TOWN OF PESHTIGO, Wis. — Home owners in the Town of Peshtigo said they’ve fought for years to get some sort of accountability for PFAS contamination in their community.

Jeff Lamont said accountability has finally arrived. He lives along the bay of Green Bay. His water well is contaminated with PFAS.

“I have two young grandchildren who I want here to come visit me and play in the lake or be able to drink tap water from our home,” he said. “They can’t do this. This is about our children.”

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul filed a lawsuit March 14 against Tyco Fire Products and Johnson Controls. The suit alleges the companies contaminated the Marinette area for many years without doing enough to restore clean water.

“Everybody in our state should be able to rely on the safety of the water that they drink, but unfortunately because of certain different types of pollution that is not true right now,” Kaul said during a news conference that day.

Lamont and his neighbor Trygbe Rhude said the accountability vindicates years of calling for action against the companies.

“Knowing that you’ve been drinking this water for, in my case my entire life growing up in this neighborhood, it creates a lot of angst,” Rhude said. “That’s not healthy for a person.”

Tyco Fire Products issued this statement March 14:

“Although Tyco does not comment on pending litigation, we stand behind the years of work and considerable resources we have invested in investigating and remediating PFAS related to historic operations at our Fire Technology Center (FTC) in Marinette. We continue to build on the progress we have made to address these issues in our community, including offering bottled water and in-home filtration systems several years ago to all households in the Town of Peshtigo whose private wells were potentially impacted by PFAS from the FTC. Construction of a state-of-the-art Groundwater Extraction & Treatment System (GETS) that will treat 95% of the PFAS in area groundwater is also nearly complete and scheduled to begin operations by summer 2022. Tyco is also completing the removal of soils with aggregated PFAS from the FTC in the coming months. We will vigorously defend this lawsuit.”

Lamont said the statement falls flat to his ears.

“They broke the law,” he said. “They let us drink contaminated water for four years before reporting it to the Department of Natural Resources under the spill law and so, yeah, we feel somewhat vindicated.”