“Nearly two years after toxic chemicals from Air Force firefighting foam were found in water drawn from the Widefield aquifer, the military announced a string of measures Wednesday to deliver clean drinking water to residents of southern El Paso County.
Under the deal, the Air Force will pay more than $900,000 to procure untainted water and filter water from the aquifer to remove perfluorinated compounds that studies have found were released at Peterson Air Force Base when airmen used the foam, which has since been banned by the military.
‘As a longtime member of the Front Range, we place an extremely high value on all of our community partnerships, and are pleased we can move forward with these support agreements,’ Peterson vice-commander Col. Eric Dorminey, said in a statement.
The military had faced criticism from civic leaders in Security, Widefield and Fountain for moving too slowly to address the contamination that was made public with an Environmental Protection Agency health advisory in 2016. The EPA has determined that the tiniest amounts of the chemical – comparable to a shot glass in 2.1 million bathtubs of water – can lead to long-term health impacts including high cholesterol and some forms of cancer.
In 2016, the Air Force pledged $4.3 million to initial efforts to deal with the contamination, with most of that cash going to bottled water and filtration systems. The new money is designed to deal with continuing problems from the contamination, and to ease tensions with local governments that have complained about the costs associated with delivering clean drinking water.”
Read the full article by Tom Roeder