Residents of Georgia city claim local officials contaminated drinking water

(InvestigateTV) — When Coleen Brooks sees something out of the ordinary, she jots it down on paper. It started as a hobby that turned into a full-time career. In her 30 years as a columnist for small newspapers in Calhoun, Georgia, she estimates writing at least 10,000 articles about everything from the weather and local sports to movies.

There’s one column, though, that has always stuck with her, one she wrote decades ago entitled, ‘Spreading It Around,” about city trucks she saw spraying something on fields across from her home and around Gordon County.

In the 2004 article, Brooks wrote a city worker told her at the time it was municipal sewer sludge turned into fertilizer. She said the worker told her the sludge was safe because it was treated with chemicals. “And when it rains, are these chemicals safe if they run off into our rivers and lakes or soak into the earth?” asked Brooks in her column.

Twenty years later, Brooks’ article may have foreshadowed a potential environmental disaster, impacting her and thousands of her neighbors.

In 2024, Brooks and dozens of her neighbors filed a lawsuit against the city of Calhoun claiming it contaminated their drinking water with a cancer-causing toxin. According to the suit, the city spread at least 28,000 tons of municipal sewage, or sludge, in fields near their homes with high concentrations of a chemical called PFAS, which has seeped into their land and wells for decades.

Investigator Reporter Andy Pierrotti takes an in-depth look at what some are calling a potential environmental disaster.