An Essay: What's Coming Down the River?

My great-great-great-grandfather John Fitzsimmons came to Goose Bay in 1830. His son John is the man Fitzsimmons Mountain — over in the Leeds area on the Canadian side — is named for. By the time my grandfather John "Lowell" Fitzsimmons came along, the family had been watching this River for almost a century. 

Lowell was Sheriff of Jefferson County and Supervisor of the Town of Alexandria, and for decades he chaired the Hudson River–Black River Regulating Board — the body that manages flows from the Adirondacks down to the cities below. He spent a good part of his life thinking about water, and he understood, the way river people understand, that water always goes somewhere. Whatever you put in upstream, somebody downstream is going to drink, swim in, or pull a fish out of.

I grew up mostly in Alex Bay. Some of my earliest memories are of fishing with my grandfather out on the river — the kind of mornings that shape a kid before he knows he's being shaped. So when I tell you that something is about to happen upstream that every person living between Cape Vincent and Massena should know about, I'm not telling you as an activist. I'm telling you as somebody whose family has been watching this River for almost two hundred years.

The short version

Micron Technology is building the largest semiconductor manufacturing complex in American history in Clay, New York — about an hour south of the River. When it runs at full capacity, it will discharge industrial wastewater into the Oneida River through a new county treatment plant. That water will then flow through the Three Rivers confluence into the Oswego River, north into Lake Ontario at the Port of Oswego, and from there — by the only route Lake Ontario water has ever taken — east past Cape Vincent and through the Thousand Islands on its way to the Atlantic. 

The wastewater will contain PFAS. The "forever chemicals." The class of compounds the EPA set a federal drinking water limit on in April 2024 because they don't break down, they accumulate in fish and in human bodies, and they cause cancer, immune suppression, thyroid disease, and developmental harm at parts-per-trillion concentrations. The state permit governing that discharge — the document that's supposed to set legal limits on what can come out of the pipe — currently contains zero enforceable PFAS limits. The treatment plant being built to handle it has not been designed yet. The design-build contract has not been awarded. That last sentence is the only reason I'm writing this article. There's still time.

Why semiconductor wastewater is different

A modern semiconductor fab uses hundreds of different PFAS compounds. They're in the photoresists, the etchants, the cooling fluids, the cleaning solvents. A 2021 study out of Cornell (Jacob et al., Environmental Science & Technology) sampled effluent from semiconductor fabs and found 133 distinct PFAS compounds. Most of them aren't on any standard testing list. The researchers called them "dark PFAS" — present, biologically active, and invisible to the routine monitoring methods that water utilities and regulators rely on. The treatment plant Micron's wastewater will pass through is a membrane bioreactor. It's good technology for what it was designed to do — break down conventional sewage. For PFAS, it removes essentially nothing. PFAS molecules are engineered to be indestructible. That's the whole point of them. Bacteria can't eat them. Membranes can't filter the smaller ones. Carbon doesn't catch them all. The only treatments that actually destroy PFAS — supercritical water oxidation, plasma destruction, piezoelectric ball milling — are not in the current design.

What Cape Fear taught us

If this story sounds far fetched – from 1980 until 2017, the Chemours plant (formerly DuPont) at Fayetteville Works in North Carolina discharged PFAS into the Cape Fear River. The River is the drinking water source for roughly 500,000 people in and around Wilmington. For thirty-seven years, no one knew. There were no enforceable limits in the discharge permit because the chemicals weren't on any regulator's list. They weren't on the list because nobody had ever required the company to disclose them. 

The story finally broke in June 2017, when researchers at NC State and the Wilmington Star-News reported that a PFAS compound called GenX was in the tap water at concentrations far above any safe level. By then it was already in people's blood, in the soil, in the air around the plant, and in eleven thousand private wells across ten North Carolina counties. The Cape Fear Public Utility Authority and Brunswick County have since spent more than $200 million on advanced filtration to try to clean up after the discharge. They are still finding new compounds. 

This is the cautionary tale in every PFAS conversation in America — and the regulatory failure at the heart of it is exactly the failure I'm describing in our permit right now. If you don't require enforceable limits on PFAS as a class in the discharge permit, the polluter is under no legal obligation to disclose what they're putting in the water. By the time anyone finds out what came out of the pipe, the damage is forty years deep and a half-billion dollars more expensive to undo. Cape Fear is what happens when you find out too late. We are not too late.

The Boise Precedent

Micron has been operating a fab in Boise, Idaho for decades. Last year a group of Boise residents got organized about exactly this issue. They didn't stop the expansion, but Idaho's congressional delegation started asking pointed questions, and Micron's stock dropped roughly seven percent during the worst of it — about thirty billion dollars of market value, gone, because a neighborhood association asked the right questions at the right time. 

The only published water study on the Boise River below Micron's existing fab found PFAS in five of seven compounds tested. No fish-tissue sampling has ever been done there. Idaho has no consumption advisory. Nobody's looked. Our campaign is now collecting Boise River samples ourselves — upstream and downstream of the discharge, water and eventually fish tissue, using EPA Method 1633A plus a Total Oxidizable Precursor assay to catch the compounds the standard test misses. The results will tell us what to expect on the Oneida, the Oswego, the Lake, and yes — the River you live on.

Why the Thousand Islands specifically

A drop of water entering Lake Ontario takes about six years to reach the St. Lawrence. Six years is a long time for a contaminant to spread, settle into sediment, and bioaccumulate up the food chain into the smallmouth bass that Bassmaster Magazine has ranked the country's number one fishery, into the muskies, the walleye, the perch the kids catch off the dock at Grindstone or Wellesley. 

PFAS doesn't dilute the way conventional pollution does. It accumulates. The fish on the end of your line in 2035 will be carrying whatever is discharged in 2027, plus whatever is discharged every year between now and then. New York State already has consumption advisories for PFAS in fish from multiple inland waters. The St. Lawrence does not yet. That's not because the River is clean. It's because nobody has looked hard.

What "limits first" means

We are not anti-Micron. The fab is going to be built. The CHIPS Act money is committed, the construction is well underway, and a hundred billion dollars of investment is not going to be unwound by a petition campaign. That isn't the goal.

The goal is sequence. 

Set enforceable PFAS discharge limits in the permit first. 

Design the treatment plant to meet those limits second. 

Award the design-build contract third. 

Once the contract is awarded, the engineering is locked in for forty years. You cannot retrofit PFAS destruction into a facility that was never designed for it — not for any amount that the state, the county, or Micron is willing to spend. The bid window for that contract is this spring. The award is expected this summer. That is the entire window.

What you can do from upstream of nowhere

If you're reading this, you're somewhere on the River. Maybe Clayton, maybe Alex Bay, maybe Cape Vincent or one of the islands themselves. You're at the very end of a watershed that drains nine U.S. states and two Canadian provinces. Everything ends up at your dock eventually. Three things matter right now.
Sign the petition at foreverchemicalsny.com

We're over 1,400 signatures with strong representation from Thousand Islands communities and from Canadian neighbors downstream. Numbers from this stretch of River carry weight that Syracuse signatures don't. The state agencies need to see that this is not a local nuisance — it's a Great Lakes question.

Tell your local government

Town boards, village trustees, county legislators in Jefferson and St. Lawrence counties. Most of them have no idea any of this is happening a short letter from a town board asking the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to require enforceable PFAS limits in the Oak Orchard SPDES permit (Application No. 7-3124-00018) before the design-build contract is awarded — that's the precise ask, and it costs nothing.

Talk to Save the River

They've been the watchdog organization for the international section of the St. Lawrence for decades. They know the regulatory landscape, they know the science, and they know how to apply pressure at the binational level. This issue belongs on their radar, and frankly on the radar of every Riverkeeper organization between Oswego and Quebec City.

A last thought

My grandfather used to say a good story always beats a good argument. I've thought about that a lot in the last year. The argument here is the regulatory framework, the chemistry, the engineering — and the argument is on our side, but most people are never going to read it. The story is simpler. There's a River that's been in your family longer than you have. There's a thing being built upstream that's going to send something into that River, forever, that nobody can take out. And there's a sixty-day window where the people who get to decide what comes down the pipe are still listening. After that, the engineering is poured in concrete and the lawyers take over. Six years from now the first molecule reaches the islands, and forty years from now your grandchildren are pulling fish out of the same water you did, and they're asking why nobody said anything when there was still time to say it.

By Lowell "Todd" Fitzsimmons

Lowell "Todd" Fitzsimmons is the founder of ForeverChemicals NY (foreverchemicalsny.com), an independent public interest campaign focused on PFAS discharge from the Micron semiconductor facility in Clay, New York. He grew up in Alexandria Bay and is President of Smart Tank Corporation in North Syracuse. His family has lived along the river since his great-great-great-grandfather John Fitzsimmons settled at Goose Bay in 1830.

Editor's Note: Obviously this essay is written with a purpose. However, it was a subject or concern I had not heard about, so, both the author and I passed it on to Save the River and to the Thousand Islands Land Trust. Both organizations were aware of the concerns and they will address the matter in their own way. TI Life will also pass the information on to the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks. I do commend Todd Fitzsimmons for taking an individual stance and writing this essay outlining his concerns.

As we publish TI Life for May, we learned from the May 10, 2026, NNY360.com that "researchers at Clarkson University have reported a breakthrough in tackling per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a group of widely used 'forever chemicals' that are difficult to remove from water and have raised growing environmental and public health concerns." Therefore, as they say - stay tuned."