Editor’s note: This is the first part of a two-part story. The second part will run in the next issue, Feb. 26.
LOVELAND, Ohio — At first glance, it would be hard to spot anything amiss in scenic Loveland, a leafy, suburban community of about 13,000 residents north of Cincinnati that stretches along both sides of the Little Miami River.
But behind its picture-postcard trappings, Loveland’s leaders are grappling with an invisible threat: there is contamination in the drinking water.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, a class of so-called “forever chemicals” linked to several types of cancer and other serious health issues, have been detected in the aquifer along the river corridor that supplies Loveland’s wells. They’re called forever chemicals because their chemistry makes them almost Herculean, nearly invulnerable to any force natural or otherwise that could break them down. So they linger in water, soil and even the human body, building up over time.
Forever chemicals have no taste or smell. Their stubbornness and phantom quality, combined with the prospect of thousands of variants all going undetected for years, further complicates the challenge scientists and regulators face as they work to fully grapple with the impacts that low levels of long-term exposure may have had on the health of everyday Americans. Meanwhile, the debate rages on over who should do something about this, and what, if anything, can be done.
“This is scary [stuff]. Nobody wants to think about it, nobody wants to deal with it, because the potential ramifications are so scary and so overwhelming, and you have to ask yourself questions like, if all farmland is contaminated, what do we do? We still need to eat,” said Emily Liss, policy manager at the American Farmland Trust.
As communities like Loveland wrestle with how to respond, the debate over PFAS has reached far beyond city limits and into the halls of Congress, where lawmakers were recently weighing how to step in on behalf of communities and farmers facing an existential dilemma from contamination they did not cause. While it’s broadly agreed PFAS pose health risks, key questions remain about exposure levels, long-term effects and the best ways to eliminate the chemicals once and for all rather than just move them around.
Meanwhile, with federal standards still years from taking effect and funding in limbo, just about every place the chemicals have touched, from cities to rural farms, is caught between evolving science, mounting public pressure and the high cost of cleanup.
Coming into focus
PFAS chemicals are commonly associated with firefighting foam, industrial processes and consumer product manufacturing. In 2019, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine directed the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and the Ohio Department of Health to study how widespread PFAS chemicals were in the state’s drinking water. When the Ohio EPA got to Loveland, it found contamination in the city’s water at about 15 parts per trillion (ppt) — well below Ohio’s response threshold at the time of 70 ppt. But in the ensuing years, growing scientific evidence showed that the health risks associated with PFAS were far greater than previously realized.
By 2024, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finalized the first national, legally-enforceable drinking water standards for PFAS, setting a much stricter federal limit of 4 ppt. However, the new limit won’t take effect until 2029. Loveland’s levels are now about four times higher than the new federal benchmark.
The suspects behind Loveland’s contaminated water were narrowed down to manufacturing and chemical corporations including 3M, Dupont, BASF and Tyco, all of which operated in the Ohio River Basin; the result of their activities ended up downstream. Dupont, for one, would settle with the state of Ohio in 2023 for $110 million over chemical contamination spanning seven decades stemming from the company’s Washington Works facility in Parkersburg, West Virginia, about 200 miles upstream from Cincinnati and the confluence of the Ohio and Little Miami Rivers. That same year, Loveland joined class action lawsuits against Dupont and the others for discharging PFAS into groundwater. Loveland expects to receive around $2.5 million in settlement money, spread out across a decade. It’s nowhere near what they’ll need to fix the problem.
These days, Loveland’s tight‑knit and vocal residents are especially outspoken on the issue of water quality, where public meetings and online discussions can be emotionally charged. According to Assistant City Manager Chris Wojnicz, people are scared. But to him, agencies like the EPA, the official referees for making the call on what’s considered safe and what isn’t, are leaving them, well, up a creek.
“I don’t feel bad saying this, but I wish Ohio EPA would do a better job of helping us communicate to the residents about the status of our water. You know, when people say it’s not safe, sometimes my response to them is, ‘If the water is not safe, why has Ohio EPA not said, ‘City of Loveland, shut your plant off?’ So that’s where I wish the regulators would help us more.”
The city is far from alone, but addressing the contamination presents an outsized financial and technical challenge for most any modest community. For this one, it’s no different.
Loveland, though, is gearing up for a fight. Now in the early stages of addressing the issue, the city is about 30% through the design phase of a new water treatment system intended to remove PFAS from its drinking water. Leaders secured a $1.3 million Ohio EPA grant last summer to begin engineering work and expect to complete the design by late this year or early next year. The system, which would rely on granular activated carbon filtration, is expected to treat up to 4 million gallons of water per day. But until the city locks in funding to build it, they won’t be ready to break ground.
“I understand we have the problem, you know, but we didn’t create this problem,” Wojnicz said. “We’re being tasked to fix it, which is fine, but at some point, the federal government or the state government has to find ways to fund this for the public water systems.”
Where to start
As cities race to comply with the looming federal standard, the science behind PFAS is still catching up to the scale of the problem, researchers say. Most testing methods approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency focus on a limited list of compounds, a small slice of the thousands of PFAS chemicals in use, posing more questions about what may be going undetected in water, soil and food.
“I think we’re trying to figure out, like, we know some things, but what don’t we know yet? And what are the implications of not knowing those things?” said Heather Preisendanz, a Penn State faculty member who leads PFAS research and outreach through the university’s Sustainable Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Science, or SAFES, Institute.
Scientists are increasingly concerned about ultra-short-chain PFAS — that means they are more mobile in the environment, potentially afoot with greater ease through groundwater and crops, though possibly less toxic. Whether those compounds pose the same health risks as better-studied, longer-chain PFAS remains unclear, complicating decisions about where limited testing dollars should be spent.
Studies show some crops can absorb PFAS from soil and water, and that animals may accumulate certain compounds after eating contaminated feed while excreting others. What that mix of exposure means for long-term human and animal health is still being studied.
“We have a better idea of where things are winding up in the environment and in crops and water, but we don’t necessarily have the information that’s needed to interpret the implications, and then without that, we can’t make good recommendations,” Preisendanz said.
The PFAS problem may have been made worse by earlier guidance around the use of biosolids, the treated sewage sludge produced by wastewater treatment plants. For years, biosolids were promoted to farmers as a safe, sustainable fertilizer. But as Preisendanz explains, when PFAS chemicals are present in wastewater — especially when there are industrial sources feeding into a treatment plant — they become concentrated in the biosolids. When that material is spread on farmland, the PFAS go with them, entering the very soils they were meant to enrich. And many farmers who adopted that practice in good faith are left worrying about their land and the safety of the food they produce.
For communities and farmers seeking answers now, that can be frustrating. Treatment systems can remove some PFAS, particularly longer-chain compounds, from drinking water, but doing so creates a new problem: highly concentrated waste that must be incinerated (which potentially risks turning a soil and water contamination problem into an air and ash contamination problem) or otherwise disposed of, at a pretty penny.
In the meantime, people like Faith Kibuye, a Penn State Extension professional who works directly with farmers and homeowners confronting contamination, often find themselves attempting to translate complex, evolving science for people on edge who are searching for practical steps. That may sound like a tall order, and that’s because it is. The conversations, she said, start with empathy. Many of those impacted followed all the rules in place at the time, only to learn years later that their water or land may be carrying a deadly secret.
“We try to share what we know openly in a way that is easy to understand… We recognize it’s not an all-inclusive response that perhaps they were hoping for, but that perspective has seemed to work,” she said. “In an ideal world, the consequence should not be falling on them.”
But back in Loveland, Wojnicz can’t help but feel that it is.
For him, the situation is personal. He drinks the same water as everyone else in town, he said, and so does his family. Yet each day the situation feels more and more fraught, with firm guidance lacking from regulators like the Ohio EPA and residents who don’t feel safe turning on the tap.
“There’s not one clear message that’s going out from those above us, our regulators. And so that’s where the biggest struggle is,” he said.
The city isn’t burying its head in the sand, he said; not like others, not with so much at stake. But the price tag on a new water treatment system is one of the biggest hurdles Loveland will face looking ahead. Early estimates pegged the system at about $17.5 million, but newer projections may put the price closer to $19 million. Settlement money from PFAS manufacturers and limited state grants would cover only a fraction of that total, leaving the city with a multimillion-dollar funding gap and no clear path forward.
That may mean difficult conversations ahead about water rates, long timelines and tradeoffs, and a willingness to adapt. Wojnicz said waiting isn’t an option when the issue touches every household and every family.
“There’s one thing that every single resident uses in a city, and that’s water, so we need to keep the focus on that and make sure we’re doing everything we can,” he said.
