Environmental activists in the Pikes Peak region started working to rid the water supply of “forever chemicals” like PFAS, PFOS, and PFOA nearly a decade ago, but the contamination had been happening for over 50 years.
Journalists Sharon Usdain and Rachel Frazin’s new book, “Poisoning the Well: How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America,” published in April, seeks to expose the damage done by corporate greed in overlooking illness and deaths caused by PFAS. The book covers the effects in Alabama, Maine, Delaware and North Carolina, but three chapters of the book focus specifically on the Fountain Valley area’s water supply, which affects those who live in Fountain, Security, Widefield, Stratmoor, Wigwam and Hanover.
“I did not know that forever chemicals meant forever activism,” Liz Rosenbaum said. She has been a PFAS activist since 2016, and her story is in the book. “There’s about 35 of us working together at the national level.”
Rosenbaum, a resident of the Wigwam community near Fountain, is chronically ill and immunocompromised. She said she believes much of her illness is due to PFAS poisoning.
“I had a major surgery coming up on three years ago,” she said. “I lost half of my large intestine, two-and-a-half feet. I always have something wrong with me, and I’m like, it’s PFAS. I haven’t been drinking PFAS water in a long time, but it doesn’t matter, because it damages our organs.”
PFAS, which includes Teflon and other fluorinated polymers, started to be used after World War II in non-stick pans, water-repellent textiles, and in aqueous film-forming foams (AFFF) used to put out jet-fuel fires for the military.
Rosenbaum’s activist group, Fountain Valley Clean Water Coalition, has helped pass seven laws in Colorado regulating PFAS contamination, she said.
“We started in 2016,” Rosenbaum said, “And our first law we passed was in 2019.”
She credits the activist she works alongside with passing Amara’s Law in Minnesota, named for PFAS activist Amara Strande, who died at age 20 of a rare form of liver cancer.
“We passed that in eight other states,” Rosenbaum said. “That’s how we’ve been able to get the EPA to set enforceable limits.”
Legislation passed in Colorado also benefits people in other states, she said.
“The last two [laws] are going to ban it in consumer products like to-go coffee cups, anything that is grease-resistant like Wendy’s wrapping paper or Starbucks cups,” she said. “What we did in Colorado, by banning it in consumer goods, the year that we passed this law, two years ago, four workers in Alabama died inhaling the fumes.”
But not everyone fighting for clean water lives to see justice.
Mark Favors, another PFAS activist who has testified before Congress, lost at least 10 family members who lived in the Fountain Valley area and were exposed to PFAS, and about 25 total have had cancer, Udasin and Frazin reported in their 2022 article published by The Hill.
“Can you imagine somebody who says, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I poisoned your whole family for the last 30 years?'” Favors said in “Poisoning the Well.”
Rosenbaum’s friend and fellow activist with the Fountain Valley Water Coalition, Molly Miller, died of breast cancer in late 2022.
It’s in everything that we have around us, but where the most damage is done is when it’s in our drinking water. – Liz Rosenbaum, PFAS activist
“It’s hard to run a coalition when your right-hand person is not here anymore,” she said. The book describes how Molly left behind many three-ring binders full of files about PFAS for the coalition.
Ronald Mixon, who dived often in the Tennessee River in the 1990s, also mentioned in the third chapter of the book, said he is the last survivor out of 11 other men he used to dive with.
“I got PFAS in there like crazy because it don’t come out,” he said in his interview.
Forever chemicals in water on local military bases
PFAS and other “forever chemicals” act as proteins in our cells, Rosenbaum said. Because PFAS is not actually a protein, damaged cells can cause organ failure and cancer.
“We have been poisoned with our consent, to the point that polar bears have some of the highest levels of PFAS chemicals in their bloodstream,” she said. “It’s in everything that we have around us, but where the most damage is done is when it’s in our drinking water. That is the highest level of contamination. It absorbs in our body at a higher concentration.”
“If you’re in an area where the water is poisoned, you’re constantly consuming it, taking a shower in it.”
The most vulnerable to PFAS poisoning are smaller communities, rural farmers and military children, Rosenbaum said.
“When you’re a military kid, you’re moving to all the bases where the water poisoning has happened, but you don’t have any justice,” she said. “Your mom or dad who is in the military can get VA benefits like for Agent Orange exposure, but when you’re a kid, you’re in the womb and you’re drinking it.”
The Department of Defense started phasing out AFFF and said it would stop purchasing PFAS-based foam in 2023 and eliminate PFAS material in 2024, as part of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, according to “Poisoning the Well.”
But the damage continues for years.
At the end of 2023, the Defense Department found that 574 out of more than 700 total bases needed PFAS remediation, which could take into the 2030s and 2024s, Usdain wrote. The only known contamination right now is near Peterson Space Force Base and not the Air Force Academy, although the Air Force tested residential wells in the nearby Woodmen Valley neighborhood.
PFAS-based firefighting foams polluted the drinking water for nearly 100,000 Coloradans and five water systems downstream from Peterson, according to Colorado State Senator Tony Exum’s legislation that Usdain referenced.
Samples taken at Fort Carson from 2019 and 2020 showed “forever chemical” contamination as high as 151,000 ppt for PFOA, 55,000 ppt for PFOS, and 9,800 ppt for PFBS, with similar concentrations at Peterson, the Colorado Springs municipal airport and the Air Force Academy, according to Usdain.
“Even down the I-25 highway at Fort Carson, the US Army base where AFFF hadn’t been used in more than three decades, the environment has remained contaminated both on and off the base itself,” Usdain and Frazin wrote in their book. “At multiple spots cited in a January 2022 report, levels of several types of PFAS exceeded risk thresholds set by military leadership-who use those levels to determine the need for further investigation of a given site.”
If the military base is the direct drinking water provider instead of Colorado Springs Utilities, the levels of PFOA or PFOS in the water are often higher and unsafe, Usdain writes, referencing an internal memorandum with data from December 2019.
Although U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen introduced legislation to make PFAS blood testing available to military families in 2021, PFAS testing is not available right now at VA medical centers, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ website.
“These kids are consuming it and they don’t have any access to finding out what their levels are,” Rosenbaum said. “Families don’t understand why their kid is sick all the time.”
Lack of medical access adds to problem
There are no major hospitals south of Platte Avenue in the greater Colorado Springs area, meaning that rural communities like Fountain Valley lack access to healthcare and regular checkups and screenings, while also experiencing autoimmune diseases likely caused by water poisoning.
“My daughter will be 29 in a few weeks,” Rosenbaum said. “Her high school friends have all had very difficult pregnancies and their young kids are affected. So she’s pushing off having kids until later, because hopefully her PFAS levels go down.”
“If you’re aware, you can make better choices, but if you’re not aware, then you’re just left with, ‘Why am I sick all the time and why can’t I go visit doctors,'” she said. “Everything puts you into a poverty loop, but yet these companies make billions and trillions of dollars.”
Joaquin Mobley, Mark Favors’ cousin, said “Poisoning the Well” helps highlight his family’s story.
“It gives validation to some of the things that we always suspected, because we were aware of what was going on, specifically with Peterson Air Force Base,” he said. “The ground was soaking it up, and then it was contaminating the water. Like a lot of the elders felt like it was going to eventually trickle into some type of water supply and it was going to impact Colorado Springs.”
“We ended up finding that it impacted our family a great deal.”
For consumers who want to better understand just how pervasive “forever chemicals” can be, Rosenbaum recommends they watch the movie “Dark Waters” (2019) and the documentary “The Devil We Know” (2018).
Finding and creating better options
Some manufacturers rebrand PFAS-related chemicals by changing the chemical composition enough to change what that compound is called, she said, but the harmful effects remain the same.
But there are more ethical companies, Rosenbaum said. Keen footwear is PFAS-free. Mobley is a fashion major, and said he and Favors have been researching biodegradable clothing.
“My hope is to open up an athletic line that is going to be PFAS-free,” he said.
The Wigwam community’s drinking water had 14 ppt PFOA and 24 ppt PFOS as of January 2020 (below the EPA’s 2016 health guidelines, but above the legal limit of 4 ppt set by the agency in 2024).
But Rosenbaum said officials are expecting to start PFAS-filtering the Wigwam community’s water supply soon, using a trailer with three different types of filtration, granulated active carbon similar to a Brita filter, reverse osmosis and electric coagulation often used in mining. She also noted that the EPA is paying for the testing to help other small communities nationwide filter PFAS out of their water supply.
Colorado Springs based PFAS-remediation Moss Parker, which started in 2017, may end up working with the Wigwam community to help eliminate PFAS collected there entirely, CEO Susan Pattee said.
“What my company does is destroy the molecules so that we can get rid of it for good rather than just moving it around,” she said.
Current methods to remove PFAS contamination collect and remove the chemicals, but then dispose of PFAS in landfills, which could ultimately end up back in the water supply, Pattee said. In New Jersey, where PFAS was stored in barrels, it corroded and leached into places that weren’t previously tainted by PFAS.
“When we first started, we were getting a lot of pushback on our technology because people were just saying, dilution is the solution, just add more water to it and it’s not as high a concentration,” she said. “But we know that with the current guidelines [being] 4 ppt, that’s a drop in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. It’s not really something you can ignore, because it’s so persistent in the environment and then bioaccumulates in the body without being able to remove it. So we really need to just get rid of it.”
While regulatory agencies like the EPA focus on PFOA and PFOS concentrations, there are more than 5,000 compounds under the umbrella of PFAS, Pattee said. Remediation efforts used to focus on longer carbon chains in the environment. “It used to be thought that the shorter chains weren’t as harmful, but now they’re finding that those are equal if not more harmful,” she said.
Moss Parker’s technology processes PFAS-contaminants over a catalyst that breaks the molecules down to fluoride and small amounts of carbon dioxide, Pattee said. “We’re able to go from hundreds of millions of parts-per-trillion to undetectable,” she said.
For anyone who wants to become involved, please visit the Fountain Valley Clean Water Coalition on Facebook.
