Ben Anderson said the Navy plans to continue providing bottled water and ultimately provide a clean water source to all affected families. “I don’t know what was related,” he said.Īfter testing their wells, the Navy provided Farnsworth and several of his neighbors whose wells tested positive for PFOS and PFOA with clean water. The realization that he and his wife had been exposed to the chemicals, which have been linked to prostate cancer and thyroid diseases, cast the struggles they have had over the past years with these very diseases in a new light. “We feel like we’re hostage here,” he said recently. Suddenly, a place that had been a haven felt more like a trap. One chemical, PFOS, was present at 3,800 parts per trillion, more than 54 times a safety standard set by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2016.īecause of the contamination, Farnsworth worried that he wouldn’t be able to sell his house - and decided not to put it on the market. But last February, he discovered a toxic side to the Navy’s presence in his life: His well, which he had used to water his fruit trees, cook, and fill his children’s and grandchildren’s glasses over the years, tested positive for three chemicals that had apparently seeped in from foam used for firefighting on the base. Until this summer, Farnsworth, who retired from the Navy in 2007, had been planning to sell it and move to Oklahoma to live near his grandchildren.Īfter a 30-year career, Farnsworth has an enduring love for the Navy. His home, which he recently had appraised for $469,000, is less than a mile down a fir-tree lined road from a sandy beach.

In the 22 years he’s lived on Whidbey, where he served as a command master chief at the Naval Air Base, Farnsworth, 61, has regularly crabbed and fished for salmon and enjoyed fruit from his own trees. A bout an hour north of Seattle at the northern edge of Puget Sound, Whidbey Island is quiet, forested, and, in Bob Farnsworth’s neighborhood, idyllic.

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