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.
“I don’t want this farm no more,” Mr. Schaap said.
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.
Similar scenarios have played out at hundreds of military facilities across the United States. But New Mexico has become the center of the nation’s reckoning with PFAS. The state is suing the federal government for turning bases like Cannon into epicenters of forever chemical contamination.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has led this campaign. Weeks after she became governor in 2019, her administration filed suit against the U.S. Air Force over the PFAS pollution at Cannon. Because the accusations in New Mexico are so clear-cut, a federal judge in South Carolina picked New Mexico’s suit to be a bellwether for similar litigation nationwide.
The designation means the outcome of the New Mexico case will become an important benchmark in how the more than 15,000 similar PFAS suits nationwide are treated in court, lawsuits filed on behalf of people like Mr. Schaap, who claim harm from forever chemicals in firefighting foam.
