to soil particles may stay in the soil for a long time. We’re talking months to years, especially if the fuel has penetrated deep into the soil where there’s less oxygen to help break it down.

Health impacts you should know about

The research on jet fuel exposure is extensive, and most of it comes from studying military personnel and airport workers who handle these fuels regularly. Here’s what we know:

Short-term exposure can cause:

• Skin, eye, nose, and throat irritation

• Respiratory problems (especially for people with asthma)

• Neurological effects like dizziness and headaches

• Liver and kidney damage at high doses

Long-term exposure is associated with:

• Liver dysfunction, emotional dysfunction, abnormal electroencephalograms, shortened attention spans, and decreased sensorimotor speed

• Nervous system damage

• Damage to the liver, immune system, and the skin

• Potential cancer risk (especially from benzene)

• Reproductive effects

You can learn more here and here.

Very little data exists on the toxicity of kerosene-based jet fuels in humans. Most studies focused on workers, not on communities drinking contaminated water. So when someone tells you the water is “probably safe,” understand that we don’t actually have great data on what happens when regular people—kids, pregnant women, elderly folks—drink water contaminated with jet fuel.

The BTEX problem

Remember those four chemicals—benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene? They’re particularly nasty because:

1. They dissolve in water easily - Unlike some petroleum products that just float on top, BTEX chemicals actually dissolve, making them harder to see and remove.

2. They affect multiple body systems - BTEX exposure impacts the respiratory, cardiovascular, digestive, urinary, hematologic, hematopoietic, immune, reproductive, and nervous systems.

3. Benzene causes cancer - Not “might cause” or “possibly causes.” Benzene is a known human carcinogen that causes leukemia. There is no safe level of benzene exposure.

4. The effects add up - When you’re exposed to a mixture of these chemicals (which is what happens in a fuel spill), the effects are generally additive. They make each other worse.

Why “repeated” contamination is a disaster

The fact that Hartsfield-Jackson has “repeatedly” contaminated the Flint River headwaters means this isn’t a one-time exposure event. Repeated contamination means:

• The soil and groundwater have had multiple chances to absorb these chemicals.

• Cleanup between spills was probably incomplete.

• There’s likely cumulative contamination that hasn’t been fully assessed.

• Communities downstream have been exposed multiple times without knowing it.

Bottom line on health risks

If you’ve been drinking water potentially contaminated with jet fuel:

• Document any health symptoms, especially neurological ones (headaches, dizziness, memory problems, attention issues).

• Tell your doctor about the exposure.

• Keep records for potential future health claims.

• Don’t assume that because you feel fine now, there won’t be long-term effects.

The research on chronic, low-level exposure to jet fuel through drinking water is limited. We’re essentially in uncharted territory and that’s not reassuring.

What You Can Actually

Look, I didn’t write all this just to make you mad. I wrote it to make you move. Here’s how you fight back:

If you live near a spill or in downstream communities:

1. Document everything. Take photos of bottled water receipts. Keep records of every expense related to this contamination. Screenshot official warnings. Save news articles. You might need this evidence later for class action lawsuits or compensation claims.

2. Get your water tested independently. Don’t just trust official testing. Keep those results. Compare them over time.

3. Attend every city council meeting. Show up. Bring your water bills. Make them look you in the eye and explain why your tap water isn’t safe. Record these meetings if it’s legal in your state.

4. Form a community coalition. There’s power in numbers. Create a Facebook group, organize neighborhood meetings, collect stories from affected families. When you speak as a unified group of thousands, politicians listen.

For everyone who cares about clean water:

5. Contact your representatives—and be specific. Don’t just say “I’m concerned.” Demand:

• A full public accounting of every contamination incident at Hartsfield-Jackson

• Independent oversight of airport environmental compliance

• Mandatory infrastructure upgrades to prevent future spills

• Compensation for affected communities

• Criminal investigations if negligence is found

Find your Georgia state representatives at www.legis.ga.gov. Call them. Email them. Show up at their offices.

6. Support environmental watchdog groups. Organizations like the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper and Georgia River Network already monitor water quality. They have lawyers, scientists, and political connections. Support them financially if you can, or volunteer. They’re fighting this battle every day.

7. Follow the money at airport authority meetings. The airport is run by the City of Atlanta Department of Aviation. Their meetings are public. Attend them. Ask questions during public comment periods:

“What’s the total cost of environmental remediation from spills in the past decade?”

“Why hasn’t infrastructure been upgraded to prevent repeated contamination?”

“What personal accountability exists for officials who oversee this?”

8. Support affected businesses. Restaurants, coffee shops, any business that relies on water. Support them. They’re victims too, and they have economic leverage to push for change.

9. Educate yourself on environmental law. The Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act—these exist to protect you. Learn what they say. Learn when they’ve been violated. Knowledge is power, and legal knowledge is the kind of power that makes officials very nervous.

The long game:

14. Vote. Every official who oversees that airport, every legislator who could strengthen environmental protections, every judge who hears environmental cases—they’re all elected or appointed. Vote for people who treat clean water as a non-negotiable right, not a luxury.

15. Run for office yourself. Seriously. City council, county commission, state legislature—these positions are often won by a few hundred votes. If you’re fed up enough to read this whole essay, you’re fed up enough to do something about it.

The Bottom Line

This story is about clean water. Safe water. Water you can give your kids without wondering if it’s poisoned.

How many more spills will it take before someone in power decides that human health matters more than operational convenience?

This story isn’t over. Not by a long shot. Because the next spill is already waiting to happen—unless someone with power decides that “repeatedly” is a word that should never be used again.

When something happens repeatedly, it’s not an accident anymore. It’s a choice.

Got more questions or concerns? Keep the conversation going down below.

A story this week in Newsweek caught my eye. It highlights another map of the U.S. with all the drinking water violations.

See the map here.

It’s not the data that’s surprising it’s the fact that Afina, a company that sells filtered showerheads, just released the study. Sure, they want to sell more filters, but this kind of data should be available to all of us. It’s public health info.

The study reveals that West Virginia has the worst drinking water violations in the country. West Virginia scored zero out of 100 for water cleanliness, with nearly 29 violation points and more than 5 contaminants exceeding legal limits per 100 residents served.

Oklahoma, Alaska, and Pennsylvania weren’t far behind. And here’s the kicker: this isn’t news. A peer-reviewed scientific study published in Risk Analysis in 2025 already told us that Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Washington were water quality disaster zones. That study found eight of the ten worst counties for “water injustice” were in Mississippi.

So why did it take a company selling products to protect us from contaminated water to sound the alarm again? Where the hell is our government?

The Numbers Don’t Lie

At least two million Americans don’t have running water in their homes. Read that again. In 2026, in the wealthiest nation on Earth, two million people are living without indoor plumbing.

Another 30 million live in communities where water systems operate unsafely. That’s roughly one in ten Americans drinking water that violates federal safety standards.

The Afina study used EPA data to calculate violation points, where the most serious infractions involving deadly contaminants like coliform bacteria or nitrate get ten points, other violations get five, and reporting failures stack up year after year. West Virginia’s 28.80 violation points weren’t an anomaly.

The 2025 scientific study confirmed similar patterns, identifying hotspots where low-income communities and communities of color bear the brunt of water injustice.

These aren’t just statistics. These numbers show how U.S. children are drinking water laced with arsenic. Families are bathing in water contaminated with PFAS, the forever chemicals linked to cancer, thyroid disease, and developmental problems. Elderly residents on fixed incomes have to choose between buying bottled water and paying for medication.

The System Is Broken By Design

The Safe Drinking Water Act handed states the responsibility for monitoring and reporting water quality, but here’s what they didn’t give them: adequate funding, adequate staffing, or adequate oversight.

A 2011 Government Accountability Office report found that states had up to a 49 percent error rate in reporting violations. Nearly half. And that was more than a decade ago. The audit system the EPA used to catch these errors? Defunded in 2010.

Dr. Upmanu Lall, a professor of engineering at Columbia University, told reporters he’s been warning about this for years. He estimates that 40 to 50 percent of water quality violations aren’t even reported. Utility operators say they lack the money, the staff, and the technical capacity to implement proper controls. Meanwhile, federal investment in water infrastructure has been gutted for decades.

And it’s getting worse. The current administration sought to completely eliminate federal funding for State Revolving Funds in its 2026 budget proposal. These funds are the primary way states pay for water infrastructure improvements. Without them, the pipes will keep corroding, the treatment plants will keep failing, and the violations will keep piling up.

The 2025 scientific study didn’t mince words: it identified systematic “water injustice.” The communities hit hardest are overwhelmingly poor and overwhelmingly Black and Brown. Mississippi. Tribal lands. The U.S.-Mexico border.

These aren’t accidents of geography. These are the consequences of deliberate policy choices that prioritize profit over people and protect wealthy communities while abandoning vulnerable ones.

West Virginia, Oklahoma, Alaska, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Arizona. What do these states have in common? They serve large populations in small, rural, underfunded water systems.

As Dr. Lall explained, when you divide violations by smaller population sizes, the numbers explode. These communities can’t afford the infrastructure upgrades they need. They can’t hire enough qualified operators. They can’t fight back against the industries poisoning their water.

So they get left behind. And they get sick.

The Profit Motive Problem

Now, I’m not knocking Afina for doing this research. They used publicly available EPA data and highlighted a crisis that our government should have been screaming about from the rooftops.

Let’s be crystal clear about what’s happening here: a company that profits from selling filtration systems is highlighting the information gap for federal agencies.

Ramon van Meer, Afina’s CEO, said it himself, “This explains why we’re seeing growing demand for home filtration solutions as people take water quality into their own hands.”

And he’s right. People are taking it into their own hands because they have no other choice. Because their government has failed them.

The solution to poisoned public water should not be forcing every American household to buy private filters. That’s not a solution. That’s surrender. That’s accepting that clean water is a luxury product instead of a human right.

Dr. Natalie Exum, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at Johns Hopkins, raised valid methodological concerns about the Afina study, noting that violations can stem from many factors and that normalizing by population size might inflate scores for smaller systems. Fair enough.

But you know what her concerns don’t change? The fact that millions of Americans are drinking contaminated water. The methodology might be imperfect, but the crisis is undeniable.

What Needs to Happen Now

First, the EPA needs to do its damn job. Not the job a showerhead company is doing. The EPA’s job. That means comprehensive, transparent, real-time reporting of every water quality violation in every community in America.

No more relying on states with 49 percent error rates. No more letting 40 to 50 percent of violations go unreported.

Second, Congress needs to stop gutting water infrastructure funding and start treating this like the national emergency it is.

The State Revolving Funds need to be expanded, not eliminated. Every small, rural, underfunded water system needs technical assistance, training, and the resources to upgrade aging infrastructure and meet modern safety standards.

Third, we need enforceable consequences.

Dr. Phil Brown, director of the Social Science Environmental Health Research Institute at Northeastern University, told Newsweek that violations resolved through enforcement are less harmful than violations that linger. But too many violations do linger because there’s no meaningful penalty. Utilities need to know that poisoning their communities will cost them more than the price of fixing the problem.

This Is Personal

I’ve spent my life fighting for communities dealing with contaminated water. I’ve seen what it does to families. I’ve held the hands of mothers whose children are sick with cancer. I’ve watched entire towns abandoned by the corporations and governments that were supposed to protect them.

So when I see that a private company had to tell us what our own government won’t admit—that millions of Americans are drinking poisoned water—it doesn’t just make me angry. It breaks my heart.

Because this is fixable. We have the knowledge. We have the technology. We have the wealth. What we lack is the political will to treat clean water as what it is: a non-negotiable human right.

Clean water isn’t a partisan issue. It’s not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. It’s a U.S. problem that demands a solution that is bold, comprehensive, and just.

Our government needs to stop forcing private companies to do its job. Our communities need to stop being poisoned.

It’s that simple, and it’s that urgent.

The water doesn’t lie. And neither should we.

Keep the conversation going in the comments below!