Read the full article by Ed Williams (Searchlight New Mexico)
“During the decades that he’s lived in his home southwest of Santa Fe, Jose Villegas was oblivious to the toxic chemicals that were seeping through the aquifer, slowly spreading under his house in the historic village of La Cieneguilla and into the well that supplied his family with drinking water.
His neighbors were also drinking the well water, unaware that the New Mexico National Guard had discovered more than a year earlier that the groundwater and soil on its site by the Santa Fe airport were contaminated with PFAS, a class of chemicals linked to cancer and other illnesses — and present in everything from household products to firefighting foams at military sites.
That changed in August 2023, when a groundwater specialist with Santa Fe County knocked on Villegas’s door and asked if he would allow his water to be tested. The results came back at 14 parts per trillion (ppt), nearly four times higher than a proposed federal safety standard to protect human health. Blood tests would later confirm that the chemicals were in his body at high levels.” …