In late March, a group of Islanders gathered at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center in Vineyard Haven to hear about the Island’s persistent problem with PFAS. These chemicals – sometimes called “forever chemicals” due to how long they stick around in soil and water – have turned up everywhere from the summit of Mount Everest to the sea ice of Antarctica. Alas, Martha’s Vineyard is no exception.
Ever since PFAS was first detected in the Island’s water in 2018, the hazardous chemicals – which pose risks to human health and the environment – have prompted concern. Unsafe levels of PFAS have been detected in several private wells in West Tisbury, and more recently in a handful of wells in Chilmark, where the town has launched a testing initiative to better understand the scope of the issue. The Chilmark School – despite PFAS tests showing levels well below state safety limits – switched to bottled water in the fall of 2025 out of caution while a filtration system is installed. Several houses in West Tisbury are also drinking bottled water on the town’s dime while investigators finish mapping a plume of PFAS spreading around the former landfill.
The panel at the film center was arranged by the Vineyard Conservation Society (VCS) to address Islanders’ questions about the scale of the issue and what to do about it. Samantha Look,
the executive director of VCS, addressed the audience: “What are we going to do as a community to ensure that the contamination of our groundwater does not get worse?”
The good news is that, as a whole, Martha’s Vineyard water appears to be less affected by PFAS contamination relative to mainland Massachusetts. In other parts of the state, including on the Cape, unsafe levels of PFAS have been detected in public water sources. By contrast, none of the public water sources on the Vineyard have yielded detections of PFAS that exceed regulatory limits. The Edgartown Water Department, for instance, reports it does not detect any PFAS in the municipal water. “We’ve been fortunate that it’s been a complete non-issue,” said Bill Chapman, the town’s water superintendent. Ditto with the Tisbury Water Works. The Oak Bluffs Water District has detected PFAS at two of its wells – at Lagoon Pond and Farm Neck – but at extremely low levels. The district is working on a “preparedness study” exploring possibilities for a filtration system or other changes to the Oak Bluffs water system should that ever be needed.
The story is different for the private wells, from which about a third of Vineyard homes draw their water, especially up-Island. Unlike the municipal water, which is tested regularly, one issue is a lack of information: only a small fraction of wells have been tested for PFAS, and results from tests that have been conducted are mostly not publicly available. The exception is a study carried out by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2022 that offered free testing to houses up-Island and published the results. The majority of the several dozen houses tested in that program did not have unsafe levels of PFAS. But there were a few wells in West Tisbury and one in Chilmark that did; the town’s recent testing push has turned up several more.
While that might not sound like a crisis, there is one aspect of the Island’s water supply that makes even such scattered detections of contamination troubling: all of the drinking water on Martha’s Vineyard comes from the same place: the sole-source aquifer.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines a sole-source aquifer by two criteria: it supplies at least half of the drinking water in the area it serves, and there is no reasonable alternative should it become contaminated. The Martha’s Vineyard Regional Aquifer meets both criteria. The giant subsurface body of water – estimated to contain around 150 billion gallons of fresh water – contains more than enough to supply the Island’s needs, which run around a billion gallons per year. Replenished by rain, the water (and whatever else is in it) slowly flows through its layers of sand and rock until it eventually reaches the ocean. The last complete study of patterns of flow in the aquifer was conducted in the 1980s, and it isn’t clear exactly how all the water connects. But people who think about the Island’s water say that the implication is that contamination anywhere should be a concern everywhere.
It was no wonder then that the risk to the aquifer at large was one of the main questions that came up during the PFAS panel. Ayesha Khan, an anti-PFAS activist from Nantucket, shared her experience about the problems with groundwater on that island, which has been dealing with its own spate of high detections in private wells. “Once the sole-source aquifer is contaminated,” warned panelist Laurel Schaider, PhD, a senior scientist with the Silent Spring Institute in Newtown, Massachusetts, “you can’t rein the chemicals back in.”
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PFAS isn’t just one thing. It’s an acronym for “per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances,” a class of around 15,000 different compounds designed to be extremely resistant to heat, water, and oil. This ability comes from a super tough bond between carbon and fluorine atoms in each molecule. That’s the fluorinated part. The mix-and-matching of these different bonds since the chemicals were invented in the 1930s has generated a long menu of PFAS. They are used in a dizzying range of materials, from non-stick cookware to rain jackets, paint to paper plates and cups, toilet paper to dental floss, and, most infamously, firefighting foam.
Mass manufacturing of PFAS started in the 1950s, but it took decades before people became concerned about consequences for human and environmental health. This was partly a matter of visibility: it wasn’t until the 2000s that tests became available to begin measuring PFAS in the environment. It was quickly found to be pervasive in water and soil across much of the industrialized world, albeit at extremely low concentrations. That pesky but extraordinarily useful carbon-fluorine bond meant the molecule almost never degraded, inspiring the nickname “forever chemicals.” They also showed up in people’s blood: researchers found that virtually everyone in the United States has detectable levels of PFAS in their bodies.
Given their diversity, the toxicity of most types of PFAS is still not well understood. But research on the most common contaminants has found links between exposure to the chemicals and risk for health problems including cancer, weakened immune systems, and reproductive issues. In 2024, the EPA issued the first national limits on six of the best-studied types of PFAS. Two of those – PFOA and PFOS – were limited to concentrations of just four parts per trillion. That was substantially less than even Massachusetts’s strict standard of twenty parts per trillion of all six types together. Essentially, the EPA was saying: no amount of these two chemicals is safe.
On the Vineyard, PFAS was already on the map – specifically at the Martha’s Vineyard Airport. In 2018, Ron Myrick, an engineer at the environmental cleanup firm Tetra Tech, was working with the Martha’s Vineyard Airport Commission to clean up different chemicals left behind by an old dry-cleaning business on the property. Separately, he had been hearing chatter about PFAS contamination at airports off-Island due to firefighting foam, so he convinced the commission to run some tests on wells drilled near the dry-cleaning site. For years, as required by the Federal Aviation Administration, crews had regularly tested an emergency firefighting foam system, spraying it on the ground.
Sure enough, when Myrick measured water in the wells, he found high levels of PFAS. “That investigation started to expand,” he said. They found it in wells farther away from the foam testing site, including private wells at dozens of houses in West Tisbury to the south of the airport along Waldrons Bottom Road and Vineyard Meadow Farms Road, following groundwater flowing downslope toward Long Cove.
“We discovered it was likely migrating off the property,” said Myrick. Of the 197 wells tested, forty-seven had PFAS that exceeded current state limits, including fifteen wells with high enough levels for MassDEP to consider the water to be an “imminent hazard” and required immediate action by the Martha’s Vineyard Airport Commission. That included providing bottled water to affected houses and then installing filters. Today, all the forty-seven affected properties in West Tisbury have filtration systems in place. These systems, called Point of Entry (POE) treatment filters, use one or multiple carbon filters to remove PFAS from well water before it flows into a house. Sampling by Tetra Tech has shown that the filters brought PFAS detections below state limits, even at properties that had the highest levels detected in their wells.
An indication that the PFAS problem wasn’t restricted to the airport came during the statewide campaign to test private groundwater wells between 2020 and 2022. Residents in Chilmark, West Tisbury, and Aquinnah – where most residents use private wells – were offered free testing by MassDEP. Not many people took the state up on the offer. A total of seventy-one wells were tested in that campaign (forty-two in West Tisbury, nineteen in Chilmark, ten in Aquinnah). There were no detections in Aquinnah. But in West Tisbury, four of the wells had PFAS levels that exceeded state standards, including one considered to pose an “imminent hazard.” In Chilmark, far from the airport or any other obvious source, just one well exceeded state limits – that of Jessica Roddy and her family.
“It was a great shock,” said Roddy. Her well had high levels of the six main PFAS of concern – more than eighty parts per trillion in one measurement, she said. “I never in a million years, never in a hundred million years, expected that it would come back positive.”
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Roddy had been a full-time resident of Chilmark since 2011, but, as she put it, she had been coming to the Vineyard since “before I was born.” Her parents started visiting in the summer in the 1950s and kept coming during her childhood. Roddy started bringing her own kids to the Island from California during summers. One year, when her then-fourteen-year-old son asked why they had to go back to the West Coast, she realized they didn’t, and bought her house in 2012 from an acquaintance in Chilmark.
Like most houses in Chilmark, it had a private well. From the start, Roddy said she tested the water annually at the Wampanoag Environmental Laboratory in Aquinnah for such things as E. coli. So she was receptive when MassDEP offered free tests for PFAS. When the results came back positive, she immediately installed filters and waited to see how the town would address the wider problem. “[The state] offered all of the neighbors free testing,” she said. “Strangely, a lot of them didn’t want to know.”
Over the next few years, PFAS got more attention on the Island. It became central to an acrimonious, years-long debate around a proposed turf field at the high school; the plan was ultimately rejected largely due to concerns about PFAS and water quality. In 2023, subsequent tests by the state linked high levels in at least ten wells in West Tisbury to the town’s fire station, which had used a similar firefighting foam as the airport. The state also detected unsafe levels of PFAS in wells near the town’s former landfill on Old Stage Road. (Landfills can be a source of PFAS as the chemicals leach out of garbage buried there, a reminder that exposure to PFAS is not limited to water.)
Under orders from the state, the town of West Tisbury hired the civil engineering firm Wilcox & Barton, Inc. to begin working to address the problem around the fire station. Amy Roth, an environmental consultant who is managing the project, said the firm, along with MassDEP, has since mapped the plume, sampling more than fifty wells. Of those, fifteen had PFAS, with seven at levels below the limits considered safe by the state. The firm and MassDEP have installed and are monitoring POE filtration systems at eight houses within that plume, paid for by the town. The firm has also started to map the plume around the landfill and the town is providing bottled water to six houses there that had detections of PFAS in their wells.
While much of the PFAS appears to come from those known sources, Roth said not all of the fifteen sites are attributed to the fire station. Roth said they have detected PFAS at a range of concentrations, some of which might represent more diffuse sources or background conditions for PFAS, such as septic tanks, which can release chemicals washed off various products into the water. Laundry products, too, are a common source.
The airport is further along with efforts to deal with its PFAS plume. In 2022, it contracted with Tetra Tech to try to stop the plume of PFAS from moving further through the aquifer. This involved injecting a material underground called colloidal carbon that sticks to the chemicals. This year, the company started testing a similar treatment to prevent PFAS concentrated in the soil from seeping down into the groundwater. The topsoil acts like “a PFAS tea bag,” explained Myrick. “Every time it rains, a little bit comes out.”
However, they’ve found that PFAS doesn’t diffuse in all directions. “The aquifer is not a bathtub that mixes. You have very defined flow pathways,” he said. While the PFAS appears to be concentrated in particular layers of the aquifer, eventually, it ends up in the ocean – unless, of course, it comes up in someone’s well.
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Roddy, who had watched as more PFAS detections popped up, had found it strange that the Chilmark select board and the other towns didn’t seem to be pursuing more widespread testing after the detection in her well. “I was kind of just mystified,” she said.
That became more than a curiosity when in June of last year, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. After she read an article in The Guardian about high cancer rates in a town in Sweden with severe PFAS contamination from firefighting foam, it occurred to her that something similar might have happened to her. She had no known genetic risk factors. Her confidence that there was a link between the cancer and the PFAS in her well was strengthened when she got her blood tested for the chemicals. Her care team at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital Infusion Services center, where she was undergoing chemotherapy, helped her collect the blood sample and send it to a testing company called EmpowerDX.
“The blood comes back and I’m a 9/11 firefighter,” said Roddy, referring to the fact that many World Trade Center first-responders were found to have high levels of certain PFAS in their blood. She plugged the numbers into an app that showed she had more PFAS than 95 percent of Americans, and exceeded the level associated with higher risk of health effects.
Her doctors had no way to prove that exposure to PFAS was the cause of her cancer. But Roddy said that they told her they thought it was plausible, and that was enough for her. “Let’s just say, it’s not my shampoo,” she said. In an effort to raise awareness on the Island, she sent a letter to the Chilmark select board in August, and then addressed the board directly in October, calling on them to do more about the problem. “My goal in going public with this was to make people aware of the dangers in our water,” she said in an interview with Martha’s Vineyard Magazine in May.
Since Roddy’s testimony, the Chilmark Board of Health (CBOH) has taken action to get more wells tested for PFAS to understand the scope of the problem and what it might mean for the Island’s sole-source aquifer. The CBOH’s administrator, Anna McCaffrey, is running the initiative. So far, she said they have done seven rounds of testing, with another round scheduled in June to make it available to summer Island residents. As of May 26, a total of 151 tests had been conducted.
This time it wasn’t just Roddy’s well that came back positive. McCaffrey shared data that showed six returned PFAS levels above the twenty parts per trillion state standard. Twelve had PFOA above the federal standard, and five had PFOS above the federal standard. It’s unclear what the sources in Chilmark might be. Look, of VCS, said she has heard a lot of speculation: septic tanks, remnants of an old barn that burned down, a junked car.
The tests aren’t free – they run from $85 for a home–testing kit to $375 for an official test through the Wampanoag Environmental Laboratory from Tap Score, an out-of-state lab. But McCaffrey is trying to make it simple to get testing kits and send them in batches to labs via courier. (For more details on how to test your well, see the information at right.)
McCaffrey is also working with the Martha’s Vineyard Commission to develop an interactive map that will publicly display testing results, including their location. The hope is that this might help to identify the still-mysterious sources of PFAS and how the chemicals are flowing through the aquifer. “I think they’ve been remarkable in getting on this and doing it,” said Roddy of the CBOH. “I wish other towns were doing the same.”
However, getting permission from well owners to display results publicly is an issue, said McCaffrey. Of the more than one hundred private wells tested in Chilmark through the program, the owners of just twenty-three wells have granted permission for the board to include their results on the map.
“People are concerned about their property values, a stigma with their neighborhood, their land, and that seems fair,” said Look. But the more information the town has, the more they will be able to do something about it and get financial support from the state to do more testing and analysis, said McCaffrey, who said she has been overwhelmed dealing with PFAS queries alongside the rest of her work on the CBOH. “We’re just trying to understand what’s going on in town and how it moves.” (She pointed out that last year Nantucket hired an environmental administrator whose work is focused on the PFAS problem there.)
It might not be long before homeowners have to report PFAS results. A bill currently moving through the Massachusetts legislature would create a fund to test and remediate PFAS in public and private water wells. Those funds would only be made available if local boards of health require property owners to test for PFAS before selling their homes, something already required in some states, such as New Jersey. The bill also includes provisions that would ban PFAS in a suite of products, among other restrictions. MassDEP has already offered hundreds of millions of dollars of loans across the state to clean up PFAS in public drinking water systems, and can require responsible parties to pay for filtration in private wells if levels of the six main PFAS exceed ninety parts per trillion. “Protecting clean drinking water is vitally important,” commented a MassDEP spokesperson. “Massachusetts was one of the first states in the nation to establish limits for PFAS in drinking water. We will continue to work with communities and public water systems to make sure that our drinking water is safe at the touch of a tap.”
And if PFAS does turn up, there are ways to deal with it. “The treatment systems work amazingly well,” said Look. Filtration systems can run from twenty bucks to a few thousand dollars, plus maintenance. In addition to carbon filters, there are other types of POE treatment systems available, such as reverse osmosis. Easy to install Point of Use filters can also be put directly on faucets and have been shown to effectively remove most PFAS.
However, filters have not yet been certified to meet the extremely strict federal standards for certain types of PFAS established in 2022, according to the EPA. Products certified to remove PFAS should include NSF/ANSI 53 or NSF/ANSI 58 on the label. (McCaffrey has put together useful information about filters as well as testing locations on the Chilmark Board of Health website.)
On a broader level, Islanders can try to prevent products with PFAS from ending up in landfills or septic tanks or farms and gardens, or from coming onto the Island at all. Living on a sole-source aquifer “asks more of each of us,” said Look. It’s important to “really know what we are buying and using. Anything you’re putting onto the land, and into the land, to know what it is.”
Avoiding PFAS can be easier said than done. The chemicals remain ubiquitous, and often are not labelled on products. But manufacturers are generally moving away from the most harmful PFAS to less toxic alternatives, and new regulations are slowly phasing out their use.
Regarding the sole-source aquifer, “the biggest threat has probably already existed,” said Myrick. As rain continually refreshes the groundwater, the PFAS that’s already there is likely to get more diluted and eventually wash out to sea. “I don’t think that things will get worse,” he said. Chapman, the Edgartown water superintendent, said he’s concerned about any source of contamination, but PFAS worries him less than the Island’s challenges disposing of treated water. “Wastewater is going to be the death of this Island,” he said.
Nonetheless, all municipal water sources continue to be regularly tested for PFAS and other potential contaminants. If PFAS are detected above state or federal standards, the down-Island water districts would be required to install filtration systems to remove them. The challenge of complying with strict federal limits on some PFAS has been an issue for water authorities elsewhere in Massachusetts, although they now have more time to make any needed changes. In May, the EPA decided to allow water authorities to request an additional two years, until 2031, for compliance. It also temporarily removed limits on several types of PFAS while keeping the strictest limits on PFOA and PFOS in place.
At the PFAS panel in March, Look pointed out that being an island is a double-edged sword. On one hand, the sole-source aquifer means Martha’s Vineyard is especially vulnerable to contamination. That includes not just PFAS, but everything from fertilizer runoff from lawns, to salt water intruding with rising seas, to seeping septic tanks and cyanobacteria blooms. On the other hand, Look pointed out, being an island means Martha’s Vineyard has a lot more control than most places over what comes across the ferry – and what ends up in the water.
Testing for Forever Chemicals in Private Wells: A Guide for Island Homeowners
Interested in testing the PFAS levels in your private well? You have several options.
The Chilmark Board of Health office, located at 401 Middle Road, offers PFAS test kits for town residents. The cost is $265. All other Island residents can contact the Wampanoag Environmental Laboratory, located on Herring Creek Road in Aquinnah, which offers test kits ranging from $325 to $375.
Homeowners are responsible for delivering or shipping the samples directly to laboratories – optimally, the day the sample is taken.
Island homeowners can also opt for private testing. To do so, contact the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) for specific instructions and a list of state-certified laboratories and guidelines.
What happens if your test comes back positive for PFAS levels above what the state allows?
According to MassDEP, there are essentially three options: purchase and use PFAS-free bottled water, install a Point of Use (POU) treatment system, or install a Point of Entry (POE) treatment system. A POE treatment system is the best choice, but also the most expensive.
Water treatment systems vary in their efficacy and pricing, from a $20 water pitcher with a filter to systems that purify the water throughout the entire home falling closer to the $1,000–$6,000 range.
Private well owners are not required to report their PFAS test results to the local boards of health or to the state, but it is encouraged so that communities can better understand and track PFAS trends.
For more information, visit the following websites:
• Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection
mass.gov/orgs/massachusetts-department-of-environmental-protection
• Chilmark Board of Health
chilmarkma.gov/board-health/pages/pfas-drinking-water
• Wampanoag Environmental Laboratory
wampanoagtribe-nsn.gov/lab
Homeowners can also check in with town boards of health for information on how to mitigate PFAS contamination.
