“For the first time in 2½ years, water drawn from a contaminated aquifer in southern El Paso County soon will be flowing from Fountain residents’ taps after being filtered to remove dangerous chemicals.

The city plans to start using an Air Force-supplied filter June 18 that can remove perfluorinated compounds – a milestone for the community that comes amid continued distrust after possibly decades of being exposed to toxic chemicals in the Widefield aquifer.

A second filter is expected to begin working about a month later, said city Utilities Director Curtis Mitchell…

‘It took a lot of work to get to where we are,’ Mitchell said. ‘We want to make sure we get it right. And we’ve taken absolutely every step to do that’…

Penny Cimino, whose house is next to one of the new filters, said she won’t cancel her Deep Rock bottled water service until she is sure the filtering works.

Cimino’s son has had stomach pains, and she developed a noncancerous mass the size of a baseball on her liver. Both, she fears, were caused by the chemicals in the water they drank.

‘It’s a trust issue,’ Cimino said. ‘It’s only human to just kind of be a little bit apprehensive, so it’ll have to prove itself’…

Mitchell said recent tests on the Air Force’s granular-activated carbon filters – which cost the military about $700,000 – showed ‘nondetectable levels’ of the toxins. That meant there were less than 2.5 parts per trillion – far below the Environmental Protection Agency’s health advisory level of 70 parts per trillion, which applied to two types of perfluorinated compounds. Colorado health officials require water systems to account for a third such chemical…

Still, many more varieties of perfluorinated compounds exist. And last year, a Colorado School of Mines researcher found that those filters weren’t very effective at removing more than two dozen chemicals derived from the firefighting foam.

As a result, cities relying on them must replace the filters more frequently if they choose to account for the growing list of perfluorinated chemicals, Christopher Higgins, the study’s author, said at the time.”

Read the full article by Jakob Rogers