“JOINT BASE CAPE COD — Water quality experts plan to update the public Wednesday on their efforts to address potentially cancer-causing contamination that has traveled off the Upper Cape’s military base into public and private water supplies…

Classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as ’emerging contaminants,’ perfluorinated chemicals known as PFOS and PFOA are compounds found in firefighting foam used during training on the southeast corner of the base from 1970 until the mid-1980s.

With the Cape’s sandy soils and the ability of those compounds to move quickly in groundwater, evidence of their presence has turned up in neighboring towns.

A formal maximum level for perfluorinated compounds has not yet been set, but the EPA issued a ‘lifetime health advisory’ in 2016 for amounts exceeding 70 parts per trillion…

A municipal well in Mashpee Village that had exceeded the advisory level for the perfluorinated compounds was shut down in March 2017 and remains offline, according to Mashpee Water Superintendent Andrew Marks.

The Air Force has just recently secured funding for a filtration system for the well, which will be installed by the Army Corps of Engineers, Marks said…

Residents of a 93-unit mobile home park in Mashpee called Lakeside Estates were provided with bottled water when contamination from the compound was initially detected, and the military base has now hooked the mobile homes up to the municipal water system.

Further evidence of the presence of perfluorinated compounds in public and private wells beyond the base was found in water sampling results provided to the Defense Department late last year, based on data from August 2017.

Two of the nine samples taken from public drinking water supplies off-base exceeded the EPA’s recommended level of perfluorinated compounds.

Of the 73 off-base private wells sampled, 22 exceeded the standard…

The firefighting foam also was used after truck rollover crashes at the Otis Rotary in 1997 and 2000. The groundwater flows west from the rotary. The base has recently started providing bottled water or filtration systems in Pocasset and has been testing wells on County Road.

The military base also has been working on installation of monitoring wells in Mashpee and Falmouth, in the area south of Johns and Ashumet ponds, where contamination exceeded the EPA’s advisory level.”

Read the full article by Christine Legere