Chemical worries
French Island wells contaminated with PFAS, pushing families to bottled water usage
“We have neighbors who have cancer, ... neighbors who have had fertility issues. And all of that just keeps going around in your head all the time.” Amanda Hartley Town of Campbell resident
TOWN OF CAMPBELL - Getting the kids ready for bed is now a production for Amanda Hartley.
It involves close supervision, as each child fills up a cup from the 5-gallon jug of water in the corner of the kitchen and walks it to the bathroom, using it to wet their toothbrush, brush their teeth and rinse their brush at the end. Her family can no longer use the water from the tap to brush their teeth or drink.
It’s contaminated with “forever chemicals” and could pose a risk to their health.
It’s a constant concern for Hartley, who has to ensure that everyone is drinking, cooking and brushing their teeth only with water from the 5-gallon jug in the corner of the kitchen, even the cats. They don’t want to risk exposure to the chemicals, fearful of the lasting health effects chemicals known as PFAS have been linked to. It’s been a lot of work to make sure the kids — ages 7, 9, 12 and 14 — learn all new habits.
Hartley is currently staying with her father, Tim Hartley, as she and her husband build a home near Viroqua. Tim said moving to the large jugs of water has been difficult — they’re hard to lift and replace and he now has to unlearn going to the sink every time he needs a drink or to cook. The adjustment to the new source of water has caused the avid coffee drinker to pour out several pots over the past months because he’s filled the machine with tap water out of habit.
“I’ve filled my coffee up and cripes, I used tap water,” he said. “So you have to dump it out and start a whole new pot.”
Tim’s house is located on French Island, the small sliver of land between the Black River, the Mississippi River and Lake Onalaska. The northern portion of the island belongs to the city of La Crosse, while the rest is home to the Town of Campbell.
He’s lived there for decades, raising Amanda and her siblings. It’s an idyllic town of just over
4,000 people, bordered by the water and the towering bluffs on either side. But the peaceful scenery has been interrupted by the knowledge that the water beneath it is poisoned — some wells with three to four times the recommended limit for PFAS in drinking water.
“It’s scary,” Amanda said. “And it’s not only scary, it’s just kind of heartbreaking.”
PFAS result of firefighting foam
Where the contamination on French Island came from is no mystery for those working to track the chemicals through the ground.
The chemicals are a vital ingredient in most firefighting foams because of their ability to easily halt high-temperature oil fires. The foam is so successful at putting out fires with gasoline that it was used under requirement by both the U.S. military and the Federal Aviation Administration for years.
For French Island, the firefighting foam came from the La Crosse Regional Airport, which takes up the entire northern portion of the island. For decades, the airport used foam to extinguish and prevent fires, said John Storlie, a groundwater geologist with the OS Group, an environmental consulting group working to identify the spread of the chemicals.
Under requirement from the FAA, PFAS-containing foam has been tested each year on the grounds, allowing the chemicals to seep into the soil as firefighters collected a small sample of foam for testing. According to documents from the state Department of Natural Resources, about 150 gallons were discharged into the ground for testing alone over the past 21 years.
Contamination has happened in other ways, too. Burn pits used in the 1980s and ‘90s were routinely extinguished with foam.
In 1970, a plane crashed during its descent to the airport, chopping off the tops of trees before it skidded to a halt near the airport, requiring the use of foam. In 1998, a charter plane heading for the Super Bowl during a snowstorm spilled jet fuel, leading crews to spray foam to prevent a fire from breaking out.
The latest discharge of the foam was in 2001, when a small plane crashed during the opening day of Air Fest, killing the pilot and one passenger. The resulting fire, at the southern portion of the airport, was extinguished with foam.
After the fire was extinguished, the foam settled into the ground, spreading through the sandy soil of the island, leaching into the private wells of the residents who live there.
According to documents on file with the DNR, the firefighting foams purchased by the City of La Crosse were most likely purchased from 3M or Tyco Fire Products. Tyco has a facility that mixes and tests foam in Marinette, which has resulted in the state’s worst PFAS contamination.
La Crosse first detected “forever” chemicals in 2015 during tests for unregulated chemicals in wells 23 and 24 near the airport, Storlie said. Both the wells were decommissioned after that to protect the health of residents in the city.
It wasn’t until late 2020 that private drinking wells started to be sampled, after the DNR named the City of La Crosse
the responsible party for the contamination. As of Jan. 20, 125 wells had been sampled in the neighborhoods south of the airport, Storlie said. The city is declining to test the rest of the private wells on the island outside of established boundaries of contamination, even though residents have requested it.
Out of those, 40 wells had levels of PFAS over the state’s recommended limit and 65 more tested positive but under that level. The other wells tested by the city are still waiting on results to be returned from labs. Other homeowners have paid to test their own wells, for which data has not been released.
Fear and uncertainty
PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a family of man-made chemicals used for their water- and stain-resistant qualities in products like clothing and carpet, nonstick cookware, packaging and firefighting foam. The family includes 5,000 compounds, which are persistent, remaining both in the environment and human body over time.
The chemicals can have devastating effects. They’ve been linked to types of kidney and testicular cancers, lower birth weights, harm to immune and reproductive systems, altered hormone regulation and altered thyroid hormones.
Tim Hartley is consistently plagued with the wonder if the prostate cancer he was diagnosed with in 2015 was related to drinking the chemicals for years without knowing. Tim isn’t the only one in the neighborhood who’s had cancer. He and Amanda were able to list several people who have gotten sick and some who died in recent years from the disease, as well as others who struggled to conceive until they moved out of the neighborhood.
“You know, you should be able to know you’re safe here, but we aren’t,” Amanda said. “But we have neighbors who have cancer, and other neighbors who have had fertility issues. And all of that just keeps going around in your head all the time.”
The contamination has also led to falling property values.
Tim said he was contemplating putting a two-car garage on his home but put the project on hold after learning about the pollution. He doesn’t want to sink money into a property that may not be worth anything because of the contamination.
“I mean, nobody really wants to put any money into their house right now,” he said.
Tanner Hageman, 27, lives next door to the Hartleys and is worried that the first investment he ever made — buying the home he lives in — may have backfired on him.
“I converted a three-season room to a garage, I took out a lot of brush around the back, put up a privacy fence, did a lot of lawn care stuff,” he said of the work he’s done to the home. “I continue to do upgrades to the inside.”
Instead of worrying what to work on next and when he’ll be able to upgrade to a bigger home, he’s now worrying if he’s stuck with his current home.
“I worked to save up, then it’s gone like that,” he said. “That’s the part I’m worried about most.”
Lower home values have been linked to areas with PFAS contamination. In a study on the damage that a PFAS contamination plume originating at the Minneapolis 3M plant caused, home values fell about 7% in the 10 years following the discovery of the chemicals.
But the most frustrating part of finding out about the contamination for French Island residents has been the lack of information. The city hasn’t been sharing a lot of information, forcing the residents to do research on their own.
Some homeowners have started working with environmental attorneys.
Tim Jacobson, of local firm Fitzpatrick, Skemp & Butler, is representing 140 families, and last month served the city with a notice of claim, the first step in a potential lawsuit.
“There is definitely an overwhelming sense of fear and uncertainty in the neighborhood,” Jacobson said. “I hear from person after person and they’re just scared. They don’t know what to do, they don’t know if they’re going to get sick, if their children are going to get sick. It’s devastating.”
La Crosse Mayor Tim Kabat has accused Jacobson and the families he represents of trying to sow division in the community, but Jacobson sees a lawsuit as a way to hold the city accountable, and in turn, the businesses that sold the foams.
Kabat contends the city isn’t ultimately responsible for the contamination.
“Manufacturers of this foam hid the negative impacts from the public for many years,” he said. “In some way I feel the city has been somewhat victimized by this.”
The city last week filed a lawsuit against a number of companies — including Tyco and 3M — for the pollution and the impact it has had on the city. Ultimately, if the city were to win, the manufacturers of the foam could be required to pay for a new water system for residents, along with cleanup.
Jacobson agrees that the companies that produced the foam should be held liable, but he also believes the city should accept its role in the contamination.
“The city has accepted responsibility for conducting this investigation, and the city was party to using the firefighting foam,” he said. “That’s an obvious responsible party.”
Jacobson is also exploring whether health issues in the area, like Tim’s cancer, are related to the PFAS contamination. He’s recommended that residents have blood drawn and tested for the chemicals to help show how greatly the contamination has affected the community.
‘We just want to be OK’
For Amanda, she just wants to see some type of action. It’s been months since they found out about the PFAS, and no one has yet offered a concrete solution to the issue.
“I just don’t feel like anything’s been made a priority,” she said. “And that hurts for people who have spent their whole lives here.”
There have been several ideas for remediation floated, including installing a double filtration system that would pull PFAS from drinking water in each home with an activated carbon filter. While this would be the most simple solution, there isn’t any information on how much it would cost, how much homeowners would be responsible for and how filters would be swapped out and disposed of.
“Do I have to pay for them to be shipped to be destroyed? Because I ain’t going to do that,” Tim said. “I don’t expect to pay anything, because this isn’t my fault.”
Another solution is to connect each home with high levels of PFAS to La Crosse’s city water system. That would require totally new water infrastructure to be run to the portion of the island not already owned by the City of La Crosse, plus costly installations for every home. Typically, homeowners would be required to pay to hook up their own home to the city’s pipes, but it’s unclear if that cost would be covered by the city or the resident because of the contamination.
Both Tim and Amanda — like the rest of the neighborhood — just want an end to the heavy 5-gallon bottles. The family goes through seven or more of them a week, and the empty bottles stacked near the door have become a frequent target for the family’s cats, who seem to enjoy the plastic bottles skittering across the floor. Amanda just wants to know that even after she moves out in the future, her dad will be safe.
She doesn’t want the contamination swept under the rug or downplayed because she can see it’s seriously affecting the lives all around her. She hopes to work with the city to reach the best conclusion for everyone living under the burden of the chemicals on the island.
“We just want to be OK,” she said. “And to be made whole again.”