In the summer of 2017, a group of residents and environmental activist Erin Brockovich challenged Mount Pleasant’s water system claiming that the town’s water contained pesticides that might be causing brain cancer in children. Listen to Clay Duffie, General Manager of Mount Pleasant Waterworks, explain how the events unfolded, how they responded, and his lessons learned.
38 days was the total duration of the situation. We spent over 1,100 man-hours. It cost us over $106,000 to deal with this fake news, and that’s quite unfortunate, but you have to do it.
Clay Duffie, General Manager of Mount Pleasant Waterworks
Transcript
Speaker 1:
So what’s in the water? That question continues to be a hot topic in Mount Pleasant.
Speaker 2:
New tonight at 11 o’clock, dozens in Mount Pleasant gather with officials to learn what’s in their water.
Clay Duffie:
38 days was the total duration of the situation. We spent over 1,100 man-hours. It cost us over $106,000 to deal with this fake news.
Robert Osborne:
Hey, this is Robert. Thanks for joining us today. You know, it’s not every day that you find yourself in the headwinds of a full-on media storm, or at least I hope you don’t. Little did Clay Duffie, who’s the general manager of Mount Pleasant Waterworks, know that within a span of 38 days that he would activate an emergency management plan, he would share newspaper headlines with Erin Brockovich, yes, that Erin Brockovich, and learn firsthand how to fight fake news.
Clay Duffie:
You know, little did I know at that time that dealing with social media and fake news was going to become the most challenging event of my life and my career. I mean, Hugo was a piece of cake compared to what we were up against.
Robert Osborne:
Today Clay shares his story with us. This story starts with a group of moms with some serious concerns and one simple question.
Clay Duffie:
The story begins in a very serious manner. There were some children in a couple of neighborhoods that had been diagnosed with brain cancer, a relatively rare form of brain cancer, and the moms were obviously concerned about their children and interested in knowing more about it. So they got on social media and started asking probing questions, asking questions like, “Is there a cancer cluster in Mount Pleasant?”
Clay Duffie:
So that question then percolated through the health department and DHEC and the CDC. They said, “Well, it’s not really a cluster.” But before you know it, this thing, it started getting legs, and the local media picked up on it. Then once they picked up on it, it went national, and in an interview with two of the moms, the reporter asked the question, “Is it the water?” They said that 11 children had been diagnosed with brain cancer in this one part of Mount Pleasant, and so that question, is it the water, that put us on the spot right there.
Robert Osborne:
Mount Pleasant Waterworks provides water, wastewater service to about 90,000 people in and around the town of Mount Pleasant in South Carolina. For some of y’all outside the state, Mount Pleasant sits on a peninsula behind the Isle of Palms and Sullivan’s Island bracketed by the wonderful Wando River. They connect to Charleston by the Ravenel Bridge. Mount Pleasant has two water sources, groundwater from the Middendorf Aquifer, which they treat using state-of-the-art reverse osmosis technology. They also purchase drinking water from the Charleston Water System. Okay, that’s enough background. Let’s go back to the story. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
Clay Duffie:
We got back to work the next day and pulled together our emergency management team that’s right out of the book, right out of our management manual, and started working the problem. We called a press conference on Sunday and had three stations there, and announced that we were going to hold a public meeting to help provide good information, factual information, and get that information out through all the mediums that we could. Customers had started testing the water with these test strips that aren’t really EPA-certified, but they got an EPA logo on the package, but they’re not certified. So they started putting that on social media that there’s pesticides in Mount Pleasant’s water, and so we had to respond to that as well.
Clay Duffie:
So that’s when we had the public meeting and developed the sampling plan in conjunction with the health department and with Charleston Water System. We all three had a sampling plan and we all sent them off to an independent lab. So we announced that, but at the public meeting, the interesting thing that happened there was that we listened to the parents. They were making some wild accusations and that kind of thing, but what we heard loud and clear is they care about their children, and that their children’s health is the most important thing, and if they thought for a minute that the water was causing these serious diseases, they were enraged by that, just by that discussion.
Clay Duffie:
But we heard them, and we heard them loud and clear, and well, they were concerned about schools and the water quality in schools, which is now a pretty significant issue as well, lead in schools. We set up a sampling plan after all this was over. It was something we had learned is that we now sample every school in our monthly routine in Mount Pleasant, routine sampling.
Robert Osborne:
And that’s not required.
Clay Duffie:
It’s not required, but we did it because we thought it showed that we heard what the parents were concerned about and we responded to it. I always say, “You can’t prevent an emergency from happening.” We all have them, but it’s how you communicate and it’s how you respond is how you’ll be judged, and I think we communicated and responded appropriately. So here we are, and we’re having daily meetings with Charleston Water System and with DHEC, had them on the phone every day for 11 days straight.
Clay Duffie:
A couple of days into it, we started getting these calls from a guy named Bob, and Bob and Erin Brockovich are a pair. They do the good cop/bad cop stuff. Erin was calling my mayor. She was talking to the press and saying that we were contaminating the aquifers with our drinking water because we use aquifer storage and recovery systems as well, and she didn’t know what she was talking about. I mean, she was calling me out and saying we were lying, and so here we go. Erin and Clay Duffie are on the front page of the Post and Courier two days in a row arguing about… She’s making accusations and we’re saying, “Well, she’s just wrong.” It really started escalating then is when the press got involved and really started promoting the story. It really got interesting.
Clay Duffie:
So Bob would say, he’d call up our water manager, Allan Clum, and talk to Allan and say, “Yeah, come on, man. You know, y’all got this real serious problem. We can help for a fee,” so this is how they work. This is the good cop/bad cop. Erin stirs the pot and Bob comes in and said, “We can save the day with your media crisis and make the utility come into a good light.” Well, we said, “No thank you. We don’t want to have anything to do with you two.”
Clay Duffie:
We just kept putting out our information. The results came in from the samples, of course, absolutely clean with no detection on the pesticides and herbicides, and so we made that announcement. We held another public meeting to announce the results. A guy that was really on our case, we knew he had sampled for GenX, and he had told the press and we had heard about it. So at that meeting, he drops that lab report on the table and said, “Y’all have GenX in the water.”
Clay Duffie:
Allan Clum handled that really well. He said, “Well, you know, I just got this report. Can we get the quality assurance document that went with this report?” So we got it and Allan looked at it, and the control had more GenX than the sample. So we knew right away that it was a bogus sample, and we had to put out a press release pretty much calling the laboratory down and said, “You didn’t explain the information to your customer, and he just took what you gave him and he saw a number on a page and then took it to the press.”
Clay Duffie:
So this is how this fake news gets started, and of course, this guy, he was out to make us… He was trying to embarrass us is what he was trying to do and call our integrity into question. As water manager, you call the water that I supply to 90,000 people every day, you call it into question, that’s a serious accusation in my book. We couldn’t stand for that, but we had to prove it and communicate it and respond to the customers’ concerns.
Clay Duffie:
Regardless of all the noise that went on with the social media, I think we ended up coming out ahead. We put all of our press releases on our website, sent them to the press, put them on Facebook, used Twitter. At that time we didn’t have Nextdoor, believe it or not, and Nextdoor came along a little bit after that, but that social media platform is used extensively.
Clay Duffie:
So we learned an awful lot. We developed a lot of good relationships. We proved that if you plan ahead and work your plan that you can be successful. It turns out we got over 250 responses from the public thanking us for what we did, thanking us for being transparent, and coming out and hosting the meetings and just dealing with the issue for… 38 days was the total duration of the situation. We spent over 1,100 man-hours. It cost us over $106,000 to deal with this fake news, and that’s quite unfortunate, but you have to do it. You can’t not show that the water is safe. Dealing with somebody with as a high profile as Erin Brockovich, it just made things a little more interesting, I’d say.
Robert Osborne:
After clay finished recounting his story, we had one more question for Clay before we turned off the microphone. We asked how working with the public has changed since the events that unfolded in Flint in 2014.
Clay Duffie:
It’s unfortunate, but since Flint, we’ve all struggled in the industry with credibility, transparency, and all those things, and the public has gotten so much more aware of what’s in the drinking water, and we keep calling them emerging contaminants. Well, contaminants and water, those words don’t really mix in my book. There are compounds that are in water. There are manmade chemicals. There are naturally occurring compounds, radioactive compounds. There’s all kinds of compounds in water.
Clay Duffie:
But when we start using that word contaminant and then people started saying, “Well, contaminant means I’m going to get sick or my children are going to get sick,” the awareness of what’s in water, what’s in my water is now really more on the forefront than ever before, which is a huge challenge for us in the water industry to do the right thing. And we quit saying we meet or exceed state standards. We say we surpass those standards, and we quit using the word contaminant. We have to try to change the language a little bit so that that customers feel more comfortable with their water, and we have to be open about the information that we have, the issue with microplastics that just came up last week. I mean, this thing’s coming out every day, harmful algal blooms, all these things that we know are affecting water quality and source water. So how we deal with all this is we’ve got to be open, honest and we’d have to communicate, and this is where I think the water associations can take a more active role in communicating the good things that are going on with water.
Robert Osborne:
Thanks again to Clay for sharing this story with us. We talked with Clay during the South Carolina Environmental Conference all the way back in March. Also, thanks again for the entire team here, Dr. Ladner and Amy for keeping this podcast going, especially over the summer, a big shout out to Dr. Ladner’s wife for feeding us last week. We’ve been meeting and pitching story ideas. We have a plate full of episodes in development that we can’t wait to share with you. I’m Robert Osborne. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with another episode.
Robert Osborne:
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