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CALHOUN, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - 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 May, 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.

The man-made toxins are known as “forever chemicals” because they do not break down naturally in the environment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said prolonged exposure to PFAS can be linked to numerous illnesses, including cancer.

According to a city permit, one of the sludge fields used Brooks’ home address; she said that was done without her permission. “Do you really think I would have given them permission?” she asked. “Oh, no.”

The lawsuit alleges the city allowed industrial wastewater from carpet manufacturers that use PFAS to flow into Calhoun’s sewage treatment plant. The chemicals were then mixed with the sludge, according to the lawsuit, and later dumped on land along the Coosawattee River, where the city draws its drinking water.

“We’ve known this for as long as human beings have been here,” said Heath Brooks, an attorney for the residents and Colleen Brooks’ son. ”You don’t poop where you drink. And that’s what the city did. They put it right next to their [water] intakes. They polluted their own city.”

“I didn’t in my wildest nightmare think that I’d be representing my parents, my aunts, my uncles, and the people that I grew up with along this road,” he said.

Water samples taken by the attorney from five Calhoun homes show potentially alarming levels of PFAS, from 70 parts per trillion to more than 8,000 parts per trillion. The EPA set PFAS limits in drinking water this past April to just four parts per trillion.

Atlanta News First Investigates shared the test results with Dr. David Andrews, a scientist with the Environmental Working Group, a watchdog advocacy group. Andrews, who has years of experience in PFAS research, said those levels “are shockingly high and incredibly concerning, and indicate and extreme levels of contamination.”

The Southern Environmental Law Center filed a similar lawsuit against Calhoun earlier this year. The nonpartisan environmental group said its lawsuit seeks to force the city to clean up the former sludge fields and the well water contaminated with PFAS.

“The citizens of northwest Georgia deserve full transparency from the city about the safety of their drinking water, and they deserve a robust response to the potentially dangerous contaminants that are in it,” said Jesse Demonbreun-Chapman the executive director of the Coosa River Basin Initiative, which is represented by the center in the lawsuit.

While residents don’t know how the contamination impact their health, a nearby city could offer a glimpse of what’s to come. Later this summer, Emory University scientists will test hundreds of residents’ blood in Rome, Georgia, to measure their PFAS levels as part of an exposure study. The city is about 20 miles south of Calhoun. Both cities rely on the same river system for its drinking water.

Emory’s study is in direct response to an Atlanta News First investigation last year that uncovered elevated levels of the toxin in residents after using take home blood testing kits. The results compelled Dr. Dana Barr, an Emory scientist, to find the funding to conduct the exposure study.

The federal government said nearly everyone has some amount of PFAS in their blood. One report by the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found PFAS in the blood of 97% of Americans. The synthetic chemical group is used in hundreds of household products to make things water and stain resistant, including nonstick cookware and food packaging.

But the amount of PFAS detected in the Rome participants’ blood raised concern; nearly all of the 11 participants who tested their blood showed levels higher than the national median.

“It should have been very intuitive it was going to be an issue because of all the carpet industry and the use of PFAS as stain repellent and water repellents,” Barr said. “We just didn’t really know about the issue before then.”

Barr said testing could start in August and the exposure study will also include a handful of Calhoun residents.

Attorneys representing Calhoun declined to comment on the lawsuit, but in court documents claim the city is a victim, too. It has filed lawsuits against the carpet manufacturers and the chemical companies that manufactured the chemicals. The majority of the carpet production is located upstream in Dalton, Georgia, a city proudly proclaiming itself as “The Carpet Capital of the World.”

Last year, the city of Rome settled a multimillion-dollar lawsuit with many of the same carpet manufacturers and chemical producers. Its lawsuit also accused Dalton’s water utility of discharging water laced with PFAS into river systems providing drinking water for Rome and Calhoun.

“What I really feel is betrayed because the city is the one that has allowed them to bring that stuff out here,” said Brooks.

If there’s something you would like Atlanta News First Investigative Reporter Andy Pierrotti to look into, email investigates@wanf.com.