Four years ago, Spokane County water experts were eager to help with a public health response to potent contaminants in West Plains drinking water. A powerful commissioner pulled the plug.

A bit more than a year ago Chuck Danner learned he might have a problem with his water. He learned this not from following the news but in a phone call from a friend who, like Danner, lives on the plains west of Spokane. The friend’s well water had tested positive for PFAS—a witches’ brew of toxic, synthetic chemicals whose profitable miracles come with a skull & crossbones asterisk. Nicknamed the “forever chemicals,” the myriad of PFAS variants are regulated in parts-per-trillion. The alarmed friend called Danner to encourage him to test his well water.

A life-long Spokanite and a now-retired carpenter, Danner moved out to the West Plains in 1992. He wanted to be closer to nature, to have more room, enjoy horses with his girlfriend and build his own house. His property is nestled in pines not far from where the main road leaves the Spokane River gorge. The view from his living room is open to the south where a pine-crested ridge on the rolling terrain hides Spokane International Airport (SIA), three miles to the south. The groundwater that reaches his well flows north from the direction of the airport where PFAS—until recently a key ingredient in aviation fire-fighting foam—has been detected in several wells.

Chuck Danner on his West Plains property. Spokane International Airport is beyond the tree line in the background.

Danner’s daughter is a young woman in her thirties now, but she lived with her father for fifteen years beginning when she was very young. Their story is not unusual on the West Plains where hundreds of families draw water for themselves and their animals from wells. When I visited in early December, Danner pulled papers from a crisp manilla folder. The pages reported the results of testing his blood for PFAS. There was also this note from his doctor:

“Hi Chuck. A few of your PFAS levels are high. From what I have read, high PFAS levels may cause increased cholesterol levels, increased liver enzymes, and increased risk of kidney or testicular cancer. Reasons I am reassured in your case are that your cholesterol levels and liver function are normal, also you have been exposed for ~30 years per your report and are healthy. I cannot predict whether or not you will develop kidney or testicular cancers, but you do not smoke cigarettes so that is reassuring. Take care.”

Danner is not reassured. There are reasons that when he looks out toward the airport he is worried, angry and frustrated. The frustration has a fuse to it and burns with a sense many of his neighbors share that their health and wealth have been endangered by officials who should have done more to inform and protect them once the West Plains PFAS contamination was discovered in early 2017. High on that list is Spokane County Commissioner and airport board member Al French, Spokane’s longest-serving elected official, whose district encompasses the West Plains and both the Air Force Base and SIA.

French declined to be interviewed for this article, nor did he respond to written questions.

Rob Lindsay is the Environmental Services Manager for Spokane County’s water resources department. A veteran public works administrator, Lindsay says he approached the county’s leadership in early 2020 with what he thought was a rather “ordinary” ministerial task—to get the commissioners’ stamp of approval to apply for a $450,000 state grant to investigate and better define the sources and pathways of PFAS in West Plains groundwater. Although Lindsay didn’t know, at the time, that there was PFAS contamination in the airport’s groundwater, there was no doubt the West Plains had a PFAS problem and Lindsay was trying to help the county catch up to it.

The Air Force had disclosed finding the “forever chemicals” in groundwater at nearby Fairchild Air Force Base three years earlier. Further testing revealed the dangerous chemicals had fouled nearby wells from which the City of Airway Heights was drawing drinking water. It looked to be an unfolding environmental health nightmare.

The news “was very unwelcome,” Lindsay remembers. “This was very concerning, absolutely.”

Additional testing revealed the PFAS contamination had spread well beyond Airway Heights. The Air Force expanded its response, offering free well water testing and providing water treatment systems to private well owners if tests found PFAS above a federal health advisory limit of 70 parts per trillion. By then, the management at nearby Spokane International Airport (aka Geiger Field) had test results revealing PFAS contamination in its groundwater. Yet, the only thing SIA was offering its neighbors was its silence.

Emails obtained in response to public records requests offer compelling evidence that at least four SIA officials, including the airport’s CEO and public affairs director, knew about the groundwater contamination in 2017. There is no evidence the airport alerted public health officials.

Rob Lindsay and former county water expert Mike Hermanson say the county’s efforts to secure state funds to study dangerous groundwater pollution west of Spokane were effectively blocked by long-time county commissioner and SIA board member Al French.

From the start, the Air Force’s response to its PFAS problem had a peculiar feature to it. Eligibility for its remediation services is limited to well owners west of Hayford Road, a main north-south arterial on the West Plains. The Air Force’s rationale for the Hayford Road boundary is that the road is the “approximate location of a groundwater divide” between two so-called “paleochannels.”

The paleochannels are subsurface canyons in the lava (basalt) layers that dominate the local bedrock. The deep incisions are packed with sands and gravels through which groundwater flows much more readily than it does through cracks and seams in the basalt bedrock. The channels align south to north. The Air Force’s hypothesis is that any Fairchild PFAS moving eastward in near-surface groundwater would be sucked into the northward flowing paleochannel groundwater and thus not cross the “groundwater divide.”

Their theory may yet prove correct, if not completely waterproof. But not long after PFAS was detected at and around Fairchild, it was also being found well east of Hayford Road by concerned home owners who’d paid several hundred dollars each to test their water. Among those who learned about the positive PFAS tests was Craig Volosing, the president of the Friends of Palisades, a neighborhood conservation group with an alert and active membership in the rural area bordering on Palisades Park just outside the Spokane city limits. The park and its increasingly alarmed neighbors are just to the north of Spokane International Airport and down-gradient from another large paleochannel—the “Airport paleochannel”—that flows directly north from SIA before tailing a bit to the east as it nears the Spokane River.

Volosing was familiar with the county’s hydrogeology work. Years earlier he’d accepted an invitation from Lindsay to serve on the advisory board for a major watershed planning project encompassing much of the West Plains. He also knew and had been in communication with Chad Pritchard, the chair of Eastern Washington University’s geology department.

Pritchard is one of the foremost experts on West Plains hydrogeology so there was a good reason for Volosing and a handful of other Friends of Palisades to seek his help. As the number of private well owners reporting positive tests for PFAS increased there were (and continue to be) growing concerns about health issues, including what seems to be an unusually high incidence of pancreatic cancers.

At the time—2019—Pritchard was primed to dig further into the emerging PFAS problem. He had just completed his most recent paper on the highly complex West Plains aquifer system focusing in large part on the paleochannels. Although it was a technical paper, it was prescient and explicit about the need to pursue a better understanding of the sources and pathways of hazardous pollutants—including PFAS—in order to protect the area’s vulnerable groundwater.

One of Pritchard’s co-authors on the paper was Mike Hermanson, a highly-regarded water specialist whom Lindsay had hired in 2007. Hermanson was at a meeting Pritchard convened in late 2019 to discuss a $2 million federal grant application. Pritchard hoped to use the funds to more precisely locate and track the West Plains PFAS contamination, especially in the areas east of Hayford Road beyond the Air Force’s designated response area. He knew competition for the federal grant would be stiff. So it caught his attention when a Department of Ecology representative at the meeting spoke up to report on a $450,000 grant Ecology’s toxics cleanup program was offering that seemed tailor-made for the West Plains PFAS investigation. The project would need a fiscal agent. Spokane County was the logical choice, so Hermanson quickly went to work preparing the grant application which he would hand off to Lindsay.

The grant application was ready in February of 2020. The last box to check was a routine briefing for the county commissioners prior to their expected vote to approve the grant application. What Lindsay didn’t expect is the phone call he says he received from commissioner Al French the day before the commissioners’ meeting.

Lindsay says French called to tell him the item had been removed from the agenda. When I asked Lindsay if French had given a reason for pulling the item he said he had; that French was “concerned about the timing and the potential effect on the airport.”

“I think my response was ‘this isn’t going away,’” Lindsay added. “And he (French) said, ‘I know that.’”

“I’m just very concerned about being potentially implicated in what I see as an obvious attempt on the part of the airport director and potentially others to hide information. And I can tell you that when I spoke to you last time, [in early June of this year] I was unaware. I was as surprised as anybody to learn that the airport board or the airport management was aware of PFAS in their wells as long ago as 2017 and 2019…it just makes me want to ask those folks out there ‘what did you know and when did you know it? In my opinion it’s lying by omission.”

–Spokane County Environmental Services Manager Rob Lindsay

Lindsay conveyed the bad news to Hermanson. Hermanson says Lindsay told him French said he’d pulled the item at the behest of a top airport official “who didn’t want people out there basically doing this work.”

That might have been the end of the line. But Hermanson and Pritchard would try another route. Blocked at the county commission by Al French, they turned to Mike LaScuola, an environmental health specialist at the Spokane Regional Health District.

LaScuola has worked for the SRHD for 37 years. His role is much bigger than his “technical advisor” title and his experience with bureaucracy and environmental health problems is broad and deep. Among other roles, LaScuola is a member of the FAFB Restoration Advisory Board created in 1995 to oversee the cleanup of solvents and other hazardous wastes at and near the base. It was to LaScuola that a civil engineer working for the Air Force disclosed, in 2017, that PFAS had been found in the groundwater.

From that moment on LaScuola took on the role of the health district’s point person on the mushrooming PFAS problem. It hasn’t been easy. “It has been the most unusual, difficult issue I’ve dealt with in all my time,” he told me when I interviewed him in June.

When I asked about the request from Hermanson to have the health district broker the grant request, LaScuola said his first answer was “no.” But he kept thinking about it and changed his mind, reasoning that “it’d be a shame to let this thing get through the window.” LaScuola says he got his then-manager’s consent to submit the grant application to Ecology but with the understanding that it would require the county’s technical expertise if it were awarded.

That decision kept the grant request alive, and it would eventually offer the county another bite at the apple. In July of 2021, Ecology notified LaScuola that the grant funds would soon be allocated to the health district. This was really good news, though not for everybody.

The health district’s board would have to sign off on the grant award but before it could do so, the county commission would have to authorize Hermanson’s work on the project. But it didn’t.

“Spokane County Environmental Services/Water Resources have staff and resources available to manage the grant, and to conduct the technical portions of the work,” Lindsay wrote to the new county CEO Scott Simmons on September 2, 2021. “Ecology is aware of the SRHD’s limitations and amenable to the County accepting the grant. They are awaiting our response.”

Simmons replied in a September 8th email: “I had a chance to discuss with Al [French] yesterday. He indicated he would like to discuss further with the Airport prior to our committing to get involved. I’ll let you know more after I hear back from Al.”

Two weeks later a grants administrator with Ecology’s toxic cleanup program sent a reminder that Ecology would need confirmation from both the county and the health district in order to release the funds. It was Hermanson who replied by email four days later: “I am still waiting direction on whether our program is in a position to accept the grant funding.”

The sign-off from the county and the health district boards never came.

Hermanson resigned his county position four months later. He says the obstruction on the PFAS study factored into his decision. His family has lived and farmed south of the river in an area not far from where PFAS has been detected in neighbors’ private wells. He was also aware of the discovery of PFAS at the Great Northern elementary school and at a fire station—both east of Hayford Road. (Great Northern paid for its test and an expensive treatment system to remove the PFAS from its drinking water.)

“For me that was…yeah, I mean, I lived that,” he told me. “I was driving to work every day on Old Trails Road and I’m watching new houses go in and people drilling wells. And I’m thinking this is work [the PFAS investigation that the grant would fund] that should be done.”

French’s headlock on the $450,000 grant has become part of the Palisades community oral history, along with the revelation, earlier this year, that top SIA officials knew, from their own tests, that there were elevated levels of PFAS in the airport’s groundwater. It feeds into their frustration and distrust of government.

When the state Department of Ecology finally learned of the airport’s positive tests for PFAS it moved swiftly to name SIA as a “potentially liable person” and initiate an enforcement action under Washington’s Model Toxics Control Act. The airport’s response was to hire a Washington D.C.-based law firm to fire back at Ecology, sharply criticizing its investigation and threatening the agency with possible legal action for undermining its potential real estate sales.

A week ago I circled back with Rob Lindsay to double-check on dates and other details for my reporting. He had gone back through his files and corroborated the emails (which I’d obtained from another source) that he’d sent and received. Near the end of the interview he said he was worried and unhappy with what had happened at the county.

“I’m just very concerned about being potentially implicated in what I see as an obvious attempt on the part of the airport director and potentially others to hide information,” he said. “And I can tell you that when I spoke to you last time, [in early June of this year] I was unaware. I was as surprised as anybody to learn that the airport board or the airport management was aware of PFAS in their wells as long ago as 2017 and 2019…it just makes me want to ask those folks out there ‘what did you know and when did you know it? In my opinion it’s lying by omission.”

The airport’s top managers have not been granting media interviews on the PFAS controversy, not even to The Seattle Times. But nothing can be said, or unsaid, about the PFAS contamination to erase the plain fact that the unwelcome test results were suppressed. Former Spokane City Council president Ben Stuckart was serving on the airport board in 2017 and 2019, where he chaired the board’s engineering committee. In a recent interview, Stuckart told me he was not informed about the PFAS contamination detected in the 2017 and 2019 groundwater samples.

Until Al French was replaced on the Spokane Regional Health District board by new county commissioner Amber Waldref earlier this year he held at least three key positions related to this story: county commissioner, airport board member (including the positions of vice chair and board secretary) and health district board member. French is also the chairman of “S3R3 Solutions” a state chartered “community empowerment zone” created to promote development and employment in the “West Plains Airport Area.” SIA CEO Larry Krauter is vice chair of S3R3, and French’s devotion to Krauter spilled into public view a year ago during a heated presentation at a county commission meeting.

As a county commissioner since 2011, and a two-term Spokane city councilman before that, French is known for his combative style even when he’s had to admit expensive mistakes. But mostly he’s known for his advocacy for property development and developers. When he responded to my interview requests on December 1st, he wrote that he was very busy with travel and official obligations such that he couldn’t foresee a time when he’d be available for an interview. He included a list of things he’s doing at the local and federal level to try to better address the West Plains PFAS problem.

French closed by inviting a “specific question” via email. I sent him seven, all related to the reporting for this piece. You can read my request here, his 12/1 answer here and my 12/5 reply here.

If there’s a silver lining to this story it is that what is now formally entitled the West Plains PFAS Groundwater Transport & Fate Study did not die after all. Last winter, Chad Pritchard was at a hydrogeological gathering in Pasco where one of his EWU students was presenting. As fate would have it, the Ecology administrator who’d been working with the county and the health district to try to deliver the $450,000 from the state was there too. The scientist and the grant administrator ran into each other. A conversation ensued. The money was still there, she explained, it just needed a willing and eligible municipal recipient. The City of Medical Lake—where Pritchard serves on the city council—is now administering the grant, and Pritchard is slated to start his field work later this winter.

The “Transport and Fate” study may offer valuable information toward reducing the spread of the contamination and future human exposure to the PFAS. What’s harder to account for is the human cost of the lost time. It’s not just the long delay in securing the state grant funds for the investigation Pritchard will head up. It is the daily missed opportunities over the past six years to protect and help people, especially those on the east side of Hayford Road, who still feel like they’re on an island, trying to hail a passing ship.

They still have to pay the hundreds of dollars it takes to test their own water and —if it tests positive for PFAS—come up with the thousands of dollars to install and maintain effective filtration. Had the airport reported its PFAS contamination in 2017, the Department of Ecology’s mandated remedial actions (which can include testing and filtration assistance to those whose water is contaminated) might be at or near maturity by now, rather than months or years away.

When I last visited with Chuck Danner a week ago he was both warmly hospitable and discernibly frustrated. The agitation came in part from the continuing sting of learning that he’s outside the area covered by the Air Force’s free water testing and remediation services. As it is, he says he may have to spend thousands of dollars for water treatment and filtration, in part because he will need to reduce the iron content in the water in order for the PFAS filtration to be effective. If he only lived west of Hayford Road, the Air Force would likely pay for all that. But not here.

He has a recent and apologetic email from the base that explains the decision and his predicament. It reads, in part:

“The data we have collected so far indicates that PFAS contamination from Fairchild sources does not go east of Hayford Rd.  We also know that a second paleochannel controls flow direction from the Spokane Airport and heads north into the area where you currently reside.  The Spokane Airport also is a user of AFFF and has trained with it for decades and there are at least two known source areas that have likely impacted groundwater with PFAS constituents that could be in drinking water north of the Airport.   
I’m very sorry that we can’t at this time help with suppling bottled water or providing a treatment system for your well. According to Department of Defense (DoD) policy and Federal Fiscal Law we are expressly restricted from spending DoD funds on non-DoD sources of contamination.“

Danner’s voice takes on a more wistful and somber tone when he talks about his concern for his health and that of his daughter. He works to lower his bad cholesterol but it doesn’t seem to budge. He no longer drinks his well water but PFAS is bio-accumulative and some variants possess long biological half-lives—meaning it can take years for the body to expel it through urine.

His daughter is on medication for thyroid disease. He knows PFAS exposure is linked to an increased risk of thyroid disease and thyroid cancer, but also knows it can be hereditary and that it rattles in the family tree.

“We started living out here in the shop when she was about five,” he says. “And then she stayed here until eighteen; moved away and came back and, you know, so basically fifteen years of her life was here. She was drinking the water. Drinking the water.”

He can’t help but wonder if her thyroid disease was hereditary or triggered by exposure to PFAS in the well water. He reads up on the question and thinks about it. He wishes he knew then, what he knows now.
—tjc