Rivers of Doubt: The North Georgia Water Crisis

Georgia textile mills produce three-fourths of the world’s carpet and rugs, and denim for iconic American brands. Do they poison local water in the process?

Story by J.R. Sullivan | Photos by Rachel Priest

A year and a half ago, Montoya Smith stopped drinking water from her faucet. She stopped cooking with it, too, or letting her teenage daughter do the same. She couldn’t trust it. Smith lives in the mountains of rural northwest Georgia, in a town called Summerville, an hour’s drive south of Chattanooga. Situated alongside a 24,800-acre wildlife area, and accessible only by two-lane country highways, the city has a population of about 4,650 and possesses certain small-town charms: a downtown strip with clothing stores and restaurants, a park near the county courthouse, barbecue joints, a few well-watered baseball diamonds. Smith’s family has lived in the area for generations. “I’m kin to half of Summerville,” she told me recently, sitting at a concrete picnic table, sunglasses atop her head. She moved away a few times over the years, she said, but always came back. “This is home. This is where everything is.”

Smith’s fondness for Summerville soured in January of last year, after the Georgia Environmental Protection Division (EPD) notified city officials that, according to tests conducted by the state and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the town’s drinking water contained unsafe levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs — a family of synthetic compounds that, according to the EPA, can cause cancer, immune system problems, and developmental harm to fetuses and infants, among other health issues. Upon learning of the water tests, the Summerville government issued a public advisory, urging residents not to drink the local tap water. At first, Smith didn’t understand the problem. She’d never heard anyone talk about water issues in Summerville. Still, she, and nearly everyone else in town, began filling up jugs of clean water from a tanker truck parked next to city hall, brought in by the city and state. “We never saw that coming,” said Sarah Millican, a Summerville high school junior. “I drank the water my whole life growing up, and they never made a huge deal out of it.” 

A class-action lawsuit filed in February of this year alleges that fault for Summerville’s water contamination, which affects a total of about 9,000 people, chiefly belongs to Mount Vernon Mills, a factory about 5 miles upstream from town. One of the nation’s largest producers of blue-jean material, Mount Vernon manufactures denim for companies including Carhartt, Levi Strauss, and Wrangler. “Most of the people here work at Mount Vernon,” Smith said. She used to work there, too, inspecting and repairing fabric. “I loved it,” she said. She made $14 an hour, decent pay for the area. She was surprised to learn that the mill that has long supported Summerville — it opened in 1845 and employs some 1,600 people — has also contaminated its water. According to Georgia EPD findings, since 1992 nearly 8,000 tons of PFASs have entered the Raccoon Creek Watershed, Summerville’s primary water source, and nearly all of it originated from Mount Vernon Mills.

In 2020, tests by the EPA and the Georgia EPD found unsafe levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances in Raccoon Creek. The “forever chemicals” can cause a wide array of health issues if consumed. Summerville issued an advisory in January of that year encouraging residents not to drink the local tap water. Photo by Rachel Priest

The Summerville class action is one of several recent complaints filed over PFAS water pollution in northwest Georgia, a hub of textile manufacturing since the late 19th century. Roughly three-quarters of the world’s carpets and rugs are produced in Dalton, a city of 33,500 people, 40 miles from Summerville. In 2019, Rome, another adjacent town, sued more than 30 mills in and around Dalton, alleging that the water- and stain-proofing chemicals used in their manufacturing processes had contaminated two rivers from which the city drew its drinking water. 

“Chemical companies worked with the carpet industry to use the rivers as an industrial sewer,” said Jeff Friedman, a Birmingham-based environmental attorney who’s representing the cities of Rome and Summerville. “And now people are paying the price for years and years of pollution.”

The full extent of the contamination remains unclear, but Atlanta’s NBC affiliate, WXIA-TV, has identified nearly 20 locations in multiple rivers throughout north Georgia that have high levels of PFASs. Ann Harris worked in the Georgia carpet industry for nearly two decades before becoming an independent clean-water watchdog. She regularly visited carpet-dyeing facilities. Of the chemicals and wastewater, she told me, “They put them in a creek nearby. Everybody did it.” 

Developed by 3M and DuPont in the late 1930s, PFASs were for decades used widely in furniture, food packaging, and assorted household products — most famously Scotchgard and Teflon. Nicknamed “forever chemicals,” since they resist degrading in nature, PFASs pose health risks nearly in perpetuity once they enter a river or a stream, unless they’re cleaned up, a difficult and expensive task. In the 1960s and ’70s, DuPont and 3M scientists discovered that PFASs could cause liver damage and build up in the blood of people and animals. In 1981, DuPont realized that two of seven children whose mothers worked in its Teflon division were born with birth defects. Such revelations remained company secrets, however, until the 1990s, when lawsuits filed against DuPont brought them to light. (The 2019 movie “Dark Waters,” starring Mark Ruffalo, recounts one such suit.)

Nicknamed “forever chemicals,” since they resist degrading in nature, PFASs pose health risks nearly in perpetuity once they enter a river or a stream, unless they’re cleaned up, a difficult and expensive task.

Over the last two decades, companies have gradually phased out PFASs. But many water- and stain-proofing treatments applied to carpet, jeans, and other textiles still contain the chemicals. This is allowed under federal law, since the EPA doesn’t regulate PFASs, despite their well-known health hazards, present even at small exposures. In 2016, however, the EPA did issue a non-enforceable advisory, urging utilities and public health departments to monitor drinking water and alert the public should PFAS levels exceed 70 parts per trillion. Summerville’s drinking water had as many as 98 parts per trillion. Rome’s levels were slightly higher. 

PFASs contaminate more than 2,300 locations in 49 states, according to data analyzed by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. In the years since the original DuPont suits were filed in 1999, civil cases have been brought against polluters across the country. In 2018, 3M agreed to pay $850 million to help clean up PFAS-contaminated water in the Twin Cities east metro area. In April of this year, 3M and the Georgia-Pacific paper company settled another major case, involving PFAS pollution in Michigan, for a reported $11.9 million. But in Georgia, and in the South in general, Summerville is “one of the first communities, and certainly one of the first small communities, faced with correcting this problem,” said Harry Harvey, the city’s mayor, and a retired teacher and principal. “I think there will probably be others.” (Mount Vernon Mills declined to comment for this story, but in a recent legal filing, the company claimed that it hasn’t used PFASs since 2017 and argued that, under Georgia law, it has no duty to ensure water quality downstream from its facility; in an email, 3M said it “acted responsibly in connection with products containing PFASs and will vigorously defend our record of environmental stewardship.”)

With carbon filters — the same technology used in Brita pitchers — Summerville has dropped the PFASs in its water below the EPA advisory limit, to about 40 parts per trillion, according to the mayor; the city stopped providing its residents with alternate water sometime late last summer. But emergency carbon filtration is more a stopgap than a permanent fix, and a costly one. The city of Rome estimates it has already spent millions of dollars on emergency purification efforts. Mayor Harvey said that he expects Summerville to spend millions, too.

Through the class-action lawsuit filed in February, Summerville residents hope to force Mount Vernon Mills, 3M, and the other defendants to build the community a new water-treatment facility, one capable of removing PFASs with reverse osmosis, a superior purification technique to carbon filtration. But, Mayor Harvey said, “we have no guarantee that the manufacturers are going to pay for it, or that the lawsuits will work.” And, at any rate, a potential settlement or verdict is surely years away. Similar suits have dragged on from two years to nearly a decade. Meanwhile, the city, with its tiny tax base, lacks the funds to construct a new water-treatment facility, forcing it to rely on emergency carbon filtration indefinitely and to explore digging wells as an alternative water source. Mayor Harvey insists that the water currently poses no threat to most citizens, with PFAS levels now below the EPA advisory limit. Still, “no matter what we do,” he said, “the water will still have some contaminants in it.”

With carbon filters, Summerville has dropped the PFASs in its water below the EPA advisory limit, to about 40 parts per trillion, according to Mayor Harry Harvey. Photo by Rachel Priest

Summerville, and small towns in similar positions, might benefit from the fact that, in April, after decades of inaction, the EPA unveiled plans to address PFASs in earnest for the first time. President Joe Biden’s EPA administrator, Michael Regan, announced that the agency would strategize how to reduce PFAS pollution, and develop new national drinking-water standards. “The scope of PFAS contamination in the United States,” Regan wrote in a memo, “… makes our task to address these chemicals particularly challenging and urgent.” In June, as an initial step, the EPA proposed a new rule requiring all manufacturers to submit detailed reports about PFAS use and disposal. In late July, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would establish national drinking-water standards for PFASs, as well as provide some $200 million in funding to upgrade wastewater treatment facilities. But the measure faces steep odds in the Senate, where a similar bill died last year.

Until government action or litigation removes the chemicals from Raccoon Creek, Montoya Smith, for one, doesn’t plan to drink from her tap; several other Summerville residents told me much the same. Unemployed, Smith relies on food stamps to help pay for groceries and, for the foreseeable future, clean water for her and her daughter. “As long as they sell it in bottles and I can afford it,” she said, “I’m going to buy it and drink it.”

Clarification, August 17, 2021:

This piece has been updated to reflect that Summerville, which has a population of 4,650, provides water to a total of 9,000 people. Also, a previous version of this article misstated the location of the tanker truck. It was near city hall, not the sheriff’s office.

From Seed to Cloth

Shop the General Store

Support Southern Storytelling