LOCALIZE IT: When PFAS contaminates drinking water, private well owners may be the last to know
EDITORS/NEWS DIRECTORS
The roughly 40 million Americans who get their water from a private well are particularly vulnerable to harmful forever chemicals.
Forever chemicals, or PFAS, are uniquely able to repel moisture and withstand heat, which made them useful for essential products like waterproof shoes and firefighting foam. They are manmade and ubiquitous. The problem is they don’t break down in the environment and research has linked them to increased risk of certain cancers and developmental delays in children.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s concern over PFAS has increased in recent years and they’ve now issued a rule requiring public utilities to test for PFAS in drinking water and ensure levels meet federal safety standards. Utilities have a few years to comply.
But those rules don’t apply to private well owners. Lots of well owners wouldn’t want them to — they enjoy not paying a water bill and their independence – but it causes problems when contamination is present and well owners would otherwise turn to the state for help. Because of the lack of testing, well owners near heavily contaminated industrial sites are often the last to know there are high amounts of PFAS in the groundwater. It can take years, and frustrating litigation, for them to receive clean water again.
Each state’s rules and funding commitment to PFAS is different, which provides lots of opportunity to localize the issue.
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READ AP’S COVERAGE
A crisis emerges across the US as ‘forever chemicals’ quietly contaminate drinking water wells
Takeaways from the AP’s reporting on PFAS contamination of private drinking water wells
Takeaways from investigation into the toxic forever chemical legacy of the South’s carpet industry
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SOME STATE POLICIES ON PFAS TESTING
We surveyed states for their policies. Below is a selection that told the AP they weren’t proactively sampling private wells beyond areas they already suspected were contaminated:
Alabama
Arkansas
Georgia
Indiana
Louisiana
Missouri
Oklahoma
Virginia
— — —
And here’s a few states that have done quite a bit or set up complex teams to deal with lots of PFAS contamination:
Michigan
Minnesota
New Hampshire
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INITIAL RESOURCES TO FIND INFORMATION IN YOUR STATE
You can broadly find the concentration of wells in your state with this EPA tool: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/be9006c30a2148f595693066441fb8eb/page/Map
This is a list of PFAS sites that was aggregated by Northeastern University’s PFAS Project Lab:
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/12412ab41b3141598e0bb48523a7c940/
Many contaminated sites are linked to PFAS use at airports, military bases, factories, or to landfills and wastewater treatment plants that received industrial waste.
These tools are references and may not always be 100% accurate or complete, but they can show where there are lots of wells and if those wells are close to very contaminated sites.
The National PFAS Contamination Coalition is a network of local activists, many of whom have experienced contamination in their own community or even in their own water. If there are problems in your state, they can be a useful starting point to learn more and what government has — and hasn’t — done to help. They have a list of names under “About” then “The Leadership Team” that can be searched for contact information.
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FINDING PFAS IN YOUR COMMUNITY
There is also a database of utility PFAS results. This is a little complicated but it is a helpful resource and can direct you straight to testing results by your local utility if available. Here’s the link to the EPA’s PFAS Analytic Tools. From there, scroll down a few ticks and click on “Open PFAS Analytic Tools” that’s above an image of a large map. After clicking through the pop up window, there are several categories to choose from on the top of the page. Select “Drinking Water (UCMR).” The tool can take a little while to load.
The EPA has asked many utilities to test for PFAS and this displays the results. You can filter the data to find your utility’s concentrations for the two most common types of PFAS, known as PFOA and PFOS.
The data table running across the bottom is where to focus. The first column should be “PWS ID.” In the column titled “contaminant” click on the magnifying glass and scroll down to PFOA and PFOS. Click on them and they should turn green then click the check box in the top right hand corner of the small window. This tightens the search to just those two types of PFAS. Then click on the magnifying glass next to “PWS Name.” Type in your town name and you should see it come up.
For example, let’s look for La Crosse, Wisconsin. Type in La Crosse and the top one, “La Crosse Waterworks” appears to be the most likely option. (If it isn’t clear which result is yours, google the number in the “PWS ID” column of the result, including the term “PWS ID.” For La Crosse, that’s WI6320309, which checks out.)
Selecting La Crosse provides a lot of results and two columns are particularly important. “Result At or Above UCMR MRL” and “Analytic Result Value ng/l” (ng/l is parts per trillion, or ppt, which is how PFAS is measured in drinking water). You can see that there are two quite high results from 2014, a PFOS result of 53 ppt and then 140 ppt. The current standard is 4 ppt. Although that standard is newer and older guidelines allowed for higher amounts, a number dozens of times above the current federal standard is an alarm bell that something was wrong.
The column “Sample Point ID” shows that this high result came from Well 23, and sure enough, when La Crosse PFAS problems are looked up, they struggled with Well 23 results, eventually taking it offline.
It is important to note that not all test results are included in this database, but it can be a starting point for asking a utility what they are doing and then asking local leaders if there are nearby well owners who could also be harmed. Sometimes, a community will be working to solve the public water supply problem without looking to see if private wells are contaminated. Residents of a nearby island that relied on private wells sued La Crosse over this exact issue, alleging they weren’t told about the high results and therefore kept drinking contaminated water.
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POTENTIAL HEALTH IMPACTS
Explaining the health consequences of PFAS is complicated in part because there are so many types and the amount of research varies widely depending on which particular PFAS is at issue. The two most common types are the ones the EPA has set drinking water limits for, PFOA and PFOS. There is robust research on the health consequences of those two. But though they raise the risk of certain diseases, it can be difficult if not impossible to link someone’s specific health problem to PFAS exposure. In general, higher concentrations of PFOA and PFOS bring a greater risk to human health, especially if someone is exposed over a long period of time.
The EPA has a helpful overview website on health consequences. They list these main health concerns:
— Reproductive effects such as decreased fertility or increased high blood pressure in pregnant women.
— Developmental effects or delays in children, including low birth weight, accelerated puberty, bone variations, or behavioral changes.
— Increased risk of some cancers, including prostate, kidney and testicular cancers.
— Reduced ability of the body’s immune system to fight infections, including reduced vaccine response.
— Interference with the body’s natural hormones.
— Increased cholesterol levels and/or risk of obesity.
If there’s a need for more in-depth reporting on health concerns, EPA also prepared detailed risk assessments for PFOA and PFOS that explain the current state of the science. There is research on other types, too, and it’s always a good idea to contact the authors of that research to better understand what can and can’t be said in a story about the danger.
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REPORTING LINES — WHAT’S GOING ON
First, look for lawsuits and settlements. Settlements may serve certain residents by providing them with a free, clean, drinking water source, but the AP found there are often frustrating limits to those deals. There may be some people excluded that need help, for example, and even those that are eligible for help may face long delays in accessing it. Nor do these settlements always provide for a complete cleanup of the contamination. It may be newsworthy to simply write about what hasn’t been done.
Then there are state laws. When the AP surveyed state policies, the range was remarkable. As AP explains in the story, some states have proactively tested and provided robust help when problems were found. Others do nearly nothing. Finding out what policies are in place and what legislators are doing provides a lot of insight into any state’s engagement with PFAS contamination. About half of states have PFAS “action plans” that outline their plans for testing and remediation, as well as a timeline for their strategy.
Wisconsin is a great example of this. It used a federal grant to do a survey of private wells to see how often PFAS contamination showed up. The results from the small town of Stella were alarming and allowed officials to act. But many states haven’t done that kind of survey and therefore might not know about contaminated places. Wisconsin has also been in a political fight over resources for PFAS, and many other states struggle to make funding available. Whatever is happening in the statehouse — or is stuck in the statehouse — will likely lead back to local issues and problems.
Though private wells aren’t regulated federally, the U.S. government also plays a role because of its historic use of PFAS-infused firefighting foam in safety exercises and fire operations at military sites. The Department of Defense has been involved in testing private wells for PFAS at locations nationwide. Our story didn’t have space to dig into the federal response, but it is another avenue for accountability.
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REPORTING LINES — IN-DEPTH
So much of the reporting for the AP story was possible because people wanted to talk about it. Community meetings are a helpful starting point to reach residents who care, although early on, local leaders may want to downplay the problem — significant amounts of contamination mean significant headaches for local leaders. That may not happen near your community, but it’s a trend to keep in mind.
The AP knocked on dozens of doors and heard from people directly about what they were frustrated by. Spending a couple of hours in a neighborhood that’s had a problem reveals key details: what people are worried about, which officials they’ve heard from and whether they even understand what PFAS is.
Once the concerns of residents are understood, it may be helpful to think of the reporting process as a fact checking effort. If town officials are saying they are addressing peoples’ concerns, are they really? Are people’s questions being answered in a way that aligns with the science and are any significant resources being deployed to help if the problem is severe?
It may also be helpful to think about the end game — how hard will it be to restore safe water to people? That might involve hooking a well owner up to local municipal water, digging a deeper well into a safer aquifer or installing expensive filters that must be regularly replaced. Are the solutions being discussed going to achieve these things quickly and at low cost?
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EMBED THIS GRAPHIC
PFAS-Forever Stained-Wells— Graphic. This graphic is a simplified depiction of how a private drinking well can become contaminated by harmful forever chemicals known as PFAS. This graphic is current as of February 2, 2026 and will not update. Source: AP
To embed, insert this code into your CMS:
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