West Prairie Village mobile home community seeks to consolidate water system with Airway Heights over PFAS concerns

May 30-When moving into a mobile home community in the months after her husband's death, Cathy Tordale was not thinking about the water.

She was grieving. As she and her 14-year-old Chihuahua, Harry, settled into their new tiny home at West Prairie Villages, she soon realized her home, and every other residence in the trailer park, relied on well water contaminated with PFAS.

"I remember years ago hearing about PFAS at (Fairchild) Air Force Base and thought it would never affect me. Well, it does affect me now," Tordale said.

The city of Airway Heights is conducting a feasibility study to build a water line north to connect the mobile park community. It is unclear if the project will move forward after the study is due in July. Residents of West Prairie Village want to make sure it does.

Situated several miles north of Airway Heights, West Prairie Village is an isolated, rural community of 350 residents living in mobile homes, including more than 100 children. Having grown to the size of a small town over the course of decades, some families have lived in the community for more than 25 years.

For much or all of that time, residents have received water from a single well that is piped into the 138 homes. For the past decade that well water has tested at PFAS levels several times the level of acceptable PFAS under federal guidelines.

Known as "forever chemicals," perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances are a set of man-made chemicals used in thousands of products . High levels of them have since been linked to cancers, heart disease, high cholesterol, thyroid disease, low birth weight and other diseases.

Years of runoff from firefighting foam at the airport and nearby Fairchild Air Force Base has been the subject of an ongoing cleanup effort. In 2017, PFAS was found in Airway Heights' water system at levels 50 times the national average. The city shut down their own municipal water and has relied on Spokane water ever since. If a water line is built to West Prairie Village, it would bring Spokane city water to the mobile homes.

Testing conducted by Fairchild Air Force Base at the trailer park started soon after the contamination's discovery in Airway Heights. PFAS was found but at levels far below that of the city below them. West Prairie Village owner Christa Connolly said she did not understand PFAS' significance at the time.

"There were small amounts but no regulations and significantly lower than what was found in Airway Heights. We understood it wasn't a big deal at that point," she said.

In 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency set out new guidance. No level of PFAS was safe for human consumption. Levels at which PFAS presented significant danger were set at between four and 10 parts per trillion, depending on the type . A part per trillion is a small measurement that would represent one gallon of contaminant per a trillion gallons of water.

Recent testing at West Prairie Village in 2026 shows PFAS ranging between 5.4 parts per trillion to 24.7 parts per trillion, depending on the type of PFAS tested. The 2017 testing of Airway Heights water showed testing of up to 1,200 parts per trillion.

As standards for PFAS became stricter, the relatively lower levels of PFAS at the mobile home park became more concerning for Connolly and her tenants. According to the landlord, she made plans to dig a new well several years ago and go deeper into the ground than PFAS had penetrated. The state Department of Ecology told her digging such a well could spread PFAS contamination.

"I was told that I could become liable for the spread of contamination, even if I contribute to it unwittingly or unknowingly," Connolly said. "From my mind the only option is to connect into city water."

While Fairchild is the cause of the contamination at both West Prairie and Airway Heights, the federal cleanup process is long and the process opaque. Last year, more than 140 military installations, including Fairchild, delayed further PFAS remediation, according to New York Times reporting.

Connolly reached out to Airway Heights and the city received a state grant to complete a feasibility study to determine the cost and impacts of extending their water line. The grant does not require the city to go through with the plan once the study is complete. Connolly hopes another state grant will pay for costs after the study's completion.

Having started in the April 2024, the grant allows Airway Heights two years to complete the study. A draft report of the feasibility study is due at the end of July.

While the city maintains the project is on schedule, Connolly said she was initially told the study would only take months to complete.

"Now we're coming up on 14 months and each time I ask for an update on a completion time frame, it just continues to get pushed out," she said.

At an Airway Heights City Council meeting this week, the feasibility study senior project manager, Rawley Voorhies, said the study was "ahead of schedule" for the July 31 due date.

Tordale and other concerned residents recently circulated a petition to urge Airway Heights to move forward with the project.

"The health risks associated with PFAS exposure are well-established and cannot be ignored. We need a 1.5-mile extension of Airway Heights city water. Airway Heights is 13 months into a Washington Department of Health-approved three-month feasibility study. Completion continues to be delayed by Airway Heights," reads the petition, which was signed by 140 residents.

For Tordale, getting connected into Airway Heights water is just an extension of the same kindness Airway Heights received from Spokane a decade ago.

"We just want that same consideration. This is such a sweet little community, and we all need to work to get everyone out of this problem," she said.

Tordale is not so much worried for herself. She is a newer transplant to the community and a retiree. What she really worries about is the many children she sees playing in the neighborhood who have been drinking PFAS contaminated waters their whole lives.

"I'm old. I'm not going to be around forever. This PFAS thing is not going to do as much damage to me as the kids. And I just stay up worried at night about that more than anything else because they don't have the option to make decisions about the water they're drinking," she said.

In his presentation at the Tuesday Airway Heights council meeting, Voorhies outlined two routes the city could take for a new water line - one moving north from the city along Craig Road and another moving west along Deno Road from the Airway Heights Recreation Center. Both are just shy of a 10,000-foot waterline extension, which Voorhies called "not insignificant." The study will evaluate the cost of installing a granular activated carbon filter on the West Prairie well and compare that to the cost of extending the water line.

Any eventual extension would also need approval from the city of Spokane, whose water would flow through Airway Heights to the newly consolidated West Prairie Village water system. Voorhies cautioned that while initial costs of the project may be covered, the city of Airway Heights would bear costs over time.

"The financial analysis assumes that any of the initial improvements to waterline extension would be grant funded, so there would not be any near-term upfront cost for the city, but it does evaluate ... the cost to perform ongoing maintenance to these systems," he said.

The feasibility study only addresses costs to extend water to West Prairie Village. It does not address connectivity to the Spokane Adult & Teen Challenge building, which is adjacent to the mobile home park. The facility is a live-in drug and alcohol addiction rehabilitation center that provides treatment to approximately 30 men at a time.

Teen & Adult Challenge campus executive director Tyson West wants the facility to be included in plans to connect water systems with Airway Heights.

"There's a lot of really good things happening out here. There's a lot of life transformation. Men that are being killed from fentanyl and methamphetamine and alcohol addiction, and as they're getting their life back, and families are being restored," Tyson told The Spokesman-Review. "But when someone is in recovery and they are trying to get their life back, having PFAS just kind of leaves a bad taste in their mouth."

The grant only covers a feasibility study for the mobile home park, and Voorhies said Teen & Adult Challenge would need a separate grant and study.

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