[CPEO-MEF] PFAS: New Mexico

[Lenny Siegel <Lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

A U.S. Reckoning Over Chemical Pollution From Military Bases
New Mexico is suing the federal government over PFAS contamination from Cannon Air Force Base. The outcome will affect how courts treat more than 15,000 similar claims nationwide.

By Alexander Nazaryan
New York Times
June 1, 2026

Two men walked through livestock pens with .22-caliber rifles, killing Art Schaap’s cows. One man would raise his rifle, its barrel inches from a cow’s forehead. A shot would ring out, the cow would fall and the men would move on to the next cow.

There were 3,665 cows at the Highland Dairy in Clovis, N.M., a city in the flatlands near the Texas border. After six hours of gunfire, there were none.

Mr. Schaap felt he had no choice but to have his herd killed. Testing showed that the water he had pulled from wells on his property contained exceptionally high levels of PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, which have been linked to birth defects, liver and heart disease and some cancers. State and federal regulators pulled his permit to sell milk and quarantined his herd. Selling his cows for beef was out of the question.

…

The source of the contamination, state environmental officials say, was his next-door neighbor, the Cannon Air Force Base, home to the 27th Special Operations Wing. For years, firefighters there had conducted exercises using a foam that contained PFAS. Runoff had seeped into the aquifer where Mr. Schaap and other farmers and ranchers drew their water.

...

For the entire article, see
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/science/pfas-contamination-lawsuits-new-mexico.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

—

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org
Author: DISTURBING THE WAR: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford University out of Southeast Asia - 1965–1975 (See http://a3mreunion.org)




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