Firefighters with the 27th Special Operations Civil Engineer Squadron test hose water pressure before an exercise Aug. 14, 2015, at Cannon Air Force Base, N.M. In January, New Mexico environment officials cited the base for a spill of wastewater containing firefighting foam with PFAS which soaked into the aquifer after a retaining pond leaked. (U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Alex Mercer)
In mid-July, Neil Dolly left Albuquerque near dawn and headed to Clovis. Under the New Mexico Hazardous Waste Act, he and his co-workers with the New Mexico Environment Department have the authority to conduct surprise inspections of hazardous waste sites, take samples and shoot photos.
Parked at a gas station near Cannon Air Force Base, Dolly called the base to confirm names and email addresses. About 30 minutes later, he emailed officials to say he was arriving.
Once inside, base officials and attorneys told Dolly and his assistant they wouldn’t be allowed to collect soil and water samples to test for PFAS. According to Dolly, they cited ongoing litigation between the state and the Pentagon.
No one paying attention to New Mexico’s PFAS saga should be surprised that the military kept Dolly from doing his job. But we should all stay alert to how the U.S. government thwarts the ability — indeed, the right — of states to protect their lands, waters and people.
Patented in the 1940s, PFAS, or Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances have been used since then in cookware, clothing, food wrappers, furniture and firefighting foams. The same qualities that make them useful — water and sunlight don’t destroy their molecules of joined carbon and fluorine atoms — also make them hard to clean up. Instead of breaking down over time, they move up the food chain, persisting in soils and waters and accumulating in the bodies of animals and humans. Some people refer to this toxic family as “forever chemicals.”
In 2018, the Air Force notified New Mexico officials that tests at Cannon — and Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo — detected perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). Firefighting foams the military started using in the 1970s had contaminated groundwater with PFOA and PFOS, just two of the thousands of compounds in the PFAS family.
When New Mexico called for cleanup, the U.S. Department of Defense sued, challenging the state’s authority. Currently, the state is part of a multi-district federal lawsuit seeking past and future clean-up costs and all natural resource damages at Cannon Air Force Base, Holloman Air Force Base, Kirtland Air Force Base, White Sands Missile Range and Fort Wingate. And in June, the state filed another lawsuit, ordering the Pentagon to clean up the plume at Cannon under a new law that clarifies the state’s ability to regulate hazardous PFAS, even if the federal government has neglected to set standards for the chemicals.
By now, the contaminated plume is roughly six miles long, and New Mexicans have spent about $12 million on litigation. We’ve spent millions more testing well water and residents’ blood and connecting rural Curry County residents to a public water system because they can’t safely drink their well water.
“I spend a lot of time battling the PFAS monster that is just omnipresent every day with some new filing or some new denial of access or whatever it is,” NMED Secretary James Kenney told me in an interview. “There is no single more recalcitrant polluter, that is more litigious, than the Department of Defense.”
Kenney says he’s frustrated that the Pentagon keeps trampling the rights of states like New Mexico that are grappling with PFAS contamination. “Where is this notion of cooperative federalism, that states rights are supreme when implementing federal law?” he asks. “I feel like the Department of Defense is giving the middle finger salute to Congress, and they’re OK with it.”
Meanwhile, the toxic chemicals have traveled beyond Cannon into the Ogallala Aquifer, and into the blood of people working on and living near the base. A few years ago, Art Schaap, whose dairy farm overlooks Cannon, euthanized 3,500 cows because their blood — and milk — was poisoned.
More recently, the state released test results for 628 people who worked on or lived near Cannon, all but two of whom had at least one type of PFAS in their blood, and more than 90% of whom tested positive for multiple types of the toxic chemicals.
PFAS’ threat to human health is well known.
Beginning in the 1960s, manufacturers like 3M and DuPont knew from testing workers and nearby water supplies that different PFAS chemicals caused reproductive and development problems; birth defects; liver and kidney disease; and immune system problems. Additional studies have linked exposure to high cholesterol, low infant birth weights, and certain cancers, along with thyroid and hormone disruption.
As a longtime environment reporter, I have witnessed generations of state officials try to protect public health and rein in legacy pollution from federal installations. Despite the massive amount of money American taxpayers invest in the Pentagon — more than a trillion dollars this year alone — the federal government continues to punt on cleanup and put people, and our precious waters, at risk.
At Kirtland Air Force Base, for example, 24 million gallons of jet fuel leaked into the aquifer — and still hasn’t been cleaned up. Los Alamos National Laboratory has long polluted tributaries of the Rio Grande, and few people want to consider what lies in the sediment at the bottom of Cochiti Lake. At White Sands Test Facility, the U.S. Army and NASA have contaminated groundwater with multiple pollutants. Confirmed PFAS contamination also has been established at Fort Wingate Depot, the Santa Fe Army Aviation Support Facility, the Army National Guard’s Roswell Field Maintenance Shop and White Sands Missile Range.
New Mexico will become increasingly arid, and our water challenges will only get tougher. We can all see the parched forests and fields, shallow reservoirs and drying riverbeds. We should also be clear-eyed about the legacy of federal pollution, and what all that contaminated water means for the state’s future. That is water lost to farms, families and the future. And the recently renamed U.S. Department of War isn’t likely to prioritize cleanup anytime soon.
As the federal government openly challenges — or just ignores — the authority of states to protect their own lands, waters and people, New Mexicans can’t be kept in the dark about what we face from legacy or emerging pollutants. And New Mexicans on opposite sides of the political aisle should at least align with one another to protect the state’s waters. No matter what else is happening in the country, our water future here in New Mexico depends on transparency and unity.