The Dark Secrets of NY's Best Tasting Water: Rochester, NY

PFAS & Poisoned Water: Hoosick Falls, NY

In 2014, a man in a small New York town did something almost no one does: he tested his own tap water. What he found, PFOA, a “forever chemical,” at hundreds of times the level regulators consider safe, would expose a national scandal and take roughly 18 months to be officially acknowledged. This is the story of Hoosick Falls, the frying-pan chemistry that poisoned a town’s drinking water, and why the same invisible contaminant may be sitting in your tap right now. I’m Ally, an environmental scientist in the Finger Lakes region — and on AquaDiary I turn everyday people into the kind of person who can read a water-quality report and know when to actually worry. This episode breaks down PFAS and PFOA in plain language: what “forever chemicals” are, how they got into drinking water, what they do to the human body, how one ordinary resident (Michael Hickey) cracked the case before any agency did, and — most importantly — the concrete steps you can take to check and protect your own water at home. If you’ve seen the movie Dark Waters, this is the same chemical. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a pattern. And once you can see it, you can’t unsee it. Check your own water: * EPA — Find your local Consumer Confidence Report (annual water quality report): https://www.epa.gov/ccr * EPA — PFAS in drinking water (the federal limits & why): https://www.epa.gov/sdwa/drinking-water-regulations-pfas * EPA — Drinking water lab certification (find a state-certified lab for private wells): https://www.epa.gov/dwlabcert/learn-about-laboratory-certification-drinking-water * CDC / ATSDR — PFAS and your health, in plain language: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/ * NSF — Look up filters certified to reduce PFOA/PFOS (NSF/ANSI 53 & 58): https://www.nsf.org/consumer-resources/water-quality/water-filters See the whole script and today's sources on Patreon:

Update: City Tracks Me Down. I Drink Radioactive Water

A few weeks ago I was at a conference when someone from the City of Rochester's water bureau found me in person to ask for a follow-up deep dive into their water supply. On the drive home, I stopped in Saratoga Springs, and tried the water. I later learned that peer-reviewed science has found it contains radium isotopes and radon gas. The state tests the popular one. Not all of them. I want to solve that issue. This general update episode covers where the show is going this summer, the Onondaga Lake investigation, and why I need your help to fund independent water testing in Saratoga Springs. Please consider supporting the show on Patreon: The AquaDiary Podcast | Podcast for water science, news and mysteries. | Patreon [https://www.patreon.com/c/TheAquaDiaryPodcast]

Onondaga Lake: Sacred Site, Founder of Democracies, and America's Most Polluted

The scientists who worked on this cleanup all signed NDAs and wouldn't speak with me. And mercury is still being found. In April 2026, routine marina renovations at Onondaga Lake uncovered mercury in sediment nobody had ever tested, in a lake declared cleaned up. The DEC says the origin is "unknown." The Onondaga Nation says they've been ignored for twenty years. And the experts who know the most about what's really in that lake cannot legally speak about it. This episode covers the full contamination history of Onondaga Lake in Syracuse, NY, once designated as the most polluted lake in America. We dig into the Solvay Process Company's century of industrial dumping, 165,000 pounds of mercury discharged between 1946 and 1970, the mudboils in the Tully Valley still delivering salt and silt downstream through Onondaga Nation territory every single day, and the roster of companies — Honeywell, General Motors, National Grid, Crucible Specialty Metals, and others — that turned a sacred Haudenosaunee site (and the founding site of both the US and Haudenosaunee democracy) into a federal Superfund site. We also explore what the Onondaga Nation has said from the beginning: that this cleanup was never enough, that their legal claim to their own homeland was dismissed on a technicality, and that the water their people have given thanks to for over a thousand years was declared clean without their agreement. This is Part 1 of a two-part series. Next time, we will cover the cleanup, the eagles that came back, the fish that are still toxic, and the question with no clean answer: what does it mean to remediate a lake when the polluter gets to decide when it's done? Further reading:Onondaga Nation land rights: onondaganation.orgRobin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions, 2013)Glenn Coin, Syracuse.com/NNY360, May 2026This episode had 28 citations. You can see them all by supporting the show on Patreon for $3 a month: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheAquaDiaryPodcast

Love Canal: They Called Her Hysterical

21,800 tons of toxic chemical waste buried under a neighborhood and a school. Hundreds of families in Love Canal had no idea. This is the story of America's most infamous environmental disaster, and the woman whose anger created federal law. Lois Gibbs was a 27-year-old housewife when she discovered her children were being poisoned by groundwater contamination seeping up through the soil beneath their home. State officials dismissed her community health survey as "useless housewife data." They told her to go home and tend her garden. She organized 90% of her neighborhood, held two EPA representatives hostage, and forced the creation of Superfund , the federal law under CERCLA that has since forced cleanup at over 1,300 hazardous waste sites across America. As an environmental scientist and a woman, I'm telling this story the way it has never been told: through the water science and groundwater chemistry that made the contamination possible, the institutional misogyny that almost stopped the fight, and the fury of a mother who refused to leave her toxic neighborhood until every family was safe.

The Dark Secrets of NY's Best Tasting Water: Rochester, NY

Rochester was voted the best-tasting municipal water in New York State. Then they found a body in the reservoir. In March 2024, a maintenance worker discovered a man's body in Rochester's Highland Park Reservoir. It had been there for 24 days while water continued flowing to tens of thousands of taps. The water tested safe, but the story of how this was possible opens up something much larger about a city drinking from two of the most protected lakes in the country while simultaneously managing 15,000 lead pipes, two reservoirs out of federal compliance for nearly 20 years, and a chemical legacy in the watershed that took state environmental archives and a stonewalled FOIL request to piece together. In this episode, environmental scientist Ally covers: 🔬 Where Rochester's water actually comes from — two glacier-carved Finger Lakes supplying 37 million gallons a day since 1876, with completely undeveloped shorelines and 6,800 acres of protected state forest. ☣️ The PCB scandal buried in the Canadice watershed. A private landowner draining transformer fluid into a tributary feeding your drinking water reservoir, and the fish test results still sitting in "draft form" two years after collection. 🚰 15,000 lead service lines still in the ground, what the city is doing about it, and how to get your water tested for free. 💀 The full story of Abdullahi Muya, the 29-year-old who drowned in Highland Park Reservoir in February 2024 and wasn't found for 24 days. and the federal compliance rule that's been deferred since 2006 that connects to the story. 🧫 The bloom science nobody in Rochester is talking about. Internal phosphorus loading documented in Hemlock and Canadice specifically, legacy septic systems still releasing nutrients 80 years after demolition, and the seiche dynamics that can trigger algal blooms from inside a protected lake with zero external input. 🧪 A University of Rochester study that found microplastic concentrations jumping from 10 particles per milliliter at the source to over 1,500 by the time it reached distribution. The source was clean, the pipes weren't. 💧 City water vs. suburb water, PFAS, disinfection byproducts, the Skaneateles comparison, the fracking fight nobody remembers, and what you can actually do The water is safe. It's also complicated. This episode explains why. Full citations at the AquaDiary Patreon (but comment if you want something): https://www.patreon.com/c/TheAquaDiaryPodcast Free lead testing: WaterTest@CityofRochester.gov