Bone fragments from the Schaap’s cows surface to the top of a now-covered PFAS containment trench as their tissues decompose. It’s all that’s left of a once 3,600 herd.
Photographer: Pat Rizzuto/Bloomberg.
Farmers Ruined by PFAS Face Key Moment in Fight Against Pentagon
A critical hearing is set for Feb. 7 before the US District Court of South Carolina, which is managing thousands of lawsuits claiming property, personal injury and other damage from PFAS-containing firefighting foam.
Neither Art nor Renee Schaap could bear to stay on their dairy farm in Curry County, New Mexico, in April 2022 as employees put down the last of their cattle, shooting 1,000 in the head one by one with .22 caliber bullets.
Workers dumped the carcasses into a 20-foot-deep trench the length of a football field, creating two layers of rotting corpses that emanated a “smell of death,” Renee said. The soil is riddled with the toxins that killed them.