Small City Pays A Price For PFAS In Drinking Water

Seventy miles north of New York City, on the banks of the mighty Hudson River, lies Newburgh, New York. Bordered by forested mountains and sweeping views of the Hudson Valley, the city, once a center of manufacturing, is now blighted by industrial waste sites. But one stands out as particularly hazardous for the continual danger it poses to human health.

The Stewart Air National Guard Base, just outside the city limits, was built in the 1930s. Decades later, it became the source of toxic PFAS chemicals that still plague the city’s watershed. 

Now, early data from a study led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bolsters research that links PFAS exposure to high cholesterol and high blood pressure. Both conditions pose a major risk of heart disease, and, according to the data, both are prevalent in study participants from Newburgh.

A Tax On Health

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are found in everything from carpets to cell phones. They’re notoriously difficult to break down due to a chemical structure of carbon and fluorine, which form one of the strongest bonds in organic chemistry. That bond is what makes them so useful—they’re extremely resistant to heat, oil, and water.

PFAS first entered people’s homes in the 1950s, when they were used in popular products like Scotchgard and Teflon pans. Today, there are thousands of different PFAS circulating across the globe, hidden in things like diapers, toys, and food containers.

The chemicals have been linked to liver damage, thyroid disease, immunosuppression, reduced fertility, and cancer, among a litany of serious health problems. No less than 98% of Americans have some level of PFAS in their blood, and millions of people are exposed through contaminated drinking water.

Newburgh is one of ten communities being monitored in the first national study to explore the effects of PFAS on human health. The early data examines the health of 1,569 residents exposed through drinking water.

“We’re a mostly Black and brown city. We have four square miles, anywhere between 30,000 and 40,000 residents,” says Newburgh Mayor Torrance Harvey. Many Latino immigrants and others are already coping with illnesses like diabetes, he says. “Now, we’ve got PFAS water contamination.”

Residents first learned of the contamination in 2016. The chemicals were quickly traced back to firefighting foam—aqueous film-forming foam, known as AFFF—used at the air base since the 1980s. The chemicals had traveled from the base into streams and creeks that flowed into the city’s main drinking water reservoir.

The water contained a toxic cocktail of PFAS chemicals, among them PFOS, short for perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, found in older fire foams and deemed a possible human carcinogen by the World Health Organization (WHO). It was this chemical that epidemiologist Dr. Erin Bell and her team at the University at Albany measured in the study, finding that adults in Newburgh had about four times the amount of PFOS in their blood as the average American.

And the new data strengthens previous findings on the risks of heart disease. “When we compared people with the highest levels of PFOS in their blood to the lowest levels, we did see an association with high blood pressure and a slightly weaker association for cholesterol,” says Bell, co-principal investigator for the New York arm of the CDC study.

The team also found hints of associations with thyroid and cardiovascular disease, but Bell points out that these were found in addition to the biomarkers for high cholesterol and high blood pressure, both key contributors to poor heart health.

Newburgh native Jennifer Rawlison had just given birth when the water crisis surfaced and she grew more worried as she found out how toxic the chemicals were. “We chose to stay and live here,” says the mother of two. “That’s where my guilt comes in,” she says, speaking of her family’s exposure “being tied to something as stupid as living in the wrong city.”

The state stepped in to pay for water from the New York City-owned Catskill Aqueduct, a clean but expensive water source that Newburgh has used ever since. But nine years later, the city’s main water reservoir remains contaminated with PFAS, and the military is still in the planning phases of a full cleanup at the air base.

Pervasive And Persistent Chemicals

The largest population study on the human health effects of PFAS, to date, came out of Parkersburg, West Virginia, where Dupont dumped the chemicals into the Ohio River, a source of drinking water for millions of people. Part of that story was dramatized in the 2019 film “Dark Waters.”

The study’s participants were found to have high blood levels of PFOA, perfluorooctanoic acid, classified as a human carcinogen by the WHO. Based on their findings, the researchers reported probable links between PFOA exposure and thyroid disease, preeclampsia, high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, and kidney and testicular cancers. (The Newburgh study excluded cancer outcomes because of the relatively small number of participants.)

The compounds have long half-lives—the amount of time it takes for a substance to reduce by half—and linger in the human body. “It takes years to get rid of them once you’re exposed,” explains Dr. Andres Cardenas, an environmental epidemiologist at Stanford University.

PFAS-polluted water is a “chronic” type of exposure that leads to bioaccumulation, Cardenas says, even when concentrations are low. “We drink lots of water, so we keep accumulating the chemicals, and because the half-lives are so long, it just builds up in our bodies,” he says.

Newburgh carries the added weight of poverty. About a third of residents live at or below the poverty line, while aging homes and water lines are still being abated for lead. And when socioeconomic stressors like these overlap in polluted communities, they can act on the same biological pathways to exacerbate health outcomes, Cardenas says.

However, PFAS tend to have shorter half-lives in women because of reproduction. “My half-life for PFOA and PFOS might be shorter than a man’s because I’ve given birth, and I’ve breastfed,” Bell says, noting that PFAS are also lost during menstruation.

As with other types of chemicals, children are especially vulnerable, even before they’re born. “We know that PFAS can cross the placenta and expose unborn children,” Bell says, and pass to babies in breast milk.

And recent EPA data shows that more than a third of people in the U.S. are exposed to PFAS through public drinking water. “This latest testing finds that more than 165 million people are exposed,” says Dr. Tasha Stoiber, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group (EWG). “The take home is that most of us have PFAS in our blood because contamination is so widespread.”

Researchers aren’t exactly sure how long the chemicals take to degrade in the environment, though estimates range from hundreds to thousands of years. New technologies have emerged to break them down, but the majority still end up in landfills, Stoiber says. “We throw them away into landfills, they enter into landfill leachate, the leachate enters into the environment, and there’s very little difference in degradation,” she says. “So, they’re with us for an extremely long amount of time.”

Hence, the nickname “forever chemicals.”

“This is personal”

Almost a decade after the water crisis came to light, Stewart Air National Guard Base continues to leach PFAS into Newburgh’s watershed. “I’m beyond angry at this point,” Harvey says. “The federal government has done little to nothing but just meet and talk.” The mayor cited his own high blood pressure as a likely outcome of the contamination. “The people in my city are victims, including me and my family. So, this is personal.”

Rawlison also wants answers. “It’s still the same question,” she says. “‘How will this impact the long-term health of our family?’”

It’s been a long and painful wait for those seeking justice over long-term exposure to PFAS. Meanwhile, the EWG continues to document hundreds of sites polluted by military PFAS. In recent years, the military replaced AFFF with foams using newer PFAS chemicals. Though less persistent, evidence suggests they may pose some of the same health concerns as older PFAS. “They don’t stay in our bodies or in the ground as long,” Bell says, “but we’re not yet convinced that means they’re safer.”

In 2023, the EPA set limits for six different PFAS in drinking water. It was the first federal law to regulate the chemicals in public water systems, after decades of pollution.

But under new leadership, in May, the agency announced a rollback of the drinking water rules for four of the six PFAS, including newer ones like GenX. And a plan to limit the chemicals in industrial runoff was wiped away just days after President Trump took office.

People are now looking to California, Michigan, New York, and other states to enforce their own clean-water rules. “It’s not just about the cleanup,” says Rawlison, whose PFAS blood levels have fallen markedly since her first test in 2016. “It’s about ensuring that we have protections moving forward.”

Until then, the study paints a fuller picture of the health impacts from less-studied types of PFAS, said Bell. “It helps us understand that some of the same things we see with PFOA, we’re seeing with PFOS, and potentially some of the other types of perfluorinated chemicals,” she says.

The CDC is expected to release the results of the larger multisite study later this year.

Meet the Writer

Shantal Riley

About Shantal Riley

Shantal Riley is an award-winning journalist and science writer, focused on environmental health.