Read the full article by Brad Rogers (Fox 23)
“FAIRFIELD (WGME) — Hunting season is now underway, but with new worries, as many hunters are forced to avoid areas of PFAS contamination.
‘There’s a horse farm up there,’ former Fairfield hunter Joe Lefebvre said. ‘Place is just loaded with deer. It’s a great area.’
Lefebvre used to hunt deer for the venison every year in his hometown of Fairfield.
After the discovery of dangerous forever chemicals in fields and animals there, his hunting days are over.
‘Everybody that’s hunted, it’s already in our systems,’ Lefebvre said. ‘We’ve been eating bird, turkey, deer for years here. So everybody’s contaminated. There’s no question about it.’
He says his neighbors have high levels of PFAS in their bodies, and he’s still waiting on his test results.
Meanwhile, the state is waiting for the rest of their test results on the 60 deer they harvested a few months ago from the Fairfield area.
‘What we saw when we tested some turkeys this spring was once you got off some of the highly contaminated areas, levels dropped pretty rapidly in the tissue of these animals,’ Mark Latti of the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife said. ‘Once you remove the PFAS and give them fresh water or fresh feed, PFAS levels drop very quickly.’
For now, the state is still advising hunters not to eat any deer, fish or wildlife from the Fairfield area.
‘I certainly wouldn’t hunt down in that Fairfield area,’ North Yarmouth hunter Gordon Slocum said.
Hunters also know there’s PFAS contamination on many other farms across Maine.” …