Brady Flanigan
Editor
Weevils—beetles as tiny as lint. They lay eggs in kernels of grain. They devour the grain from the inside until they’re ready to burst free. They emerge, breed—the circle goes unbroken—until the crop is destroyed. Farmers and ’shiners know that once weevils have infested the harvest, they can’t be stopped. It’s destruction by accumulation. Pests evolve; lessons don’t.
And now there’s a chemical pest in Bedford County. It’s man’s creation—a synthetic compound made in industrial American laboratories—and since its invention in 1938, it’s only spread across the land. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, known as “forever chemicals.” For good reason: PFAS practically never die. It’s in every waterway on earth. It’s on Everest and in the Mariana Trench. And as we manufacture more, its presence grows.
Your Teflon pan is PFAS. Your Scotchgard. The wrapper of your Big Mac, that Domino’s pizza box beside the window. That overpriced Patagonia raincoat for heroic treks to cover the windshield in PFAS-coated Rain-X. Maybelline and dental floss.
The Tuesday before Halloween, the Shelbyville Power, Water & Sewer Systems Board met at 5 p.m. to discuss joining a national class-action lawsuit against 3M, DuPont, Chemours, and Corteva for their hand in spreading PFAS. The city faces a Jan. 1, 2026 deadline to decide whether to join, but if it does, Shelbyville could collect as much as $2 million—money set aside for installing a PFAS filtration system, enough to run it for maybe two years.
PFAS exposure has been linked to multiple cancers—pancreatic, liver, kidney—organs that, according to medicine, are considered important. They’ve also been tied to elevated cholesterol and triglycerides, lower birth weight, delayed puberty, hypothyroidism, suppressed immune response, and gestational hypertension. And every day, more health problems are being tied to PFAS.
And if you’re reading this from Shelbyville or near one of the thirteen other plants flagged by the EPA in Tennessee, those PFAS numbers have crossed federal limits into toxic territory. Shelbyville was among the worst, averaging one-and-a-half times the upper-limit.
In April 2024, under the Biden administration, the Environmental Protection Agency set drinking-water limits for six PFAS chemicals—the first federal effort to regulate the so-called “forever chemicals.” By mid-2025, the Trump administration rescinded four of those limits and delayed enforcement of the rest, citing cost and feasibility concerns from utilities.
In the books, the rollback was framed as a matter of scientific review and practicality—an acknowledgement that many water treatment plants couldn’t handle the costs to meet the four parts-per-trillion threshold. For reference, the safe water threshold for arsenic is ten parts per billion—2,500 times lower than PFAS. Critics consider this political: a tale of deregulation that ebbs and flows like the tide—consistent with the new administration’s broader push to loosen environmental regulations and appease industry groups who’ve lobbied against the rule. Whether science, economics, or politics, the reversal left communities already dealing with PFAS contamination—questioning who the state was really protecting.
Yet all across the country, settlements are already underway. DuPont, Chemours, Corteva, 3M, each paid billions to settle a debt that never ends. Lawyers sent emails to small municipalities offering “no-risk representation” and “significant recovery.” Contamination lawsuits have become a business model as widespread as PFAS or the weevil.
Shelbyville’s large PFAS-treated cardboard check may very well approach $2 million, and the water may run clear for a year or two. But the checks will clear long before the river does. The weevil ruined the crop. Man ruined the water.