South Adams County Water and Sanitation District on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the city and county of Denver for allegedly contaminating the district’s raw water supply for decades with PFAS-laden firefighting foam runoff from Denver’s firefighting training center.
The suit is another example of the potentially infinite cost of the legacy of “forever chemicals,” as South Adams claims the pollution is “ongoing” and forced the district to build an $80 million water treatment facility for a safe supply.
“There remains a huge deficit” between the cost of that treatment and the state and federal funds South Adams scraped together, and Denver should pay, the district said. South Adams has spent “tens of millions” of dollars handling the PFAS problems since they were discovered in 2018, according to the lawsuit and an interview. District residents are paying higher rates because of the cost of avoiding PFAS, Moreno said…