SACRAMENTO, Calif. _ It was a Sunday tradition at Bethany Slavic Missionary Church. After morning services, Florin Ciuriuc joined the line of worshippers waiting to fill their jugs with gallons of free drinking water from a well on the property, a practice church leaders had encouraged.
"I take it for my office every week," said Ciuriuc, a 50-year-old Romanian immigrant and a founding member of the largely Russian-speaking church, which claims 7,000 congregants.
Church leaders boasted it was the cleanest water in Sacramento, according to Ciuriuc. In fact, test results showed the water contained toxic chemicals from firefighting foam used for decades on a now-shuttered Air Force base a mile away. Church leaders say they did not understand their well was contaminated.
The church's well is one of thousands of water sources located on and near military bases polluted with chemicals from the foam, which was used by the armed services since the 1960s.
Defense Department officials know that the chemicals, called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, have seeped into the groundwater underneath nearly two dozen military bases throughout the state. But the department has conducted only limited testing off base and cannot say how many civilian water sources they've polluted or who will pay for it.
Since 2016, when the Environmental Protection Agency classified PFAS as an "emerging contaminant" linked to liver cancer and other health problems, the Pentagon has found the pollutants at levels above federal health guidelines in soil and groundwater at more than 90 bases nationwide.
California has the most of any state, with contamination at 21 bases, including six where the chemicals threaten the water supply in nearby communities, according to a review of hundreds of pages of Defense Department records by the Los Angeles Times.
In Riverside County, Barstow, Orange County and Sacramento, PFAS have been detected in private wells or public water systems outside the boundaries of military installations, records show.
At Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos and Fresno Air National Guard Base, the chemicals are suspected of moving into the community water supply.
One military contractor warned in September that residents "using groundwater for drinking water" near Los Alamitos "may potentially be exposed to migrating PFAS contamination." Another contractor said in March that five wells west of the Fresno airfield could be affected.
But the Pentagon has not completed off-base testing at either location, and at other California bases, leaving the full extent of the contamination unknown.
The Pentagon faces the prospect of a gigantic environmental cleanup that officials estimate could cost in excess of $2 billion and take decades to complete. The day Defense Secretary Mark Esper took office in July, he appointed a task force to oversee the Pentagon response.
Wherever they have already found PFAS in drinking water above the EPA health advisory level of 70 parts per trillion, the military has supplied bottled water, paid for filters and purchased clean water for both military personnel and civilians, officials say.
"Our first priority is to cut off human exposure, and everywhere we've identified that someone's drinking water is above the EPA health advisory level, we are doing everything we can to provide alternative drinking water," Maureen Sullivan, deputy assistant secretary of defense for environment, said in an interview.
Citing limited funds from Congress for cleanup and testing, the Defense Department only acts when water sampling finds contamination levels above EPA health advisory level for two of the most common variations of PFAS.
The threshold, which was set in 2016, is nonbinding, and officials in several states have set much more stringent standards. Congress is currently debating whether to force the Trump administration to adopt an enforceable nationwide standard, a proposal the White House has said it opposes.
California regulators have few legal tools to force the Pentagon to expand its sampling to groundwater near bases.
"We're doing everything we can to compel the owner, the Department of Defense, to conduct the investigations, to show us it's not a problem," said Doug Smith, assistant executive officer with Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board, which monitors groundwater at seven California bases.
According to the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan research organization, about 85% of Californians depend on groundwater for some portion of their water supply.
Regulators and environmental groups warn that the slow pace of Pentagon testing has left an unknown number of people drinking contaminated water.
"The PFAS plumes are spreading near these military bases, and DOD is turning a blind eye," said Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics, an environmental group that has pushed for more stringent PFAS cleanup standards.
