Press Releases

Congressman David Rouzer (NC-07) released the following statement after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced four drinking water health advisories for PFAS substances:

“Our communities rightfully have questions about PFAS chemicals, including GenX, and how they affect our drinking water, health, and the environment.  The scientific community has been working hard to answer these questions, and I’m glad to see the EPA move forward with new PFAS drinking water health advisories so we can achieve progress on cleaning up the contamination entering our source waters.  I will continue to work with my colleagues in Congress along with state and local officials to ensure families in Southeastern North Carolina have access to safe drinking water.”

Background:

On June 9, Rouzer introduced the Healthy Drinking Water Affordability Act (The Healthy H2O Act) in the United States House of Representatives.  The Healthy H2O Act would provide financial assistance to families and small businesses in rural communities to test their drinking water and fund the purchase, installation, and maintenance of water filtration systems to provide healthy drinking water and immediate and ongoing protections from known and emerging water contaminants, like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), lead, and nitrates.

Last October, during a Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment hearing entitled, “Emerging Contaminants, Forever Chemicals, and More: Challenges to Water Quality, Public Health, and Communities” Rep. Rouzer advocated for more study, and research and development to better understand the effects of PFAS chemicals, how widespread they are, which particular PFAS substances are ones of concern, whether those that are of concern are still used in commerce or are now just legacy pollutants, and how they can be monitored and cleaned up.