When Kayla Furton moved back to her childhood home in 2016 with her husband and three young children, she had no plans of ever leaving. Nestled in the small town of Peshtigo, in northern Wisconsin, the house sits on a property with five acres of woods in the back and picturesque waterfront access to Green Bay, on Lake Michigan. Furton’s neighbors call the area the “best-kept secret” in the state because of its natural beauty and tight-knit community.
Then, in 2018, the Furtons received a letter with some unwanted news about their forever home: The water supply was contaminated with perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.
PFAS are a group of thousands of synthetic chemicals that have been used for decades in the manufacturing of everyday consumer products like clothes, makeup, and nonstick cookware because of their water- and stain-resistant properties.
The Environmental Protection Agency declared in 2022 that perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), two common PFAS compounds, are dangerous at any level. More recently, the agency proposed that nine additional PFAS compounds be categorized as hazardous substances because of the dangers they pose to human health.
The news didn’t come as a total surprise to Furton. She knew that PFAS had been detected in private wells nearby, and the official investigation area where the groundwater was being tested was enclosed by, as she puts it, “an arbitrary boundary.”
“Water does not know to stop because there’s a roadside ditch,” much less a line drawn on a map, she says.
Nevertheless, the reality of officially being in “the plume” of local PFAS contamination was upsetting. Furton already knew the dangers of PFAS and had been removing household products that contained these chemicals from her family’s life.
“I’d gotten rid of all of our nonstick cookware and other potential contaminants at the time,” she explains. “We avoided bottled water because of concerns over other chemicals leaching in, and then we’re put in this position that our [tap] water is not safe for our kids.”
PFAS have been nicknamed “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the environment and can accumulate in the human body over time. There is a growing body of research about the adverse health effects of PFAS, including problems with fertility and pregnancy, developmental delays in children, and an increased risk of certain cancers.
Ruth Kowalski, a retired elementary school teacher who lives about a mile away from the Furtons, believes that PFAS contamination is responsible for an unusually high incidence of thyroid disease, cancer, and other serious health issues in her own extended family.
Bonnie Willison
Ruth Kowalski rifles through papers at her kitchen table in Peshtigo, Wisconsin. She has kept extensive documentation of the PFAS crisis in the community.
“I assumed the thyroid disease in my family was somehow hereditary,” she says. “But now I know it was because we all lived within the plume.”
Kowalski, who is in her seventies, worries most about her grandchildren and other members of the younger generation who were exposed to PFAS at an early age. Her great-nephew is one of several members of his graduating class diagnosed with testicular cancer.
“You’ll never know when it comes to these contaminants,” she says, referring to how difficult it can be to pinpoint the exact cause of a diagnosis like cancer. “But you are always going to wonder.”
In their fight for clean water, residents of Peshtigo have found themselves in a protracted legal battle with Tyco, a major manufacturing company that contaminated the groundwater in the area. (In 2016, Tyco merged with Johnson Controls International.)
From 1962 to 2017, Tyco used PFAS-containing firefighting foam at its fire training center in Marinette, a small city near the town of Peshtigo. The soil at the testing site became contaminated after years of using the foam, and PFAS was carried throughout the area by sewer systems and groundwater.
Kowalski learned her private well was contaminated with PFAS in 2017, when Tyco sent her a letter. Shortly after, she and her husband attended a town meeting with representatives from Tyco, where she says the company was “downplaying” the severity of the problem. “We’re gonna give you bottled water; we’re gonna test your water,” she remembers them saying.
According to Kowalski, Tyco seemed to be promising that everything was under control.
“Later, I found out they knew for three years that this was in our drinking water and never told us,” she says.
The first batch of letters was sent to households in 2017, after the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) ordered Tyco to investigate the extent of the PFAS contamination in Marinette and Peshtigo. But state records show that the company had detected PFAS compounds in the area as early as 2013.
Kowalski believes the company shouldn’t have waited so long to warn residents of the PFAS contamination and begin remediation. “It was immoral and unconscionable,” she says, her voice breaking.
While some of Kowalski’s neighbors agree that Tyco should have acted sooner, the company maintains that it has responded to the PFAS crisis promptly and thoroughly. In an email message, Trent Perrotto, vice president for external communications at Johnson Controls, says, “As soon as we became aware that PFAS from historic operations at the [fire training center] migrated into private drinking water wells in Peshtigo, we took responsibility, provided bottled water and point-of-entry systems (POETS), and moved rapidly to address this issue and identify long-term solutions.”
Perrotto is referring to households in the “potable well sampling area,” or the limited zone where Tyco is responsible for cleanup. But some residents, like Trygve Rhude, a retired soil scientist who lives up the shoreline from the Furtons, worry that Tyco’s designated area excludes many households in the community that are likely affected.
“So if you’re on one side of the street and have contamination, you could be eligible for their POET system, their in-house treatment, [and] bottled water,” Rhude says. “If you live on the other side of that street, your well will not have been tested, and you get nothing.”
That leaves some families to keep drinking tap water with high levels of PFAS or pay for the testing and treatment themselves.
Furton’s sister, who lives a little over a mile away, is in this situation. Since her house is outside the covered area, she and her family have installed their own under-the-sink filtration in the kitchen and bathrooms, and they pay for bottled water out of pocket.
Bonnie Willison
Kayla Furton sits in the living room of her childhood home in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, which she and her family moved into shortly before learning about PFAS contamination in the community.
“It’s great that they can do that, but not everyone can,” Furton says. “That cost should be borne by the party that contaminated it.”
But not everyone in the community agrees about exactly how to hold Tyco responsible.
Some Peshtigo residents filed a class-action lawsuit against the company. The parties reached a $17.5 million settlement in early 2021, which covered things like property damage and medical monitoring. Tyco and the two other companies involved in the settlement have denied any wrongdoing.
For Furton, this is simply not enough.
“We opted out of the settlement because it did not include permanent, safe drinking water,” she says. “I don’t want a payout. I want to be able to have safe drinking water in my home.”
While Furton acknowledges that her neighbors are well within their rights to participate in the settlement, she is concerned that Tyco has been using a “divide-and-conquer” tactic to keep the community from organizing effectively. Anyone who was part of the settlement cannot sue Tyco, leaving a smaller pool of residents eligible to file a more expansive lawsuit that would hold the company liable for the full extent of the damage, including properties outside the limited designated area.
Asked about this, Perrotto writes, “Although Tyco does not comment on pending litigation, we stand behind the years of work and considerable resources we have invested in investigating and remediating PFAS related to historic operations at our Fire Technology Center in Marinette.”
Regardless, Furton sees a major power imbalance at play, with a large company like Tyco having an entire legal team to devote to this ongoing battle while the community is left to find solutions with limited resources. “I have to think that they know, or hope, ‘OK, if we parse out enough people, they won’t have a fighting chance,’ ” she says. “There’s a corporate playbook that they all know how to go by, but there’s not a citizen playbook.”
For Peshtigo residents like Furton, Kowalski, and Rhude, creating a sustainable, community-wide solution to their water problem is a top priority. But it’s not so simple in a town where everyone gets their water from private wells, which draw from groundwater.
In Wisconsin, as in many states, there is no groundwater standard for PFAS. There is a drinking water standard of seventy parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS, two of the most common PFAS compounds, but this designation applies only to public water systems that serve at least twenty-five individuals.
One of the solutions that has been proposed in Peshtigo is to connect the town with the public water system in the neighboring city of Marinette. Though Marinette also has PFAS contamination within its city limits from Tyco’s plant, they draw their municipal water from Lake Michigan and are able to test and treat it before it goes out to individual homes.
In early 2019, at a meeting held in a local restaurant, Tyco said they were working with Marinette to pipe city water to affected Peshtigo residents.
But Furton says that after the meeting, she found out that Tyco hadn’t talked to the city of Marinette, hadn’t been working with local government officials in Peshtigo, and hadn’t informed the WDNR about this plan before publicly announcing it.
She notes that this kind of behavior has been typical for Tyco since this all began. “They will make these statements, these public promises, but they are not backed up by actual work, actual engineering, actual intergovernmental agreements.”
Perrotto provided The Progressive with a copy of a print ad that he said had run in local newspapers. It read, in part: “During 2023, Tyco evaluated over 600 additional groundwater and surface water samples collected last year, which confirmed the extent of PFAS impacts to groundwater from historical operations . . . . The data further demonstrate, as expected, that the plume is mature and not expanding.”
The ad continues: “Tyco is working with the WDNR to develop a long-term monitoring plan for groundwater. That plan will include over 150 monitoring wells located throughout the community to ensure the plume remains stable and geographically defined. All work will be done under WDNR oversight, and all data will be publicly available so our neighbors will be up to date on our continued progress.”
Meanwhile, the city of Marinette has indicated that they are not willing to extend their water service area to Peshtigo unless the town is annexed. This leaves residents with few other viable options for a permanent, clean drinking water source.
Bonnie Willison
Trygve Rhude has a point-of-entry treatment system in his house, which is located on the shore of Lake Michigan’s Green Bay, in Wisconsin.
One is to dig new, deeper wells. But this comes with risks of its own. It’s possible that the local aquifer is already contaminated with PFAS, and even if it’s not, experts say that the process of drilling a new well could push existing “forever chemicals” farther down into the soil, creating more pollution and lasting problems.
Another option is to stick with the point-of-entry treatment systems, but these are limited to individual homes and require extensive maintenance. The WDNR has pointed out that there are long-term challenges to relying on POET systems, including that there is “no mechanism to ensure water quality protections are in place” after a property is sold and changes hands.
This brings us back to the municipal water route, which is favored by the WDNR as the best long-term solution. Elected officials in Peshtigo proposed creating a water utility district that could strike an agreement with the city of Marinette or another nearby city to receive municipal water. But while there were proponents of this plan, including Furton, who was serving on the town board at the time, it faced serious public opposition.
“I literally had a resident tell me one time that they would rather drink PFAS than city water,” Furton says.
There had recently been a town meeting with standing room only where residents voiced strong opinions about whether they supported the water utility district and, by extension, the town chair at the time, Cindy Boyle, who had spearheaded the effort.
Less than a month later, during the 2023 spring election, Boyle lost her re-election bid to a candidate who ran on a platform of rejecting the water utility district. The new town chair, Jennifer Friday, said that she cares about the PFAS problem but represents residents who “are not looking to completely vilify Tyco for their actions.”
While there are no easy answers when it comes to PFAS or holding megacorporations accountable for their actions, clean water advocates have not given up hope.
“You gotta look at the collective: What’s good for the entire state, the entire nation, the entire world versus what’s good for me,” Rhude says.
He has faced off with Tyco before in a landmark arsenic cleanup in the Menominee River, which took more than thirty years to be delisted as an area of concern. “Patience is a real virtue in this case, where you want to get the best solution for the most people. That’s gonna take time,” he says. “I think it’s important that we just stay the course and wait till that long-term solution is figured out.”
Furton echoed this sentiment. “We all need to look at this collectively because water doesn’t know municipal boundaries,” she says. “I don’t just want clean water for me now, or even for my lifespan. I want my kids and whoever lives in this house, in this community, in the future to also have that.”
Richelle Wilson conducted the research for this story while producing Public Trust, a podcast from Midwest Environmental Advocates and Wisconsin Sea Grant, with support from the University of Wisconsin–Madison Center for the Humanities.