In March 2025, the City of Fort Worth, Texas, filed a federal lawsuit seeking at least $420 million in damages from 3M, DuPont, and the U.S. Department of Defense. The allegation: decades of PFAS contamination had infiltrated the city's drinking water supply, and the companies that manufactured these "forever chemicals" knew the risks and said nothing.
Three weeks earlier and thirty miles south, Johnson County had declared a state of disaster. The source of the emergency wasn't a hurricane or a wildfire. It was fertilizer — biosolids produced from Fort Worth's own wastewater, spread on farmland, and laced with PFAS at levels that stunned investigators.
Together, these two events tell a story that every American community should understand: PFAS contamination doesn't stay where you put it. It follows the water. It follows the waste. And when the system fails to track it, ordinary people pay the price.
The City: 1.4 Million People, One Invisible Threat
Fort Worth's water system serves approximately 1.4 million customers across North Texas. In 2023, federally mandated testing at the city's North and South Holly water treatment plants found 16 samples that exceeded the EPA's newly finalized maximum contaminant level of 4 parts per trillion (ppt) for PFOA and PFOS — two of the most studied and dangerous PFAS compounds.
But the real shock came from the groundwater. Samples taken from beneath Naval Air Station Fort Worth Joint Reserve Base — the former Carswell Air Force Base — between January and March 2022 revealed maximum PFAS concentrations of 29,800 parts per trillion. That is nearly 7,500 times the EPA's enforceable drinking water limit.
The contamination source: aqueous film-forming foam, known as AFFF, a firefighting suppressant used for decades at military installations. AFFF is extraordinarily effective at smothering jet fuel fires. It is also saturated with PFAS compounds that do not break down in the environment — hence the name "forever chemicals."
Fort Worth had previously been part of a national class-action settlement involving water utilities and PFAS manufacturers. But city leaders determined the settlement was inadequate. They opted out, hired outside counsel at a cost of $9.3 million to explore PFAS removal options, and filed their own suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on March 10, 2025.
The lawsuit names 3M, DuPont, the Department of Defense, and other manufacturers and distributors. It alleges violations under CERCLA (the federal Superfund law), the Texas Solid Waste Disposal Act, and common-law claims of trespass, negligence, and public nuisance. City spokesperson Reyne Telles told reporters the suit was about "holding parties accountable for contamination and health risks" to Fort Worth's water supply.
The County: When City Waste Became Rural Poison
While Fort Worth was grappling with PFAS in its drinking water, the same contamination was taking a different path — through the city's wastewater treatment system and into the surrounding countryside.
Synagro Technologies, a company that processes municipal wastewater sludge into commercial fertilizer products, had been operating at Fort Worth's treatment plant since 2020. Synagro produced a biosolids-based product called "Granulate," which it marketed to farmers as a soil amendment. In late 2022 and January 2023, Granulate was applied to agricultural land in Johnson County, a 200,000-person county just south of Fort Worth.
Residents began noticing a powerful smell from biosolids piles on a neighboring property in November 2022. They reported it to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and to Johnson County officials. What followed was an investigation that would upend the county.
Dana Ames, Johnson County's Environmental Crimes Investigator, tested the biosolids and surrounding properties. The results were, in her words, "absolutely shocking." Testing confirmed 27 types of PFAS in the Granulate product, with 11 compounds at high concentrations. Eighteen of those same PFAS compounds were found in the soil and water of neighboring farms — a chemical fingerprint linking the contamination directly to the fertilizer.
The numbers told a devastating story:
Surface water on neighboring agricultural properties measured over 84,700 parts per trillion of PFAS — more than 21,000 times the EPA drinking water standard.
Well water on affected properties exceeded EPA limits by several hundred times.
Cattle tissue from a newborn calf tested at 3,200 parts per trillion of PFAS.
Livestock were dying. Farmers could not sell their cattle for human consumption. Property values collapsed. On February 11, 2025, the Johnson County Commissioners Court declared a state of disaster — the first such declaration in the United States triggered by PFAS contamination of agricultural land.
The Farmers Who Fought Back
Among the affected landowners were James Farmer, Robin Alessi, Patsy Schultz, Tony Coleman, and Karen Coleman — cattle ranchers whose operations bordered the land where Granulate had been applied. They filed suit against Synagro Technologies, alleging negligence in manufacturing and distributing contaminated fertilizer, and seeking damages for property devaluation, livestock losses, and disruption to their livelihoods.
Johnson County sought Governor Greg Abbott's endorsement for federal emergency assistance. County officials met with Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller to explore state-level relief. As of early 2025, no federal assistance had been approved.
Meanwhile, in December 2024, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had filed his own lawsuit against 3M, DuPont, and Corteva in the Northern District of Texas — alleging the companies violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act by marketing PFAS-containing products like Teflon, Scotchgard, and Stainmaster as safe, despite knowing of harmful consequences for more than fifty years. The state sought at least $1 million in damages plus civil penalties.
The Regulatory Backdrop
These Texas cases arrived at a pivotal moment for PFAS regulation in the United States. On April 10, 2024, the EPA finalized the first-ever National Primary Drinking Water Regulation for PFAS, setting enforceable maximum contaminant levels (MCLs) of 4 parts per trillion for PFOA and 4 ppt for PFOS, individually. The rule covers six PFAS compounds total and requires public water systems to monitor, report, and reduce PFAS levels to comply.
In May 2025, the EPA confirmed it would retain those MCLs, though it proposed a two-year extension of compliance deadlines to give utilities more time to install treatment systems. The rule does not cover private wells or agricultural water — a gap that the Johnson County disaster exposed with painful clarity.
Fort Worth's groundwater readings of 29,800 ppt sit in stark contrast to the 4 ppt standard. The gap between what regulators now say is safe and what communities are actually drinking is not a rounding error. It is a chasm.
What This Case Teaches Us
The Fort Worth and Johnson County cases illustrate a truth that environmental professionals have long understood but the public is only beginning to grasp: PFAS contamination is a systems problem. It enters through manufacturing and military use. It passes through municipal water treatment. It concentrates in biosolids. It spreads to farmland. It enters cattle. It enters the food supply.
No single regulation covers this entire chain. The EPA's drinking water rule addresses public water systems. CERCLA designations can trigger Superfund-level cleanup at point sources. But biosolids — the processed sludge that cities produce in massive quantities and routinely spread on agricultural land — sit in a regulatory gray zone. The EPA has not set PFAS limits for biosolids applied to soil. States like Texas are left to respond after the damage is done.
At the EPR Foundation, we see the Fort Worth story as a case study in what happens when protection stops at the city limits. A community of 1.4 million had PFAS in its drinking water. The same PFAS flowed through the wastewater system, was processed into fertilizer, and spread across the farms that feed surrounding communities. The contamination didn't stop because the jurisdiction changed. The oversight did.
The Path Forward
Fort Worth's decision to opt out of a national settlement and pursue its own $420 million lawsuit signals that cities are no longer willing to accept inadequate remedies. Johnson County's disaster declaration — the first of its kind for PFAS on farmland — demonstrates that rural communities can force attention to contamination that would otherwise go unnoticed.
But lawsuits are not cleanup. Disaster declarations are not remediation. The ranchers in Johnson County still cannot sell their cattle. Fort Worth is still spending millions to explore filtration options. The PFAS in the groundwater beneath the former Carswell base is still there, at concentrations that dwarf any safety threshold ever proposed.
What these communities need is what every PFAS-affected community needs: comprehensive monitoring that follows contamination from source to exposure, enforceable standards for biosolids and agricultural water, funded remediation programs that don't require a decade of litigation to activate, and genuine accountability from the companies that manufactured these chemicals knowing they would persist in the environment forever.
The water in Fort Worth flows south. The waste follows. The contamination doesn't care about city limits, county lines, or regulatory gaps. Our protections shouldn't stop at those lines either.
Sources: KERA News (March 13, 2025); Water World (March 14, 2025); Texas A&M AgriLife Extension (February 24, 2025); Hilliard Law (March 19, 2025); City of Alvarado Public Statement (February 13, 2025); Texas Tribune (December 11, 2024); EPA PFAS National Primary Drinking Water Regulation (April 26, 2024, 89 FR 32532); National Agricultural Law Center; ESG Dive (December 16, 2024); Haynes Boone (April 25, 2025).