Homeowners question government over PFAS contamination cleanup

National Observer

28-07-2025

Edward Sheerr didn't know much about per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances until they were discovered in his drinking water. He, his wife and their two children moved to their home in the town of Torbay, Newfoundland and Labrador, in 2017 and found out from neighbours that the water in their area was not safe to drink.
He recalls feeling afraid, angry and desperate for answers: 'What are the possible implications from that? And what really can we do about it?'
Eventually, he learned that the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) contamination was coming from St. John's International Airport before spreading and seeping into the household well water in his neighbourhood.
PFAS are a group of synthetic chemicals used since the 1950s in everything from clothing to food wrappers to cookware. But one of the most problematic uses is at airports and airport firefighter training facilities, where aqueous firefighting foams (AFFF) contain PFAS. These 'forever chemicals' build up in the environment and in people who come into contact with them.
The St. John's airport is one of 33 PFAS-contaminated airport sites for which Transport Canada is responsible, according to the department's own data. Some of these sites have been identified as PFAS-contaminated for over 20 years, but have not yet undergone complete environmental remediation to clean PFAS out of the soil and water.
All of which has added another question for Sheerr: What's taking so long?
'They don't go anywhere'
The Torbay site was classified as contaminated by Transport Canada in 2005-2006 and, 20 years later, just under 19,000 tons of contamination has been cleaned up. Other sites are also seeing sluggish progress. A site in Sept-Îles, Quebec, was identified seven years ago but is still in the planning stages for a cleanup which hasn't been performed yet. Watson Lake in the Yukon was added to the list in 2005-2006 — and current information shows that no remediation work beyond planning has happened.
The St. John's airport is one of 33 PFAS-contaminated airport sites for which Transport Canada is responsible, according to the department's own data. Some of these sites have been identified as PFAS-contaminated for over 20 years.
A research paper from 2018 assessed that of 2,071 airport and heliport sites across Canada, 420 sites likely have PFAS contamination from firefighting foam and 25 of these sites were between 200 metres to 2.5 kilometres from surface water such as streams, lakes or wetlands.
Their ubiquity is a direct consequence of their utility.
'On one side, they're amazing chemicals,' says Johan Foster, an associate professor with the University of British Columbia's chemical and biological engineering department. 'They're wonderful for what they do.' And because they're so effective, they're used a lot, he says. But their chemical structures mean they don't break down.
'That's why they're the 'forever chemicals,' because they just kind of sit around, they never degrade, and then they build up,' he says.
Also, PFAS don't stay local — they travel, sometimes long distances away from the original polluted area. They spread via groundwater, surface water, run-off, soil, rain and wind. They evaporate into the air and drop somewhere else. They can spread with activities, like water bombers scooping up water from a contaminated lake and dumping it on a forest fire elsewhere, says Foster. Because they spread easily, water-soluble PFAS are the ones most frequently found in nature, he says.
'If it rains, they get into the groundwater,' he says. 'We can eat them, they get into our bloodstream, they cause all sorts of problems inside the human body and also with animals and nature. We don't break them down inside of our body, and they don't go anywhere.'
The chemicals had been widely adopted because of how cheap and easy they are to use — but cleaning them up is precisely the opposite.
'Truly, once the cat is out of the bag, cleanup of PFAS is wildly expensive and very complex work,' says Cassie Barker, senior program manager for toxics at nonprofit Environmental Defence. 'I think that these municipalities and/or private well-users are left holding the bag on trying to find expensive water treatment solutions at the end of the pipe.'
There isn't yet a good remediation method, either. There are two main technologies available, Foster says. One is absorbative, which uses a filter to remove PFAS from water, but those filters are then contaminated. If they're sent to a landfill site, they'll just transfer the contamination to the ground.
There's also electro-oxidation and supercritical water methods. For the latter, a container of water is heated to 374 degrees Celsius under a lot of pressure that ultimately destroys the PFAS.
This is what engineers like Foster call a 'very dilute problem.'
If you were to throw half a wooden toothpick-sized quantity of PFAS into an Olympic-sized swimming pool, that would make it undrinkable. Now imagine cleaning that up.
'You just can't take that swimming pool of water and heat it up. You have to be able to concentrate it and then destroy it,' he says. 'That creates an issue of being able to do this at scale.'
Where are the PFAS?
Even before the difficult work of remediation can begin, the PFAS need to be found. However, Canada lacks comprehensive records about PFAS contaminations or its presence in water systems or groundwater.
While over 100 federal sites have been identified as PFAS-contaminated, the Federal Contaminated Sites Inventory does not yet include all of them, according to a 2025 report from Environment and Climate Change Canada and Health Canada. PFAS was only added to the inventory in 2024-2025.
Further, environmental releases of PFAS are reported to the national spill registry, which is better suited to capture spills of substances such as oil or diesel — not something that can contaminate a swimming pool with a couple of drops — so small but still consequential amounts may not be reported.
As well, not all types of PFAS get picked up by standard commercial analyses, says Kela Weber, professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at the Royal Military College and co-author of the 2018 paper. That's been, he says, 'a fundamental challenge from the start.'
'There are so many different types of PFAS, most labs can't even analyze for them,' he says. And if we don't know what was present in the first place, we can't know whether it's really been destroyed, he points out. Additionally, the PFAS being dealt with now are from 30-odd years ago, not the current variations, which are ever-expanding — one estimate puts global annual PFAS sales at $55 billion a year.
As if the problem weren't already complex enough, PFAS can transform as they move through the world, evaporating, condensing and encountering other chemicals.
'The challenge of remediation is not the removal of the parent compound that you're interested in,' Weber says. 'It's the removal of all PFAS, including what that parent compound is transformed into.' He says that's what happens with all removal technologies, 'whether it's detected there's transformation happening or not.'
Who's going to pay?
As evidence mounts of the chemicals' harms, individuals and governments are taking PFAS manufacturers to court. Transport Canada is suing chemical manufacturers 3M and Mueller Water Products, while British Columbia filed a class action against manufacturers last year.
But governments are also facing lawsuits for their part in allowing the chemical contamination to go so far. The Sheerrs are part of a class action lawsuit launched against Transport Canada last fall, accusing the department of negligence and seeking damages, among other things.
They say the department has never performed a hydrogeological study, even though the Department of Environment and the Town of Torbay have both recommended one.
'We're at somewhat of a loss as to why it is that Transport Canada hasn't committed to doing that yet,' says Alex Templeton, the lawyer heading the lawsuit.
Transport Canada declined to provide a representative for an interview and instead sent a comment that reads, in part, 'Transport Canada takes its responsibilities related to human health and the environment seriously, especially with respect to Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS). … When test results at an airport property boundary indicate exceedances of the new PFAS objective, Transport Canada has been contacting neighbouring residents with residential drinking water wells to test their water.'
But the Sheerrs found out about their water when Transport Canada tested other homes in their neighbourhood. Eddie Sheerr contacted the department himself to request a water test.
'I had to reach out to them. They didn't reach out to me,' he says.
In-home filtration systems promised last fall have yet to materialize, he says, and as with other homes in their community that found PFAS presence in excess of 30 nanograms a litre, the Sheerrs are now receiving 15 five-gallon bottles of water a month from Transport Canada.
There are many start-ups and researchers trying to solve the PFAS removal problem. Foster has a PFAS-cleaning start-up being tested, and Weber is working on a method that's scheduled for a field trial in Ontario next year.
The Sheerrs and others in their community would like more transparency and help, and Foster would like more regulations and plans. 'This is our generation's leaded fuel,' he says. 'It's in the environment. You can't see it. You can't smell it. It's creating all of these health problems. And we're going to have to deal with it.'