US Senator Gary Peters announced Thursday that a Senate subcommittee hearing will be convened to discuss the role of the federal government in the PFAs crisis.
The hearing will be held by the Federal Spending Oversight and Emergency Management subcommittee, of which Peters is the ranking member.
PFAs are chemical compounds that have been found at multiple sites across the state and are linked to health problems including cancer.
Senator Peters said the hearing will take a broad look at how many sites exist, what kinds of remediation work needs to be done, and what responsibility the federal government has for clean up.
“We need to determine what steps we need to clean up this contamination and realize this is a major problem across the United States and it’s going to require substantial resources but first we need to get a better scope of the problem.”
Peters said the hearing will try and get a sense for what nationwide remediation projects will cost.
“This is going to have a cost element to it and we want to have a better sense of what this is going to cost but certainly it’s clear on the surface, or on the face of it all, that the Federal government is responsible for cleaning up these sites, particularly those sites that were run by the Department of Defense.”
The hearing, scheduled for September 26, will also address the possibility of lowering the Federal Action level for PFAs - something activists have begun calling for.
Peters said he’s already worked to secure $10 million dollars for a study by the Centers for Disease Control into the health impacts of continued PFAs exposure.