After his factory worker father died a painful death from kidney cancer at age 68 in 2013, Michael Hickey made it his mission to find out why so many people in his hometown along the Hoosic River were getting sick.

Two years later, the US Environmental Protection Agency has warned residents of Hoosick Falls not to drink or cook with water from municipal wells, and a plastics plant has agreed to install a $2 million carbon filtration system at the village water treatment plant.

Hickey's campaign began with suspicion about industrial pollution in the factory village. His father had worked for 35 years at a plant that made high-performance plastics similar to Teflon, so Hickey searched online for "cancer" and "Teflon".