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Video: Nantucket’s Hidden Danger: PFAS Water Contamination Explained
June 26, 2025
Transcript
Intro: PFAS Has No Borders
PFAS water contamination knows no borders. It doesn’t care whether people in the town are wealthy or poor. Just like most environmental issues, there are no borders when it comes to pollution.
Just today in The Boston Globe, an article was published about PFAS water contamination in Nantucket. As you might know, Nantucket is a wealthy island off the coast of Massachusetts. It’s popular in the summertime for visitors, and a lot of people have vacation homes there.
Shocking Levels Found in Nantucket
In Massachusetts, they have some of the strictest measurements for PFAS in the country, though they are much higher than that of the federal EPA. In Massachusetts, water municipalities can have no more than 20 parts per trillion in the drinking water supply.
The federal EPA, for PFOS and PFOA—the two main contaminants—has set a much lower precedent of 4 parts per trillion, which equals four drops of water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
Well, in Nantucket, they found in newer areas of the island that some of the levels are 124 parts per trillion. In other areas near the airport, measurements have been found to be over 4,000 parts per trillion.
What Is PFAS and How Does It Spread?
This means that people drinking the water in Nantucket—which has only one aquifer—are all potentially exposed to PFAS, and they probably have been for years, unknowingly.
PFAS refers to a group of chemical compounds used extensively in industrial manufacturing and consumer products like floss, rugs, women’s makeup, and water-resistant fabrics such as Gore-Tex. These are often flushed into the ground by companies. They also come in the form of aqueous firefighting foam. When this happens, it leaches into the aquifer and gets into our system.
These chemicals do not break down in the environment and do not break down in the human body.
PFAS Health Risks: Are You Affected?
If you have been exposed to PFAS, it’s recommended that you get a blood test. These are not paid for by insurance. Quest Diagnostics offers some testing.
It is stated that if you have between 2 and 20 nanograms in your body, you are potentially exposed to negative health effects. These can include high blood pressure, thyroid conditions, infertility, and cancers such as kidney, thyroid, liver, and testicular cancer, as well as ulcerative colitis. About 91% of Americans fall into this category.
If you’re over 20 nanograms, then you are considered at elevated risk and should be monitoring for more serious issues such as cancer.
PFAS Federal Lawsuit: Who Can Join
Currently, there is a pending lawsuit moving very quickly. It’s a multidistrict litigation out of the federal court in South Carolina. This primarily targets people who have been exposed to PFAS through their drinking water supply.
This includes people in Nantucket. The injuries most correlated with PFAS exposure include kidney cancer (the number one), testicular cancer, thyroid and liver cancer, and ulcerative colitis.
The lawsuit is moving quickly. There are rumors that the kidney cancer cases will settle before the bellwether trials set for October of 2025.
If you have been injured and diagnosed, it is essential that you contact an attorney right away.
The Role of 3M, DuPont & Legal Accountability
At Rightful Legal, we’ve been helping hundreds of clients get on board for this lawsuit to receive the compensation they deserve—which is only a fraction of what they’ve endured. But it’s also an opportunity to hold 3M, DuPont, and the other manufacturers of these harmful “forever chemicals” liable and responsible for harming people everywhere, and contaminating over 70% of the public drinking water supplies in the United States.
It’s estimated that every human being in the world has some PFAS in their body. These are man-made synthetic products, and the companies knew of the danger—and did nothing.
We are the ones who are being poisoned as a result. And as with everything, the cost of getting these chemicals out of your water often falls to the consumer, through expensive testing and expensive water filtration systems like reverse osmosis or carbon filters for your whole home.
