Talks between New Mexico, Air Force officials progressing on PFAS cleanup 

Discussions are progressing on how New Mexico environment officials and U.S. Air Force leaders can clean up toxic “forever chemicals” that have seeped into the groundwater on and around Cannon Air Force Base in eastern New Mexico, a state Environment Department official told state lawmakers Friday.

Mitigating the contamination has been a drawn-out, litigious process. State officials first found the contamination near Clovis in 2015. Since then, the toxins — firefighting foams containing per- and polyflouroalkyl substances, commonly referred to as PFAS — have spread into a miles-long groundwater plume.

The contaminants have been found in nearby residents’ blood samples. It has even tainted cows at nearby dairies, including one whose owner euthanized nearly 4,000 of the contaminated animals, in a corner of the state that heavily relies on the industry.

Discourse surrounding who to blame for polluting and who to charge for the costly work of cleaning up has often occurred within the confines of a courthouse. So when officials from the Air Force and state Environment Department agreed on a cleanup plan last month, they referred to it as a “thawing” in what had long been a tempestuous relationship.

In recent weeks, both sides have worked well with one another, NMED Hazardous Waste Bureau Chief John-David Nance said as he sat down to speak to lawmakers on the interim Military and Veterans’ Affairs Committee Friday.

“Just before I sat down, I had another phone call from a counterpart with the Air Force…so we can further advance how we’re going to move forward with this effort,” he said.

For years, state officials have overseen a number of efforts related to the contamination, including offering blood tests to residents and dumping PFAS-contaminated milk from dairy cows.

More recently, the state has begun offering home water filtration systems to nearby residents and signed a $12 million deal with EPCOR, a private water company that serves communities across the U.S. and Canada, to build new water lines that will carry clean water to eastern New Mexico residents who currently rely on private wells.

Some lawmakers on the interim committee questioned why the cleanup has taken so long, considering that the contamination was first discovered more than a decade ago.

Nance responded by saying that the ongoing litigation between several of the involved governmental entities — particularly between the Air Force and State of New Mexico over whether the state has the ability to make the federal government follow state-level hazardous waste laws — has gummed things up.

That’s why NMED officials have sought to lead off-base cleanup efforts, including a March initiative to remediate PFAS-contaminated groundwater at several Curry County dairies.

“While that legal battle is going through that process, as a state, we’re sitting here, looking at it and going, ‘Something needs to be done,’” Nance told lawmakers. “We can wait another 10 years for litigation to resolve, but that’s not addressing the issue that is currently going on.”