In the spring of 2014, routine water testing at the Pease Tradeport in Portsmouth, New Hampshire returned numbers that should have triggered immediate alarm. The Haven well — one of three supplying drinking water to the 8,000 people who worked at or visited the former Pease Air Force Base daily — showed PFOS at 2,500 parts per trillion and PFOA at 350 parts per trillion.
For context: the EPA's current maximum contaminant level for PFOS is 4 parts per trillion. The Haven well was running at more than 625 times that standard.
Among those 8,000 daily users were children. Small children. Infants and toddlers attending a daycare center on the Tradeport grounds, drinking the same water, day after day, month after month.
The Source Nobody Questioned
The contamination traced back decades. Pease Air Force Base, active from 1956 to 1991, had used Aqueous Film-Forming Foam — AFFF — at its fire training area. AFFF is spectacularly effective at suppressing fuel fires. It is also loaded with PFAS compounds that do not break down in soil, do not break down in water, and do not break down in the human body.
When the base closed and converted to a civilian tradeport, the wells kept pumping. Nobody tested for PFAS because, for most of that period, nobody was required to. The foam had been in the ground for decades. The chemicals had migrated into the aquifer. And the water flowed into taps, water fountains, and bottles warmed for infants.
The City of Portsmouth shut down the Haven well immediately upon discovering the results in May 2014. But by then, the exposure had been happening for years.
"Eight Months of Ignored Messages"
Andrea Amico's two small children had been drinking that water at the Pease daycare. When she learned about PFAS — that these chemicals bioaccumulate, that the body eliminates them extraordinarily slowly, that they concentrate in developing tissues and organs — she did what any parent would do. She asked for answers.
The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services said no.
Amico requested PFAS blood testing for exposed community members. The state refused. She wrote letters. She made calls. She attended meetings. For eight months, her messages went unanswered or deflected.
So she went to the media.
In 2015, Amico co-founded Testing for Pease with two other mothers — Alayna Davis and Michelle Dalton. Their demand was simple: test our blood. Tell us what's in our children.
The media coverage worked. New Hampshire DHHS reversed course and offered a blood testing program. 1,578 people — adults and children who had lived, worked, or attended childcare at Pease — were tested between April and October 2015.
The results confirmed what the mothers feared: the Pease community showed significantly elevated PFAS blood levels compared to the general U.S. population. PFOS, PFOA, and PFHxS were all higher than national averages from the same period.
From Local Fight to National Policy
What makes the Pease case remarkable is not just the contamination — hundreds of military bases across America have similar PFAS plumes. It's what three mothers with no policy experience accomplished through sheer persistence.
Amico's advocacy caught the attention of federal lawmakers. Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire included provisions in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act that authorized and funded the Pease PFAS Health Study through the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a division of the CDC.
That study didn't stay local. It expanded to seven additional PFAS-contaminated sites across the nation, becoming the Multi-Site PFAS Health Study — one of the largest investigations of PFAS health effects ever conducted in the United States.
Amico testified before Congress. She gave a TEDx talk. She was described by the PFAS Project as "a true hero in the fight against PFAS." But she wasn't fighting for recognition. She was fighting because her children drank poisoned water and nobody in authority had bothered to check.
The Remediation
The U.S. Air Force eventually funded construction and upgrades of PFAS treatment systems for all three Pease wells — Haven, Smith, and Harrison. A dual granular activated carbon (GAC) and anionic exchange resin facility was built on Grafton Road, reimbursing the City of Portsmouth for costs.
The Haven well — the one that tested at 2,500 ppt PFOS — stayed offline from 2014 until 2021, when the new filtration system was finally operational. Seven years without the community's primary well.
By 2021, treated water from all three wells showed PFAS levels at 0.1 to 3.3 parts per trillion — well below both the EPA's 2024 MCL of 4 ppt and New Hampshire's own stricter state standards (15 ppt for PFOS, 12 ppt for PFOA, 18 ppt for PFHxS, 11 ppt for PFNA).
The water is clean now. The question is what happened to the people who drank it for years before anyone checked.
What Pease Teaches Every Community
Pease was one of the first sites in America where PFAS was discovered in a public drinking water supply. The pattern it revealed has since repeated at hundreds of locations:
The contamination was old. AFFF had been used decades earlier. The chemicals simply waited in the ground.
Nobody was required to test. PFAS wasn't regulated. No utility was looking for it. Discovery was accidental.
The first response was denial. State health officials refused blood testing. The instinct to minimize preceded the instinct to investigate.
Mothers organized. Not environmental lawyers. Not scientists. Parents who refused to accept "we don't know" as an answer.
Media pressure moved the needle. Eight months of polite requests accomplished nothing. One news cycle changed everything.
Federal legislation followed local action. The 2018 NDAA provisions that funded national PFAS health studies started with three women in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
The Unfinished Story
A 2021–2024 follow-up study (PFAS-REACH) tested blood from 87 children who were likely exposed through Pease water. Their median PFAS levels were lower than the 2015 results — a sign that the water treatment is working and that blood levels are declining over time. But "declining" is not "gone." PFAS half-lives in the human body range from two to eight years, depending on the compound.
The children who drank that water as infants are now teenagers. The long-term health implications — thyroid disruption, immune suppression, developmental effects, cancer risk — won't be fully understood for decades.
Portsmouth is doing the monitoring. The Air Force is paying for the treatment. The water is clean. But the Pease story isn't over. It won't be over until the last exposed child grows old enough to know whether the water they drank as a baby changed their health trajectory.
Sources:
- PFAS Project, "Portsmouth, New Hampshire" (pfasproject.com)
- City of Portsmouth, Pease Tradeport Water System Consumer Confidence Report, 2021
- City of Portsmouth, PFAS Updates (portsmouthnh.gov)
- PFAS-REACH Blood Test Results, Pease, July 2025 (pfas-exchange.org)
- CDC/ATSDR, Pease Community Fact Sheet (archive.cdc.gov)
- Andrea Amico, Written Testimony, U.S. Senate PFAS Hearing, September 26, 2018
- Andrea Amico, Testimony before Senate Homeland Security Committee, December 9, 2021 (hsgac.senate.gov)
- NRDC, "PFAS Blood Tests: Needed, Denied" (nrdc.org)
The EPR Foundation tracks PFAS contamination sites, remediation progress, and regulatory developments. For more, visit eprfoundation.org/blog.