Molly Montgomery, Searchlight New Mexico
Raised in Taos, Mariah Blake is a Washington, D.C.-based investigative reporter and the author of an important new book called “They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals.” Her project is the culmination of eight years of research and reporting on forever chemicals, or PFAS — a large class of toxic man-made substances that have been used in a host of consumer products, and that are now in the bloodstream of virtually every living being.
Much of the book focuses on the village of Hoosick Falls, New York, and residents’ decade-long struggle for clean drinking water. But it also exposes the secret history of forever chemicals, some of which is deeply relevant to New Mexico. As Blake explains, PFAS were developed during the Manhattan Project, and serious contamination has occurred at a number of locations in the state, most notably Holloman Air Force Base, ten miles west of Alamogordo. According to researchers at the University of New Mexico, who have been studying the area around Holloman for the past couple of years, wildlife near the base is contaminated with higher levels of PFAS than have been recorded anywhere else in the world.
The source of the contamination is a firefighting foam that has been used since the 1970s at military sites around the world, including Holloman, Cannon Air Force Base, Kirtland Air Force Base, the White Sands Missile Range and Fort Wingate. Scientists say they don’t know where the contamination zone around Holloman ends, and that the PFAS are likely traveling: through the soil, air and water, and also in the bodies of migratory birds, which hunters around the country shoot and eat. The New Mexico Department of Health is advising anyone who consumed birds from the area between 2010 and 2024 to seek medical guidance.
PFAS—or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, as they are formally known—take hundreds or thousands of years to break down in nature. Studies have linked even low levels of PFAS exposure with fertility issues, various cancers, developmental delays, hormone disruption and reduced immune system function. Blake’s book makes clear just how ubiquitous PFAS are in our lives and how dangerous they are, how difficult the remediation will be and how hard ordinary citizens are fighting to repair the damage.
Searchlight: Where did PFAS come from?
Mariah Blake: The U.S. government developed this class of chemicals as part of the Manhattan Project. Most people know the project’s main goal: designing and building the first atomic bomb, with top physicists and engineers working at secret locations around the country, foremost among them, Los Alamos.
But there was another aspect of the program that never registered in history books. It involved some of the leading chemists from all over the country, working with the chemical giant DuPont to develop PFAS, which were then known as fluorocarbons. They were needed for uranium enrichment. They ended up being absolutely essential to the bomb project.
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Pretty quickly, chemists were able to develop a variety of methods to manufacture these chemicals on a commercial scale. But it was clear from very early on that they were dangerous. At the plants where they were manufactured, in southwest New Jersey, fires and explosions were common. Workers were constantly being hospitalized with breathing problems or chemical burns. Farmers downwind of the plants started to complain that their peach crops were burning up, that their cows were so crippled they couldn’t stand, that they had to graze by crawling on their bellies. Farm workers who ate the produce they picked fell ill, too.
The farmers’ complaints really alarmed Manhattan Project officials, because they feared that the farmers would sue, and that these lawsuits would compromise the secrecy of the project and open the government up to liability.
At the time, there was already a secret medical research program that looked at Manhattan Project special materials — one study involved injecting unknowing cancer patients with plutonium. As part of that program, the U.S. government started intensely studying the health effects of PFAS. By 1947, they discovered that these substances were highly toxic and that they were accumulating in human blood.
One of the things that makes these chemicals so troubling is that they stay in the human body for many years. This was information that the U.S. government knew before PFAS even went into commercial production.
Searchlight: What happened with PFAS after the war?
Blake: Post-war, the Minnesota-based company 3M acquired patents for technology to produce PFAS, and they hired a team of Manhattan Project chemists to turn them into products that could either be used in manufacturing or sold to the general public. This led to all kinds of innovations, including Scotchgard fabric protector, Gore-Tex and Teflon. These chemicals quickly found their way into thousands of household items, everything from dental floss and kitty litter to contact lenses, children’s clothing, cleaning supplies and beauty products.
In the 1960s, the Navy worked with 3M to develop a specialized firefighting foam. The existing fire retardants just weren’t that effective on fires caused by fuel. The fluorinated foam they developed, which was made with PFAS, was extremely effective. As a result, by the 1970s, the foam was being used at military bases, airports and firehouses all over the world.
Firefighters and service members who handled this material were told that it was safe as soap. Fire houses would throw parties for the community, and they would spray the children with foam. It was used routinely in training and sprayed in areas where there are private wells or public drinking-water wells. It wasn’t only sprayed. It was dumped and spilled in huge quantities. It was discharged into sewer systems. Then the sludge from those systems was spread over millions of acres of agricultural land. The foam was dumped without much thought, because people were told there really was no reason for concern. But as early as 1973, Navy scientists had determined that it was toxic.
This points to an interesting part of New Mexico history: during the 1970s, a team of researchers at Kirtland Air Force Base, in Albuquerque, began testing different methods to filter PFAS out of foam before it was dumped or discharged into sewage systems. They found one that worked. It’s the same technology that’s used to filter PFAS out of drinking water today. But it was never deployed by the U.S. military to prevent pollution around its bases.
Searchlight: How did medical research on PFAS evolve alongside the commercialization of them?
Courtesy Julie Napear Photography
Blake: After the war, Manhattan Project medical research continued under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission. In the 1970s, a scientist working in that program discovered that PFAS were accumulating in the blood of people all across the country. He alerted 3M. 3M then began conducting its own blood studies, looking at thousands of blood samples from around the world, including remote, rural parts of China. It also looked at archived blood samples from past medical studies. The only blood 3M could find that didn’t contain these chemicals was in archived samples from Korean war veterans that was collected before the 1950s, the decade when PFAS went into wide-scale production. This information caused some alarm inside 3M, and the company began intensively studying these chemicals. They quickly discovered that they didn’t break down in the environment, that they had a devastating effect on lab animals and that they were linked to serious diseases in workers. But rather than inform the public or regulators, they buried their findings. This is a pattern that played out over and over and over again for many years.
The Navy did its own research, compiling more data about the toxicity of these substances, but it didn’t disclose this information, either.
Searchlight: What implications does the pollution caused by firefighting foam have for human health and the environment?
Blake: Fluorinated firefighting foam is one of the leading sources of PFAS contamination, not just in the U.S. but worldwide. Some of the most severe pollution is around military bases, where this material was routinely used for training. Groundwater around many bases contains levels of PFAS that are thousands, even millions of times higher than the EPA safety limit. This level of pollution is seen almost nowhere else.
A kangaroo rat that was captured at Holloman Lake, which adjoins the Air Force Base, showed PFAS levels that were 30 million times the EPA safety standard. That blows away every other number I’ve seen in my decade of reporting on PFAS. It’s worth noting that, at Holloman, scientists are only testing for 17 of the 9,000 PFAS in circulation in the U.S. Other studies have shown that there are several hundred different PFAS in groundwater and drinking water near military bases. The study of these chemicals near Holloman probably underestimated the level of contamination by a large margin.
Because PFAS don’t break down in the environment, and they’re highly mobile, sites like this are more akin to Fukushima, the site of major nuclear meltdown, than a regular toxic waste site. They radiate contamination. PFAS move through the environment quickly: through the air, through water in the underground aquifers. Animal species are absorbing enormous quantities, and that moves up the food chain.
Searchlight: What tools do we have to clean up heavily contaminated sites like Holloman?
Blake: They are really limited. There are technologies that can filter some of these chemicals out of drinking water, but not all, and what you end up with is a concentrated stew of PFAS that you then either put in a landfill — but all landfills eventually leak — or incinerate. However, if these chemicals aren’t incinerated at a high enough heat, they just break down into smaller PFAS and spread all over. There are only three incinerators in the entire country that are capable of destroying PFAS.
Scientists are now using Holloman as a laboratory to study how PFAS from firefighting foam moves through the environment. That is probably the best possible use of that land, because it will be contaminated for generations.
Searchlight: What is the Pentagon’s stance on remediating PFAS contamination around military bases?
Blake: The expense of cleaning up these sites—if it’s even possible—is going to be mammoth. The Pentagon has fought in various ways to avoid having to do it.
It’s fought to kill PFAS regulation on the federal level. It has also refused to comply with all kinds of state regulations, as well as EPA mandates, on PFAS. PFAS contamination first really registered on the radar in New Mexico around 2018 when a dairy farmer named Art Schaap, whose farm is right next to Cannon Air Force Base, discovered that the water on his farm was highly contaminated. He ended up having to slaughter 3,500 head of cattle. His operation, Highland Dairy, supplied milk for the public schools in Albuquerque. Schaap was very vocal, and state officials responded by setting cleanup standards around Cannon. The Pentagon actually sued New Mexico for trying to enforce cleanup standards, claiming that it didn’t have the authority.
The Pentagon eventually backed down. But now the Department of Defense has asked a federal judge to dismiss dozens of lawsuits that have been brought against it, for its role in contaminating drinking water and soil around military bases. One was brought by the state of New Mexico. These are just a few examples of various ways that DOD has tried to evade responsibility for the contamination around its sites.
Searchlight: What lessons can people in New Mexico learn from the people in Hoosick Falls, New York, and their successful fight for clean drinking water?
Blake: I focused at length on Hoosick Falls, where the water is polluted with PFAS from a local Teflon coating factory. But I could just as easily have focused on any number of communities around the country, because variations of the same story are playing out all over. People in Georgia, in Maine, in Arizona, in Alaska—people from all over the country whose lives have been devastated by PFAS—are channeling their anguish into advocacy. They’re accomplishing things that I wouldn’t have considered possible when I started researching my book.
I mentioned earlier that it was largely a dairy farmer named Art Schaap who put PFAS on the radar in New Mexico. He has also advocated for change on a national level. He was part of a contingent of unlikely activists from all over the country who traveled to Washington, D.C., in 2019 to lobby lawmakers to pass a host of bills related to PFAS. As a result of citizen pressure, that year Congress passed a law requiring that fluorinated firefighting foams be phased out on U.S. military bases. In addition, 30 states have passed more than 155 bills, including 16 full or partial bans on the entire class of chemicals in consumer goods. Thirty-three states have passed or are weighing bans on all PFAS in firefighting foam. This is a paradigm shift. This is not how we usually regulate chemicals in this country: normally, we regulate them one by one.
There’s also a huge amount of litigation happening. Currently, more than 15,000 lawsuits are pending against manufacturers, and there are a growing number of lawsuits against consumer brands. This is all causing major shifts in the market as large swaths of the economy voluntarily migrate away from forever chemicals. 3M, the world’s largest manufacturer of PFAS, has announced that it will quit producing them this year.
By the way, I was there in 2019 when Schaap went to Washington. The people I followed from Hoosick Falls were also there. There was a farmer from Maine. There were factory workers. It was amazing to see how lawmakers responded to people telling their stories. It goes beyond politics and partisan divides, hearing the stories of people whose lives and livelihoods have been ruined by these chemicals.
Searchlight: How did your history in New Mexico shape the way you approached your book?
Blake: I grew up in Taos. Both sides of my family have been there since the 1950s. My grandfather on my father’s side, Ernie Blake, moved there to build Taos Ski Valley. What most people don’t realize is that he was a German Jew who fled Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. That was not something he spoke about publicly. But he was obsessed with history, particularly military history, and I think some of that obsession rubbed off on me, which is why I felt compelled to delve so deeply into some historical aspects of the forever chemical saga, including the Manhattan Project story.
Republished with permission from Searchlight New Mexico, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that seeks to empower New Mexicans to demand honest and effective public policy.
