I wanted to add an addendum here: We are also increasingly dealing with the fact we made tons of chemicals that the medical science and stats are now catching up on. I was at a town hall meeting of a tiny tiny town that had big issues with PFOAS before it “popped”. At that point it time, it was something the EPA was researching, but hadn’t officially come out against. I have some biochemistry background, and while that kind of thing is outside my field, I could read that the EPA positions was “look… we don’t have the data to say this definitively, but for the love of god don’t put this in your body”.

So this town, with a mayor that isn’t even a full time appointment is being asked to read into data that has a TON of nuance and subtext to take actions that will absolutely destroy their budget for decades… or if they don’t, destroy their citizens instead… and oh yeah, all of this involves shutting down the reason you can afford to fix the school roof…

I don’t have a solution to any of this, but it’s going to be an increasing problem. There are some cases where it’s cut and dry, you could arm the city of East Palestine Ohio to disallow rail traffic based on inspection failures, for instance. However, PFOAS will not be the last compound we get new data in for that makes us go “ohhhhhh thats not good”. I don’t know what you do to help a town handle that proactively where the town is usually focused on paving contracts and new park benches.