For years, the 686 residents in and around the small town of Stella, in Oneida County, Wisconsin, have been fighting for safe drinking water after discovering high levels of PFAS contamination in private wells. What was once considered routine—drinking water from one’s own well—has become a source of fear, as everyone relies on a well.
Kitchen taps go unused; bottled water stacks up in homes. Residents are left with questions about the future of water access, property values, and their long-term health. The biggest question residents have been asking is how this happened, whether it could have been prevented. Local communities have pushed back at public meetings and demanded answers and regular well-testing from officials. Other residents like Kristen Hanneman have turned to civic action to better educate neighbors about PFAS, while Tom LaDue joined a statewide PFAS coalition.
Sewage sludge is spread on farmland. (City of Geneva, Illinois, Flickr )
The start of a nightmare
William Casey Crump, long-time resident, landowner and chairperson of the Stella town board, thinks back on those first days when state testing revealed the contamination.
“When it first came out that we had such high levels of PFAS chemicals, the highest levels in the country, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) had a public meeting and briefed us on a bunch of stuff.” He adds, “At that time, there were a whole lot of unknowns, and one of the biggest concerns was what do we do?”
It was the summer of 2022, and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Bureau of Drinking Water and Groundwater launched a project to test for 44 types of PFAS by sampling 450 wells from volunteering owners throughout the state.
Diagram depicting the type of shallow private wells tested by the Wisconsin DNR in 2022. Wells with casing no deeper than 40 feet below the water table were selected for the study. Casing depth is how far down the well casing extends into the ground. The depth to water is the depth from the ground surface to the water table. According to the DNR, the shallower the groundwater, the “younger” it is. The “age” of the groundwater refers to how long ago the water entered the subsurface. Since PFAS started being used around the 1950s, younger groundwater equates to higher risk. Deeper groundwater can still be affected, however, depending on specific hydrogeologic conditions. (Wisconsin DNR)
The DNR found an alarming 71% of wells in the state contained at least one type of PFAS. Private wells in Stella raised particular concern. They contained levels of PFAS so high that town chairman David Brunette sent letters to DNR officials and government officials requesting help, saying water “can no longer be safely consumed by our residents.” Subsequent testing by DNR officials later revealed some wells contained levels of PFOA and PFOS higher than 35,000 parts per trillion, or almost 10x above the drinking water standards set for those two types of PFAS chemicals by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
Since the 1950s, companies like DuPont (makers of Teflon) and 3M (makers of Scotchgard) have manufactured thousands of PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, for military, industrial and household uses. Yet, despite conducting their own toxicity studies, these companies spent decades misleading the public and denying the dangers of PFAS, and as a result, PFAS are now widespread in water, soil and air. The synthetic chemicals are defined by at least one carbon-fluorine bond that is nearly impossible to destroy, hence the nickname “forever chemicals.”
Wisconsin Public Radio reports that in Wisconsin, around 1.2 million acres of land are approved for sludge spreading under regulations established by the EPA. Nationwide, sewage sludge may have been spread on nearly 70 million acres, or about a fifth of U.S. farmland.
Exposure to PFAS is associated with many adverse health conditions, including preeclampsia (pregnancy-induced hypertension), kidney and testicular cancer, increased cholesterol levels, immune dysfunction, thyroid problems and other serious health issues.
According to the EPA, current scientific evidence suggests that for some PFAS there may be no level of exposure below which adverse health effects do not occur. In 2024, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Biden administration imposed the first-ever national limits on PFAS in public drinking water, but in May the Trump administration proposed rescinding those limits except for all but two kinds of PFAS, PFOA and PFOS. The Trump EPA recently killed the risk assessment of sewage sludge conducted under the Biden administration, which detailed the health and environmental risks of applying sludge to farmland.
Private wells are a particular concern for rural Americans. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, more than 43 million people rely on private wells for their drinking water, with 72% of rural households using private wells or small water systems. Whereas public drinking water systems are subject to regulation, private water supplies, like household wells, are not. Owners of private wells typically bear both the responsibility and the cost of testing and treating their water, which can pose a significant barrier. Towns like Stella are one example of municipalities that do not have a municipal well, forcing residents to rely on individual wells.
People using domestic supply wells per square kilometer, with a photo of a private well cap. (U.S. Geological Survey)
After the 2022 testing results, the DNR stepped in by offering free sampling for private water wells within 3 miles of the Stella’s town hall. By 2023, the DNR expanded its sampling of surface water in Stella and the nearby town of Starks, including the north branch of the Pelican River and the Wisconsin River, and in 2024 conducted more private well sampling. According to the DNR in June 2025, of the 241 wells sampled in a 3-mile radius of Stella, 127 tested positive for PFAS, with 88 exceeding Wisconsin DHS’s drinking water standards. High levels of PFAS were also found in the nearby Moen Lake Chain, the Pelican River and in the tissue of fish and deer.
Result after result has left many residents concerned about the health effects on their children, who had grown up drinking the water. Crump says residents whose wells hadn’t yet been tested began living in fear. “Now, when people turn on their faucet, if they haven’t had their water tested, they wonder what’s in there,” he says. “Some of them don’t want to know, but most people want to have their well tested.” As the results poured in, the contamination could be traced back to a practice that was once deemed not only safe but beneficial: sludge spreading.
How did this happen?
Not long after discovering Stella’s PFAS contamination, the Wisconsin DNR began a process to review the area as a potential Superfund site and identify responsible parties. A site inspection report, released in September 2025, linked the pollution to sludge spread on farm fields since the 1980s, which included sewage sludge from the nearby City of Rhinelander and sludge from a paper mill located in Rhinelander. For decades, farmers in the area saw paper mill sewage sludge from municipal sewage treatment plants and residuals from paper mills as “a good fertilizer,” says Crump. “And so that’s how that stuff ended up being spread out here in the potato fields and hay fields. It was a good base fertilizer, and it was cheap.” Federal and state officials encouraged spreading sludge as “beneficial” and safe to use. Why would farmers think otherwise?
After completing its investigation into the results, the DNR sent out a responsible party letter to Rhinelander Mill’s current owner, Ahlstrom Rhinelander LLC, part of a multinational company based in Finland. (The mill was founded in 1903, and Ahlstrom purchased it in 2018.) In its letter, the DNR linked PFAS treatments to make greaseproof paper for microwave popcorn bags as a source of the contamination. The DNR also found soil collected from areas where the mill had spread sludge contained high concentrations of PFAS.
In the statement following the letter, Tricia Schwartz, an Ahlstrom spokesperson, said that the company was reviewing the letter and the inspection report, but never admitted responsibility and denied using the chemicals PFOA and PFOS in its manufacturing process.
It was not the first time Ahlstrom has been targeted. In 2023, private well owners near Stella filed a class-action lawsuit against Ahlstrom, alleging the company knew or should have known about the dangers of spreading PFAS-contaminated sludge on farmland. An attorney for the plaintiffs claimed further that DNR records show the company continued to land apply sludge as recently as 2021.
Yet, as the DNR site inspection report reveals, sludge spread on Stella’s farmland did not come from the paper mill alone. Another source was from the City of Rhinelander, which has faced its own bout with PFAS. In 2020, two municipal wells were found to contain high levels of PFAS. An investigation by WXPR found those wells were built near places where municipal sewage sludge was spread in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
It remains unclear whether the city will continue spreading its sewage sludge on nearby land. When asked whether it considered municipal sewage sludge a possible source of contamination, a DNR spokesperson referred Barn Raiser to the responsible party letters the agency already sent, adding the DNR “may send additional responsible party letters to others in the future if new information becomes available.”
Stella Town Chair Casey Crump was featured in a January video by Wisconsin Conservation Voters, which profiled the PFAS contamination in Stella. (Wisconsin Conservation Voters)
Paper mill sludge and sewage sludge can have different compositions and concentrations of PFAS, and they are subject to different regulations. The DNR’s website still lists paper mill sludge as a “beneficial use” of and industrial byproduct.
According to the DNR spokesperson, there were no requirements to monitor PFAS in sewage sludge in Wisconsin Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (WPDES) permits until 2024. WDNR uses WPDES permits as a mechanism to require PFAS testing in sewage sludge and to restrict land application at certain PFAS concentrations. Their PFAS thresholds in sludge follow the “Michigan Model,” where feasibility standards have been set rather than health-based standards, so contaminated sludge is still being spread.
Historically, the agency conducted analyses of heavy metals in sludge. It wasn’t until the 2025 Wisconsin Act 201, signed into law by Gov. Tony Evers, that PFAS monitoring became required.
Industry insiders today acknowledge sludge spreading as a “Trojan horse” for dumping toxic industrial waste, where farmers are given or sold cheaper fertilizers without being told the risks.
In the 1970s, PFAS was a growing part of industrial waste systems in many states. At the time, chemical manufacturers like 3M and DuPont knew the hazards of these chemicals. In 1973, for example, DuPont scientists found there was no safe level of exposure to PFAS in food packaging, and in 1977, 3M found that PFOS, (the PFAS chemical in Scotchgard) was “more toxic than anticipated,” but continued to manufacture and sell their products.
As environmental laws tightened in the 1970s and 1980s, industries and municipalities lost many of their traditional waste disposal options. The Clean Water Act, which passed in 1972, restricted disposing pollutants to surface waters through a permit system and treatment requirements. The Ocean Dumping Ban Act of 1988 ended routine ocean disposal of sewage sludge and industrial wastes in U.S. waters, redirecting them to wastewater treatment plants, landfills, incinerators and farmland.
Spreading sewage sludge, the semi-solid waste byproduct from municipal wastewater treatment plants or the residuals from industrial paper mills, became a cheap disposal method.
Industry-led PR campaigns helped rebranded sewage sludge as recycled nutrients and “biosolids.” In 1996, Wisconsin adopted standards that encouraged the land application of sewage sludge as fertilizer over incineration or landfilling, while the WDNR issued permits.
Emblematic of the results of this effort is a 1997 BioCylce article titled “Paper Mill Sludge: Feedstock for Tomorrow.” Its author highlights paper mill companies in Wisconsin, Maine, Michigan and Ohio, who saw land application of their sludge as a cutting-edge form of recycling. Between 1979 and 1995, according to data from the National Council of the Paper Industry for Air and Stream Improvement, Inc., land application was the fastest growing trend of paper mill sludge management.
By the early 2000s, as the New York Times has reported, researchers at 3M had discovered the presence of PFAS in sewage and were concerned about its spread on farmland. They presented their research to the EPA in 2003, yet the agency continued to promote the use of sewage sludge on farmland, despite whistleblowers and the agency’s internal studies raising concerns about contamination.
Despite greater public awareness of high concentrations of PFAS in both sewage sludge and paper mill sludge, its beneficial image persists. In October 2025, Steve Warner, statewide site review coordinator for the wastewater program at the Wisconsin DNR, told Wisconsin Public Radio sludge spreading is “a win-win for the farmer in that they can get a relatively low-cost source of fertilizer.” He added, “But also it’s often an economic reuse option for the facility compared to taking that to a wastewater treatment plant or to a landfill.”
For the residents of Stella dealing with the aftermath, the cost is devastating mentally, physically and financially.
“You’ve been used to 50 years of turning on any faucet in your house or out of the hose in the barn. Now those individuals can’t maintain their normal routine because they’re not supposed to consume that water,” says Crump.
Another resident, Tom LaDue, shares that they’ve been drinking the water for many years now and have relied on the water for hunting the deer on his property, eating fish out of the lake and watering his vegetable garden. LaDue worries for future generations.
“My sons and their families are going to inherit this place when I pass and I don’t like the idea of the lake being contaminated for fishing, swimming and sports,” he shares.
“They say that water sports are safe on your skin, but don’t swallow any water. But younger kids, they splash around and are likely to get some water, and it’s the long-term effect that I’m concerned about.”
It’s not just the residents’ everyday routines that have been disrupted, but also local food production.
“Food production out here is part of our livelihood,” Crump says, noting concerns about PFAS uptake in plants and food watered from contaminated groundwater fed by local streams and lakes. “We still have potato farmers, cranberry bogs, corn and hay producers. They plant corn on my 90 acres out here, and they farm it for feeding cattle, but it takes a lot of water.”
LaDue agrees and hopes there will be more water testing and research into the vegetables grown using the contaminated water.
Accountability and response
While Crump appreciates that Ahlstrom has launched a bottled water program for residents within a 3-mile radius of Stella, he believes the money could be better spent on long-term solutions. Those include more PFAS testing that the DNR has been unable to test and helping homeowners maintain their filtration systems. The average installation cost for a point-of-entry treatment system (for whole-house filtration) can cost thousands of dollars and about $1,400 on average for annual maintenance.
“We put filters in and then in six months you’re supposed to change the filter, and you forget about it, and you don’t have a service coming in to do it, which is another additional cost, then that routine maintenance may not happen,” Crump says.
But these are still temporary fixes. A Wisconsin DNR spokesperson admitted that a realistic timeline for long-term solutions or cleanup is unclear, since it is such a lengthy process to understand the extent of contamination.
The town of Stella in Oneida County has been facing PFAS contamination of private wells and the Moen Lake Chain. A sign for the town hall is pictured here on June 21, 2025. (Danielle Kaeding, Wisconsin Public Radio)
As long as sludge spreading is still permitted on land, the risks of continued pollution remain. But there is some hope, and one simply needs to look no further than Maine. The Pine Tree state is the first state in the country to pass a state law that banned the land application of sewage sludge. For half a century, both paper mill sludge and sewage sludge had been spread across farmlands in Maine, until 2019, when local farmers raised their voices. The state investigated the sludge pathways and found that while paper mills were a culprit, they didn’t bear the sole responsibility.
Land applying residuals, whether from POTWs (publicly owned treatment works) or paper mills, was the problem. As a result, the state passed a landmark law, Public Law 2021, Chapter 641, which banned the practice. Jean MacRae, associate professor at the University of Maine, who has focused her research in Maine, says that the state introduced the bill “to reassure people that we weren’t going to continue to make a problem bigger, to protect the groundwater, and prevent neighboring wells from getting contaminated.”
The key aspect that Wisconsin leaders should pay attention to says MacRae, is the positive, supportive attitude that Maine lawmakers had towards affected farmers and communities when addressing the issue.
Michelle Ramirez, Government Relations Director at Wisconsin Farmers Union, agrees that Wisconsin should look to Maine as an example. She said, “The experiences that the state of Maine shows that with proper support from a state, most of the contaminated farms can safely return to production, and future contamination could be avoided.”
Ramirez shares that the union fully supports banning land application.
With the signing of Wisconsin Acts 200 and 201 in 2025, $133 million in funds have been allocated to help address the water crisis through testing and remediation. Crump revealed that funds have been set aside for private treatment systems, which is a good start. The funding will help expand the Well Compensation Grant Program.
During the signing, Evers said, “This will provide real relief to families and communities tackling the pressing threat of PFAS in local wells, municipal water systems and more.” He added, “It’s been a long road, but this will make a real difference for families living with the challenges of people every day, so today, we’re here to chart a new path forward— one where folks can trust that the water coming from their tap is safe to drink.”
The Wisconsin Farmers Union celebrates the PFAS bill. “The PFAS bills that were signed on [April 6] are a win-win for farmers and rural communities,” WFU President Darin Von Ruden said in a statement.
But again, no real solution can start without first stopping continued contamination. According to a DNR spokesperson, the City of Rhinelander has not land applied since 2014. But a full ban is not in place. Instead, the DNR is describing continued land application with tighter PFAS regulations. Under the DNR’s new general permit for sewage sludge, announced on July 1, only two PFAS, PFOA and PFOS, would be monitored, limiting concentrations above 20 parts per billion from being land applied.
But this is not enough. Stopping land application will not solve the problem. Research out of Maine reveals that contamination from sludge can surface years after application.
According to Maine state Rep. Bill Pluecker, who was central to Maine’s legislation banning sewage sludge spreading on farms, states across the country need to be proactive in banning PFAS from consumer products and in setting meaningful concentration limits. Michigan, for instance, was an early leader in setting drinking water standards for PFAS, but the state’s strategy “depends on detecting PFAS and mitigating it through cleanup initiatives—a strategy that’s well intended but leaves room for harm to reach the public,” Pluecker recently wrote. By contrast, “Maine’s policies opt for a more comprehensive approach, regulating PFAS as an entire category rather than by individual chemical regulations,” Pluecker wrote, adding that in addition to creating an emergency relief fund for farmers affected by PFAS contamination, the state also created safety nets to protect small businesses to help them navigate the transition away from using PFAS in consumer products.
MacRae suggests that states like Wisconsin should take two steps when facing PFAS and sludge: “Looking at source reduction and investing in the infrastructure that is needed to reduce the amount of [sludge] that winds up on the land.”
While the release of funding is a welcome relief, the fight for clean water is far from over for residents of Stella. Bottled water needs to arrive, filters need to be installed and maintained, and wells still need to be tested because many still don’t know what lies in their taps. The timeline for meaningful change remains unclear, as regulation is still struggling to catch up to contamination as a result of a farming practice that was encouraged and largely unquestioned.
Resources
Those who rely on private well water should ask local health officials about eligibility for help paying for testing and possible repairs. Subsidies in your area may be available but may not be publicized. You can use this EPA website to find a list of state-certified laboratories in your area that do water testing, or contact your county or state health department or your State Certification Officer for assistance.
The Water Rangers Program with the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project offers free training to teach participants how to collect and analyze water samples, document pollution, and report violations to regulators.
Jason Collins is a Las Vegas-based journalist and editor with more than a decade of experience reporting on politics, culture, and public life. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English, and his work has appeared in Poynter, Nonprofit Quarterly, South Magazine, and other publications.
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