[{"_1":2,"_88":-5,"_89":-5},"loaderData",{"_3":4,"_26":27},"root",{"_5":6,"_17":10,"_18":19,"_20":21,"_22":10,"_23":-5,"_24":-5,"_25":10},"user",{"_7":8,"_9":10,"_11":10,"_12":-5,"_13":-5,"_14":15,"_16":-5},"roles",[],"isAuthenticated",false,"isPremium","planName","subscriptionStatus","featureFlags",{},"insightsBudget","isDevelopmentHost","userPreferences",{},"recaptchaSiteKey","6LcvOJcUAAAAAHsB-gPGfGktcRlKpH7OTIU_dMTD","isImpersonating","impersonation","affiliateStatus","isFreedomPortal","routes/v2/article/layout",{"_28":29,"_30":31},"notFound",true,"relatedArticles",[32,76],{"_33":34,"_35":36,"_37":38,"_39":40,"_41":42,"_43":44,"_45":46,"_47":48,"_49":50,"_51":52,"_53":54,"_55":56,"_57":58,"_59":60,"_61":62,"_63":64,"_65":66,"_67":68,"_69":70,"_71":72,"_73":74,"_75":74},"mediaId",5978814,"mediaKeyId","5798225-221a94449e51e3207ddb7e6c09d26e77","parentId",5798225,"title","DES: Saint-Gobain demolition nearly complete; agency seeks soil-distribution work plan for consent-decree area","audioSeconds",1708,"startMs",3753000,"endMs",5461000,"viewUrl","/Search/View?dp=1&key=5798225-221a94449e51e3207ddb7e6c09d26e77&start=3753&end=5461","thumbnailUrl","https://assets.pipeline.soar.com/5798225-221a94449e51e3207ddb7e6c09d26e77/thumbnail_3753000.jpg","articleUrl","/articles/5978814/New-Hampshire/DES-Saint-Gobain-demolition-nearly-complete-agency-seeks-soil-distribution-work-plan-for-consent-decree-area","mediaUrl","https://secure.pipeline.soar.com/5978814-2aefdd00745fafef785d677af39f6a97/orig.mp4?Expires=1771174672&Signature=DjKQLmEGaxOt-QW1DGo5aiTQRdtYUMlVoiaswgwFrsUq2TDqCy1btzxuTVmRVfYTWaEWr2a8w4lhED0ydQb-nU2m3W9ZR8MlrhlYlCPU5KVuwidIpyUwYpK5O~dKiGPAIlLgQT9nq1caWx0w7tDafwYryE4eMWroQpyccYqiR9dgOSqNRtOLF53Xg4XkM976r~DBLY1FFSSLqNItO7J0dulQrA~9odZzMZaEo9b8NO25RhVbCPw4cpR4bwGNOwbLcpZn5DE1n~K8Wnq8m~MFhDXhqU6y6KpfhQghaWI-gTYxkWHP1ZKbFNzlf6kFsqb1wy3QRP2oz2mhVeI0RX8y3A__&Key-Pair-Id=KUT5TJCACFTXG","author","Environmental Service Department NH","date","2025-09-18T19:58:00Z","article","At the Sept. 12, 2025 meeting of the Legislative Study Commission on the Environmental Health Effects of PFAS, a DES representative reported that demolition of the former Saint-Gobain facility is nearly complete and that company-funded clean-water remedies have advanced but that soil management and long-term groundwater monitoring remain major unresolved issues.

\"The demolition of the former facility is nearly a 100% complete,\" the DES presenter said, and noted only a concrete slab remains while the company completes decommissioning work requiring railroad access. DES said Saint-Gobain is evaluating potential PFAS leaching from the remaining concrete using EPA leaching-test approaches and that results are expected in coming months.

DES summarized remedial and replacement-water work completed under the parties' consent decree and associated term-sheet attachments: contractors have installed approximately 748 point-of-entry treatment (POET) systems (707 of them considered officially complete), and dozens of municipal waterline connections have been completed in Merrimack, Bedford and other towns. DES said a recent report summarized installation efforts and system monitoring through March 31, 2025, and that bottled-water deliveries have been discontinued at properties where meters have been installed. The presenter said the company has sampled about 1,300 eligible properties under a revised groundwater monitoring work plan and expects to sample roughly 150–200 properties per month.

DES reported that 111 additional properties were identified as exceeding the state's ambient groundwater-quality standard (PFOA) during the revised sampling program and were offered bottled-water remedies under the consent decree. DES also said it had accepted a company work plan to sample previously unsampled areas at the edge of the consent-decree boundary (Bedford and Litchfield) and that Saint-Gobain intends to sample those properties twice before February 2026.

On soils, DES told commissioners it had asked Saint-Gobain in a Sept. 8 letter to submit a work plan (due Nov. 7, 2025) to evaluate PFAS distribution in soils within the consent-decree outer boundary and to develop guidelines for soil management practices. The agency said the scale of potential soil contamination presents unique management challenges because the area spans tens of square miles; DES staff said they want practical, protective approaches that avoid forcing every excavated yard of soil into a landfill.

Community members and commission members urged more timely and visible action. Maureen, a commission member and long-time local resident, pressed the parties on follow-up sampling in the epicenter area and said, \"We have a responsible party ... they haven't ... been held fully accountable for the environmental damage that they've done.\" Another commissioner warned that delays in resolving where contaminated soils can be managed could slow municipal infrastructure projects such as a planned bridge replacement in Merrimack.

DES also described ongoing regulatory and technical timelines: the state's ambient groundwater standard is currently 12 parts per trillion (ppt); federal drinking-water MCLs (proposed at 4 ppt for certain PFAS) are being phased in and will have separate implementation timelines for public water systems. DES staff said that once the federal MCL is adopted and the state ambient groundwater standard is adjusted, the consent-decree remedies could be enforced to the lower state standard.

DES said it will continue to review company submittals, requested a final demolition and decommissioning report from Saint-Gobain, and plans to share comments on the recent remedy-installation report. Commissioners asked DES for clarification on sampling counts and status reports; DES said it will provide updated numbers and meeting notes to the commission clerk.","mediaType","Video","parentTitle","September 2025: HB 737 Meeting","oneSentenceSummary","DES reported demolition at the former Saint-Gobain facility is nearly finished and that corporate contractors have installed dozens of home water remedies; DES requested a work plan to characterize PFAS distribution in soils within the consent-decree boundary and flagged wider soil-management challenges.","taxTitle","Environmental Service Department, State Government Agencies, Executive, New Hampshire","taxId",37496,"location","New Hampshire","headline","","shortSummary",{"_33":77,"_35":36,"_37":38,"_39":78,"_41":79,"_43":80,"_45":81,"_47":82,"_49":83,"_51":84,"_53":85,"_55":56,"_57":58,"_59":86,"_61":62,"_63":64,"_65":87,"_67":68,"_69":70,"_71":72,"_73":74,"_75":74},5978819,"Expert: PFAS testing in food and wildlife is feasible but costly, method-dependent",1685,66000,1751000,"/Search/View?dp=1&key=5798225-221a94449e51e3207ddb7e6c09d26e77&start=66&end=1751","https://assets.pipeline.soar.com/5798225-221a94449e51e3207ddb7e6c09d26e77/thumbnail_66000.jpg","/articles/5978819/New-Hampshire/Expert-PFAS-testing-in-food-and-wildlife-is-feasible-but-costly-method-dependent","https://secure.pipeline.soar.com/5978819-d18aaea3dbcc247458dc95230613c6d3/orig.mp4?Expires=1771174672&Signature=GSfjtpAyU9hqBSJqFxiLUKuqKsvyRuaApaLceFgRl-NitjQ9HYNZEeBQhfF2mN035HcCOI89EAEyjvVW4bDngLEAOGYgRsLviDqd6Oa86aXDp-gppqgG3CbaHvvWZKju6Cpsf9RZR42ayYwTpSVRPKVcEACL38Nbg9UjgIUIjQQTXR9JytBooEhDhOcBhWxJYztdnKnEpdu8-g3aToOLainX6G6-iH2mfoVj~E-yBhEAjakQtm7i33WI2kplCRwCHhO4V9rXhxRBIH7WtJvO8xg9xA9sX8I4ccN~80anYoYlpb3la5ARyNGYIbAOaBf0AXV~MmaFaN~9djNRlm3ciw__&Key-Pair-Id=KUT5TJCACFTXG","At the Sept. 12, 2025 meeting of the Legislative Study Commission on the Environmental Health Effects of PFAS, John Patelli, a Battelle Memorial Institute researcher and former toxicologist with the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services (DES), told commissioners that detecting PFAS in food and wildlife is technically possible but expensive and analytically complicated. \"We do have the methods to do it, but it's costly and resource intensive, and it really requires a lot of scrutiny,\" Patelli said.

Patelli told the commission that drinking-water standards (maximum contaminant levels, or MCLs) do not directly translate to food because intake assumptions differ; screening values for food are commonly in parts-per-billion rather than parts-per-trillion. That difference arises, he said, because people typically do not consume the mass equivalents that drinking-water risk calculations assume. He gave the example that converting a drinking-water intake to pounds of food would equate to eating roughly 18 chicken breasts a day.

The researcher described several practical constraints for food and wildlife surveillance: the small set of inter-laboratory-validated analytical methods for tissues and foods; frequent interferences in complex food matrices that can produce false positives on lower-resolution instruments; and high per-sample costs. Patelli said a baseline fish analysis costs roughly $300 per fish and that guidance-quality sampling commonly requires at least five fish per water body, making broad surveillance expensive. \"You start doing the math of how many water bodies or lakes you want to sample, you get into the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars very quickly to monitor and track for this, and that's just for fish,\" he said.

Patelli described local and regional research collaborations and data sources that commissioners could use for policy decisions: DES sampling and advisories on southern New Hampshire ponds; Dartmouth, Clarkson University and EPA Region 1 work on shellfish and invertebrates; U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) food-web studies; and forthcoming Battelle publications on finfish from the Gulf of Maine and expanded food-web sampling in lakes with existing advisories. He said New Hampshire likely produces only about 3% of the food its residents consume, noting that most food consumed in the state is produced elsewhere, which limits the reach of state-level product standards.

Commissioners and community members asked about recent state advisories and whether new sampling had been done. Patelli said Dartmouth had resampled several ponds (including Horseshoe Pond in Merrimack), that preliminary results were similar to earlier findings, and that the researchers were still completing QA/QC before sharing final data with DES. He also noted that some states are finding PFAS in fish even where no local industrial source is known.

On plants and crops, Patelli said uptake varies by compound, plant species and plant tissue: \"Short chains and carboxylic acids are more likely to be taken up than longer chains and sulfonic acids,\" and uptake patterns differ between protein-rich and water-rich crops. He cited Maine's ongoing research into biosolids and crop uptake as a regional resource.

Patelli offered options for legislative or programmatic focus: statewide lab contracting or bolstering in-state capacity; subsidized soil and water testing through extension services (UNH Extension was specifically mentioned in the commissioner's discussion); targeted sampling to support fish-consumption advisories; and source reduction through product bans to limit new inputs. He also warned that mandatory product or food testing without accompanying protections for producers could create litigation and market-access risk for farmers and small producers and thus discourage voluntary testing.

The presentation closed with a set of practical trade-offs for policymakers: choose where testing and funding yield the greatest public-health benefit, prefer surface-water screening where possible (to avoid costly tissue sampling), and invest first in validated methods and lab capacity before launching large surveillance programs.","A Battelle researcher told the Legislative Study Commission that PFAS testing in food and wildlife is technically possible but hampered by limited validated methods, high lab costs and complex exposure calculations; he urged targeted funding and careful choice of sampling approaches.","actionData","errors"]

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DES: Saint-Gobain demolition nearly complete; agency seeks soil-distribution work plan for consent-decree area

Expert: PFAS testing in food and wildlife is feasible but costly, method-dependent