CLOVIS, N.M.- A local farmer said contaminated water from the Cannon Air Force Base has contaminated 4,000 of his cows.
"Life is water, and without good fresh water, you can’t grow crops.
You can’t milk cows," said Art Schaap, the owner of Highland Dairy.
"What do I do with the animals?
So, we’re looking into maybe having to euthanize them," Schaap said.
He said the City of Clovis is working on a resolution.
"The positive is Curry County has passed a resolution to support– to make Cannon Air Force Base be more accountable," Schaap said.
Robert Thornton, Curry County Commissioner District 5, confirmed the city’s efforts.
KOB 4 reached out to Col. Russell Kesley from Cannon Air Force Base about the claims, but he chose not to comment.
Schaap said so far, Cannon Air Force Base has provided clean bottled water for his family and him, but not for the animals.

Adobe Stock Sandy officials are warning residents to be aware of scammers pretending to be from the health department after the city’s recent contaminated water troubles.
SANDY — Sandy officials are warning residents to be aware of scammers pretending to be from the health department after the city’s recent contaminated water troubles.
"We have had reports of impersonators claiming to be from the health department to test water and asking for financial information," the city tweeted Wednesday.
The city and health department will not ask residents for money, according to the tweet, and such requests are scams.
On Feb. 15, Sandy reported water samples in an area of the city had tested high for copper and lead after a fluoride feeder malfunctioned and sent undiluted fluoride into the system.
That incident occurred in the midst of a power outage during a snow storm, the city said.
The incident prompted a number of angry residents to show up to a town hall the following week to vent frustrations with the way the city handled the incident.
Sandy’s director of public utilities was later put on paid administrative leave while the incident is investigated.
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The water is acidic or alkaline, highly turbid and hard.
Acharya Nagarjuna University, located between Vijayawada and Guntur, falls in the high growth corridor after the state capital was shifted from Hyderabad to Vijayawada-Guntur region.
“The physico-chemical analysis of groundwater quality in industrial areas of Guntur city reveals that groundwater is largely affected by various types of contaminants from industries.
Total dissolved solids, total hardness, total alkalinity and chlorides are very high in groundwater in peripheral regions around industrial locations in Guntur,” warns a research study by the department of environmental sciences, Acharya Nagarjuna University.
Samples were taken from three places for analysis – Autonagar, the Masjid Omar site near Autonagar and Acharya Nagarjuna University campus – to check if groundwater in industrial areas was fit for human use.
“The results revealed that the water quality failed to meet drinking water standards.
Expressing concern over high alkalinity or acidity of groundwater, the researchers said though this does not directly affect human health, it indicates “an alarming increase in ions in the groundwater through industrial leachate contamination.” The researchers called for an evaluation of the environmental impact of human activities and formulation of strategies for groundwater conservation on a high priority basis.
The water samples had a low pH value indicating acidity during the summer season.
“This indicates a future threat that might lead to the dissolution of more heavy metals, thus rendering the water unsuitable for potability,” the study said, while suggesting continuous monitoring.
The results indicated that chlorides ranged between 72 mg per litre at Acharya Nagarjuna University during summer and 6,000 mg per litre at Autonagar during monsoon.

He says it’s all a result of the water contamination caused by Cannon Air Force Base and the firefighting foam they used.
Last year, he found out the milk he was producing here was no good.
It saddens me to see my cows suffer, and what really scares me is the unknown of the health of our family,” said Schapp.
He’s currently dumping 15,000 gallons of milk a day, has had to let go of 40 employees, and may have to euthanize all of the cows if they can’t be sold for beef.
As far as efforts to work with Cannon Air Force Base, he says he’s reached out but they’ve refused to do anything.
"They have no solution.
Their solution is, ‘I hope it goes away.
‘” He’s now suing the chemical companies that produced the chemical foam, like 3M and Dupont.
Schaap says thankfully, local and county governments have been very supportive.
Schaap has also filed a tort claim against Cannon Air Force Base.

In 2014, the town of Flint began using the Flint River as a public water source, resulting in unsafe levels of lead, bacteria and other contaminants in residents’ drinking water.
The study found that children born to Flint mothers exposed to unclean drinking water during pregnancy had lower birth weights on average than children born to mothers living in cities with clean water during the same period of time.
The effects were particularly pronounced in children born to mothers from a lower socioeconomic status.
Conducted in collaboration with colleagues from Tulane University and Wuhan University, the research was published through the IZA Institute of Labor Economics in January.
“There are very convincing studies showing that people with lower birth weight have poorer performance in school and lower labor market wages, and they die earlier.” Birth weight trends have even been linked to crime rates, Chen said, so looking at the birth weights of infants born in a particular region can help researchers predict the long-term effects of water pollutants on social and financial outcomes for the population of that region.
While lead is one of the main contaminants found in Flint’s drinking water, bacterial contamination of the water supply also poses a significant threat to residents of Flint and many other areas in the United States.
Bacteria is usually flushed out of drinking water with a cocktail of disinfectants added to water supply pipes.
In many regions experiencing clean water shortages, psychosocial interventions may also be necessary to reduce maternal stress during pregnancy, which is known to have adverse consequences for infants.
She and her colleagues had no way to determine which mothers had engaged in avoidance behaviors and which had not, meaning that some infants included in the sample were likely born to mothers who had avoided drinking from contaminated public water supplies.
If this is the case, she explained, the results of the study may underestimate the effects of a mother’s consumption of contaminated water on an infant in utero.

Researchers at UBC Okanagan have come up with a new device for detecting contaminants in drinking water, one that is not only portable and inexpensive but can provide results in real time.
Water contaminated with Cryptosporidium continues to be a worldwide health concern, one that is thought to cause between 30 and 50 per cent of childhood deaths in the developing world.
The intestinal parasite can survive outside of a host for up to 16 months and has a high resistance to common disinfectants.
Once it finds a home, Cryptosporidium can cause diarrhea in healthy adults and in severe cases can lead to death in children and immuno-compromised individuals.
Cryptosporidium can be a problem in the developed world, too, as witnessed in 1993 when a massive outbreak in Milwaukee infected more than 400,000 people and caused over 100 deaths.
Hence the need for an accurate and accessible method to detect the pathogen, say the authors of a new study published in the journal Sensors.
“Current methods for detecting Cryptosporidium require filtering large volumes of water, separating out the organisms, staining them with a fluorescence label and trying to identify the pathogen using a microscope,” says George Luka, a doctoral student at UBC Okanagan’s School of Engineering and the study’s lead author, in a press release.
“The process is extremely slow, expensive and doesn’t yield reliable results.” Luka and colleagues developed a calibrated biosensor involving anti-Cryptosporidium antibodies attached to electrodes that can act as capture probes.
“The biosensor performed exactly as we were hoping and was able to measure Cryptosporidium contamination rapidly and without the need for complex preparations and highly-trained technicians,” says Luka.
“This is an impressive solution that can easily be integrated into inexpensive and portable devices to test drinking water in real-time anywhere in the world.” Luka says that the new biosensor has the potential to find uses beyond Cryptosporidium detection.

FOUNTAIN, Colo. – A public forum was held Thursday with the Environmental Protection Agency to hear from residents affected by contaminated water in Fountain and Security-Widefield.
It’s believed chemicals from firefighting foam used on Peterson Air Force Base contaminated the aquifer between Security-Widefield and Fountain.
Now, people in the area are being found with elevated levels of toxic chemicals in their blood.
Thursday’s meeting was the fourth in recent months to learn about the impact Perfluorinated chemicals are having in our community.
Research shows exposure to these compounds has been linked to cancer, infertility, and brain damage in both children and adults.
"I’m going to weather through as long as I can," said Kenneth Bond, who’s lived in Fountain for 26 years.
Water coalition groups argue that method is not effective and takes too long.
"People can take us to court and say you didn’t fully take our comments in consideration and the courts will send us back to do it over again," said Benevento.
Right now, the agency explains they’re in part two of a three-part process to implement a maximum contaminant level.
A Harvard study dating back to 2016 found contaminated levels of PFC’s around 664 military fire training sites across the country, affecting 6 million people.

Washington – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) outlined a national plan Thursday to deal with public health risks of pollution caused by a family of chemicals used in many household products, including those produced by Minnesota-based 3M Co.
Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler told reporters Thursday that the EPA initiative is moving toward classifying PFAS as a hazardous substance under the EPA’s Superfund program, allowing the EPA to clean up sites and force polluters to pay.
Environmental and consumer groups said the EPA’s plan doesn’t go far enough.
They quickly challenged Wheeler’s decision not to push immediately for a national standard or other measures that will to lower allowable amounts of PFAS in drinking and groundwater.
No mandatory national standard exists for allowable levels of PFAS, only a federal advisory level.
Wheeler said Thursday that EPA feels "70 parts per trillion is a safe level for drinking water."
But Minnesota’s limits, like the federal limits, are "advisory rules, not regulatory standards, " said Jim Kelly, the state’s manager of environmental surveillance and assessments.
Wheeler said EPA will recommend mandatory PFAS toxicity standards by the end of the year but could not say how long the process of approval and implementation would take.
PFAS were discovered in drinking water in eastern Twin Cities in 2004.
"We’re ahead of most states already," said the MPCA’s Smith.

The recent contamination of water in the huge Narmada Dam catchment area is snowballing into a big mystery as the authorities and environmentalists have locked horns over the possible reason behind an imminent disaster.
The authorities have explained that the sulphide contamination in the millions of acre feet (MAF) Narmada water body has been caused by mild seismic activity that caused a fissure in the river bed through which toxic gases have seeped in from the core of the earth.
If this explanation is accepted as correct, environmentalists feel there is a danger of a quake hitting the dam in the long run.
The Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Limited (SSNNL), the apex agency for the dam and canal network, had last week suspended water supply to 138 villages in the vicinity due to reports of sulphide contamination accompanied by mass death of fishes in the reservoir.
As the needle of suspicion pointed towards possible dumping of untreated chemical effluents by dubious factory owners, the authorities first attributed the sulphide content leading to mass death of fishes to decrease in dissolved oxygen in the upstream areas and also huge amounts of water being stagnant for two years due to insufficient rains.
Later the authorities shifted the blame to a suspected seismic activity underneath the huge reservoir that might have released toxic gases into the water body.
The seismic activity explanation raises a very fundamental question about safety of the dam in the longer run, Vadodara-based environment activist Rohit Prajapati told The Statesman on Wednesday.
Acknowledging that it is not possible to contaminate such a huge water reservoir by dumping some untreated effluents, Rohit Prajapati said the authorities must thoroughly investigate the real cause behind the disaster.
Prajapati, along with other concerned citizens, has shot off a letter to the Narmada Control Authority (NCA) to disclose the reasons behind the sulphide contamination and decrease in dissolved oxygen levels which led to the mass death of fishes.

BAGHDAD, Feb. 10 (Xinhua) — Prime Minister of Iraq Adel Abdul Mahdi on Sunday said that solving river water pollution issue is a priority for the new government, calling on exploiting rainfall water to increase reserves.
"Solving water pollution issue resembles a priority to the new government since its formation,"a statement from Abdul Mahdi’s media office quoted him as saying.
"We have taken correct and reassuring steps regarding the issue, in addition to implementing plans to limit water contamination and guaranteeing the optimal utilization of water resources," he added.
Last year, thousands of people were hospitalized due to water contamination in Iraq’s oil-rich southern province of Basra, some 550 km south the Iraqi capital Baghdad, as poisonous undrinkable drinking water caused several illnesses and fueled raging protests in the province.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 (Xinhua) — The United States space agency NASA’s lunar orbiter has observed the landing site of China’s Chang’e-4 lunar probe for the second time and in a higher definition.
NASA announced Friday that its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) acquired a new shot on Chang’e-4 landing site the day after it did so on Jan. 30.
This time, LRO, a NASA spacecraft orbiting the Moon, moved closer to the floor of Von Karman crater and tilted to capture the Yutu-2 rover in two pixels just north of the lander, according to NASA.
The rover was not discernible and the Chang’e-4 lander was only a few pixels across in its first shot.
Chang’e-4 probe comprises a lander and a rover, and the rover is smaller than the lander.
In the picture released by LRO’s scientific team from Arizona University on Friday, Chang’e-4 lander and rover nestled among craters on the floor of Von Karman crater.