This summer, I traveled from Park City to Washington, D.C., to talk with lawmakers about something my family learned the hardest way possible: What happens when the public isn’t told what’s in its water.
My grandfather developed pulmonary fibrosis after living for years near the 3M chemical waste disposal site in Lake Elmo, Minnesota.
There were no warning signs posted around the site. No notices came in the mail.
For years, no law required anyone to tell the families in that community what had seeped into the ground and water beneath their homes.
In the area where he lived, there is a cluster of pulmonary fibrosis and breast cancer cases. His illness was diagnosed decades after the exposure — an exposure no one in his neighborhood knew about, and no one consented to.
I’m 16, a student at Park City High School, and I went to Washington because the protections built in response to stories like my grandfather’s are being rolled back right now.
In May, the EPA proposed two rules that would unwind much of the first-ever federal drinking water standards for PFAS — the “forever chemicals” behind the Lake Elmo contamination and hundreds of sites like it.
One rule would completely rescind the limits for four PFAS compounds, leaving no federal drinking water standard for them at all. The other would let water systems delay compliance with the limits for PFOA and PFOS, the two most notorious of these chemicals, from 2029 to 2031.
The EPA’s justification is procedural — it says the previous administration issued the standards in the wrong order.
But nothing in the law requires responding to a paperwork error by eliminating health protections. If the process was flawed, redo the process. Don’t leave families unprotected while the government works out its sequencing.
This matters in Utah, too. PFAS aren’t a Minnesota problem. They’ve been found in water systems across the country, and the chemicals accumulate in the body over a lifetime. The people who will drink the water these rules govern the longest are people my age.
The costs of weakening standards today won’t show up by 2031. They’ll show up in doctors’ offices decades from now, the way they did for my grandfather.
So I did the most concrete thing a teenager can do: I filed formal public comments opposing both rules in the federal dockets (EPA-HQ-OW-2025-0654 and EPA-HQ-OW-2025-1742). Federal agencies are legally required to read and respond to substantive comments, and every comment becomes part of the permanent record.
Here’s why I’m writing to my neighbors: You can do the same, and the window closes July 20.
Go to regulations.gov, search either docket number, and click “Comment.” It takes 10 minutes. You don’t need to be a lawyer or a scientist. You just need to be someone who drinks water and believes the public deserves to know what’s in it.
Beyond the comment period, I’m asking Congress to make these protections permanent — to write the hazardous-substance designations for PFOA and PFOS into law so no court ruling or change in administration can quietly erase them, and to strengthen community right-to-know requirements so notification reaches actual neighborhoods, not just federal databases.
My grandfather never got a warning sign. The least we can do is refuse to take down the ones that finally exist.
Hudson Fossey is a student at Park City High School. The public comment period on both EPA rules closes July 20 at regulations.gov.