How do you fix ‘forever’? Cleaning up PFAS from groundwater in Santa Fe County will be difficult, expensive task
Pollutants linked to cancer have seeped into Santa Fe’s backyard, and officials at all levels of government are trying to determine how to address it.
Toxic chemical compounds known as PFAS were detected late last year in residential wells in La Cienega and La Cieneguilla, Santa Fe County announced in November.
The likely source is a New Mexico National Guard site at the Santa Fe Regional Airport. PFAS, potentially from foam used in firefighter training and fire suppression, was detected there in early 2023.
Three of the six wells tested in the communities south of Santa Fe showed PFAS levels above those the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency deems safe.
Area residents worry about their long-term exposure to PFAS, which has likely been in their groundwater for decades. The potential community health threat has put pressure on federal, state, county and city officials to tackle a problem that’s difficult and costly to fix. It’s also costly for residents, many of whom have been paying for their own well testing and installation of filtration systems on contaminated wells.
The first step is determining how extensive the contamination is and where exactly it came from, New Mexico National Guard spokesman Hank Minitrez said.
“We don’t know the size of what people are starting to call a plume,” he said. “We need further testing out there to determine just what area is affected by this.”
PFAS is short for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances. Exposure to high levels of the chemicals, found in an array of household goods, can lead to high blood pressure in pregnant women, low birth weight in infants, increased risk of kidney or testicular cancer and increased cholesterol levels.
They are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they take thousands of years to break down and last indefinitely in the body.
Compounding the challenge of addressing the local PFAS contamination are blurred jurisdictional boundaries, with various government agencies exploring who is responsible for causing it and, in turn, remediating it.
A meeting is planned in April for the city of Santa Fe, Santa Fe County, the National Guard, the state Environment Department and the Defense Department to discuss a plan of action everyone can agree on, Minitrez said.
An environmental chemist said government officials’ confused scrambling for answers in response to the PFAS intrusion is happening throughout the country, as more widespread testing reveals how pervasive the substances are in water systems.
“Somebody just said ‘the black death is coming’ when PFAS are mentioned,” said Michael Ketterer, professor emeritus of chemistry at Northern Arizona University. “That’s how the regulating community and the government agencies are going to respond. This is like a problem that they can’t ever fix. Everybody is going to hate them, and it’s going to make them hate their job.”
Tracking where it began
Regional National Guard officials were told around 2019 to conduct tests at their aviation support facility at the city airport as part of a larger Defense Department investigation into PFAS contamination at military bases. Technicians found the site, like hundreds of installations across the U.S., was contaminated with PFAS from firefighting foam used in training.
Transparency is important to the Guard, Minitrez said, which is why it publicized its decision to look into possible PFAS contamination and issued a report in 2023 when the chemicals were detected.
PFAS-laced foam was used there for years, perhaps decades, until the early 2000s.
Aside from training, Guard members would spray the foam from fire extinguishers during inspections to ensure they worked.
The PFAS testing showed it was mainly small amounts released at the site, Minitrez said, indicating crews never had to use extinguishers to put out an aircraft fire, which would have saturated the ground with the foam.
Samples taken from a total of seven spots showed PFOA and PFHxS, both potent compounds, at six times the EPA’s accepted threshold.
Although the Guard leases the airport site from the city, the facility is federal, putting the cleanup under CERCLA, Minitrez said, referring to the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act.
CERCLA is more commonly known as Superfund, the federal program for cleaning up hazardous waste sites, accidents, spills and pollutants.
But the National Guard might not be the only source of PFAS in the water.
In a recent statement, the state Environment Department said the city’s nearby wastewater treatment plant and its fire crews responding to fires at the airport — using the toxic foam — might also have released PFAS into the environment.
The contamination violates the state’s hazardous waste and water quality laws, giving regulators the authority to issue penalties and cleanup orders to the polluters, the agency said in a news release.
State officials are analyzing data they received from nine monitoring wells the city placed around the treatment plant to check for PFAS pollution.
City Public Utilities Director John Dupuis said those monitoring wells have detected PFOA at levels that would exceed future EPA standards.
PFOA is one of the PFAS compounds the EPA aims to put on a hazardous waste list, which will give the state more authority to order the pollutants cleaned up.
Environment Department spokesman Matt Maez wrote in an email the agency is working with the city and the National Guard to conduct the necessary sampling to nail down the size and source of the contamination.
“Once this is complete, we will hold responsible parties accountable for site remediation,” Maez wrote. “While PFAS contamination is a challenging issue to address, it has and continues to be a priority issue for the Environment Department.”
Testing and outreach
The tests Santa Fe County conducted for a handful of private residential wells and the La Cienega Mutual Domestic Water Association indicate the PFAS pollution is probably confined to the west side of La Cienega and La Cieneguilla, although that could affect dozens of private wells, the county’s water resources manager said. And more wells are likely to show contamination as residents do their own tests.
The good news, officials said, is the main production well for the water association did not test positive for PFAS, showing the toxins’ spread is limited. Also, no recent tests have detected toxic PFAS levels in the city and county water systems.
Still, the full scope of the contamination in the two small communities is unknown, county water managers say.
The county conducted well testing after learning the National Guard had detected PFAS pollution in April 2023, picking residential wells that were within a mile of the Guard’s site.
The county recently received a $459,000 grant from the Environment Department to “investigate, model and plan for known PFAS contamination,” the grant agreement states.
The funding will be used to “determine if and how the chemicals may be migrating,” county spokeswoman Olivia Romo wrote in an email. That may include testing some additional wells, “but the extent of any additional testing that may be required is not yet known,” she added.
County Commissioner Camilla Bustamante, who lives in the area and has deep family roots in the two communities, said she pushed the county to become a resource for residents who might be affected, even though the county probably didn’t contribute to the contamination.
The county should, “at a minimum, identify the extent of the problem and bring attention to the issue to mitigate
further and future impacts on community health,” she said.
She believes educating residents about what they can do to protect themselves is vital in these traditionally agricultural communities, she said, calling it an environmental justice issue.
However, Bustamante said it would be inappropriate for the county to reimburse private landowners for testing of their private wells.
That leaves residents covering the costs of their own tests, with prices starting at $300 per sample to determine if PFAS is in the water.
Meanwhile, as part of the larger outreach, the county has hired public health consultant Shelly Moeller for a six-month contract up to $50,000 to take questions from the community and deliver answers in English and Spanish. She is also researching funding options for private well owners to test and filter their water.
Moeller is helping the county organize a PFAS town hall March 14 at Santa Fe Community College featuring panelists from the county, city, National Guard, Environment Department and offices of U.S. Sens. Ben Ray Luján and Martin Heinrich, and U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández.
Playing catch-up
Part of the problem with assessing how to respond to PFAS is that it’s not well understood, even among people in the waste industry.
“Whatever we knew yesterday [about PFAS], it’s going to be different tomorrow,” Dupuis said.
He said he’s spent “a few all-nighters” trying to learn more about the issue since the contamination was discovered. One important action that could be taken immediately is hiring a PFAS expert to help assess the scope of the problem and the potential threat, he added.
The Environment Department’s statement that some of the PFAS could be coming from the city’s wastewater treatment plant is fair, Dupuis said. There’s “no step in the plant where we add PFAS,” he noted, but if it’s in the water that comes into the plant, it’s likely in the effluent as well.
Ketterer, the environmental chemist, said the odds are great PFAS will show up in any wastewater treatment plant that’s tested because the filtering and purification systems are not designed to break down the tenacious chemical bonding in these compounds.
This resilience is why PFAS are called “forever chemicals” and why they’ve proven effective in household products, such as water-resistant fabrics and nonstick cookware, Ketterer said. It also makes PFAS such a pesky pollutant and health hazard, he added.
“These compounds have sort of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde nature,” Ketterer said.
The water solubility of PFAS makes them troublesome because after they absorbs into water, they become extremely difficult to purge, especially on a large scale, he said.
For this reason, environmental health advocates say the most practical solution now is for people to remove PFAS from their water with filters, either mounted on pitchers or installed in the plumbing.
Purging PFAS from aquifers is very slow and costly, Ketterer said. The most common method is to pump out the tainted water, treat it and inject it back into the ground, he said, noting the process is similar to one used at Los Alamos National Laboratory for years to treat an underground chromium plume.
Technology to aid large PFAS cleanups is bound to improve as the market for it grows while increased litigation forces polluters to clean up their messes, he said.
There are no regulations for PFAS being discharged at treatment plants, but Dupuis thinks that could be on the horizon.
He also believes Northern New Mexico residents would be responsive to a public education campaign about what to keep out of the water supply to avoid PFAS contamination.
Still, with the compounds existing in so many man-made materials, Dupuis said, “I don’t know what to tell them not to put in the wastewater.”