Ken Fellows has been fishing off and on all his life. Last year, he decided to try his hand at turtles. He caught one near his favorite fishing hole along Montour Run, west of Downtown Pittsburgh
“I had never done that before until last year, going after turtles,” said Fellows, 65. “But I had the time. I like the soup.”
He processed the meat, and ate half of it. (Yes, catching snapping turtles for personal use is legal in Pennsylvania with a fishing license.)
“I made it at home, and I ate the whole thing myself. And it was delicious.” He stored the remainder of the meat in the freezer for a later date.
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That is, until he heard that Montour Run, a meandering stream recovering from more than a century of pollution, may be coursing with a new type of pollution: PFAS chemicals.
Montour Run is a 13-mile stream that flows through the western suburbs in Allegheny County, including Moon, Findlay and North Fayette townships, to the Ohio River, and is flanked by the popular Montour Trail. Sections of it host bald eagles and great blue herons, and the stream is stocked with trout every spring by the state. Pittsburgh International Airport’s stormwater drains into tributaries of Montour Run.
Since 2023, Three Rivers Waterkeeper, an environmental watchdog group, has been doing sampling in the Montour Run watershed and found high levels of PFAS, so-called “forever chemicals,” downstream of the airport, which had used PFAS-containing firefighting foam for decades.
PFAS – per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances – are a group of thousands of chemicals that contain the element fluorine. Because of fluorine’s strong bond with carbon, these chemicals don’t break down in nature, and are known to build up in the tissues of living things.
Snapping turtles can live for decades.
“I was a little concerned that I’d eaten one of those turtles,” Fellows said, on a recent morning along the banks of Montour Run.
Fellows sent his remaining turtle meat to Three Rivers Waterkeeper. The group gave the meat to Carnegie Mellon University scientist Carrie McDonough for analysis. McDonough studies PFAS in the environment.
“I’d like for the right test to be done, and for the results to be recognized and acknowledged,” Fellows said.
PFAS problems in Pennsylvania streams
The case of Montour Run highlights the mounting problem of PFAS pollution across Pennsylvania. The state began increased monitoring for the chemicals in 2023, shortly after a U.S. Geological Survey found 76% of at least 161 rivers and streams in the state contained one or more of the chemicals.
In 2021, the state stopped stocking trout and issued a “Do Not Eat” advisory for fish caught in Neshaminy Creek in Bucks and Montgomery counties, near a military base that used the firefighting foam.
In February, the state issued a similar order for two other streams: Briar Creek in Columbia County and Middle Spring Creek in Cumberland and Franklin counties. In the case of Briar Creek, the state suspects PFAS came from the spreading of sewage sludge on farmland in the area.
The ubiquity of PFAS is likely due to their use in a wide range of products, from waterproof clothing to carpeting to non-stick cookware. One of its most prominent uses for decades was in the formulation of Aqueous Film-Forming Foam (AFFF). The foam is excellent at putting out oil-based fires, like the kind airports have to contend with if a plane catches fire.
The Federal Aviation Administration mandated that airports use AFFF. That changed in 2022, when Congress directed the FAA to transition away from PFAS-containing foams.
For decades, the Pittsburgh International Airport’s firefighting training facility used PFAS-containing foam to train first responders. Though the facility now uses non-fluorinated foams for firefighter training, the chemical is still showing up in the airport’s stormwater drainage system, which discharges into tributaries that feed Montour Run.
One outfall has recorded levels of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), thousands of times the federal limit of 4 parts per trillion in drinking water. The most recent recorded level, submitted by the airport through the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s electronic discharge monitoring report database, was 42,700 parts per trillion for the first quarter of 2026. A previous high mark from last year, the first for which data were available, was 62,900 parts per trillion.
The highest recorded level of PFAS from Three Rivers Waterkeeper’s sampling in Montor Run and its tributaries was 430 parts per trillion.
‘Alarming’ levels of PFAS from Pittsburgh airport are being discharged into Montour Run watershed
Local researchers step in
These high levels have caught the attention of local researchers, including McDonough, the Carnegie Mellon scientist.
On a recent afternoon, McDonough stood by the side of the stream as a trio of her grad students took water samples from Montour Run. Nearby, Duquesne University Professor Brady Porter and a student sifted through sediment looking for macroinvertebrates, tiny bugs that live in the stream, like damselflies. McDonough is testing the bugs that Porter catches for PFAS. The higher up the food chain, the higher the concentration of PFAS, McDonough explained.
“They can accumulate in [plants and animals],” McDonough said. “Birds are eating fish. That’s transporting it up the food web, and we know that these compounds are toxic and they’re never going to break down.”
McDonough is concerned that people may be consuming PFAS through fish they catch in the waterways around the airport.
“That’s not something I would recommend doing regularly – eating anything out of here,” she said.
Some PFAS chemicals are known carcinogens, while others have been linked to developmental effects like low birth weight, decreased immune response, kidney disease and other serious health problems.
All of these health effects are more of a risk because the chemicals don’t break down.
“Sources like this, where AFFF was used in the past, can be continuous sources of PFAS to the water for hundreds of years – they’re not going to go anywhere,” McDonough said.
No advisory yet for Montour Run
So far, the state has yet to issue a “Do Not Eat” advisory for Montour Run. In June, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection “plans to conduct additional sampling of water, fish, and aquatic insects in Montour Run and nearby tributaries,” said Neil Shader, a department spokesman, in an email.
Michael Parker, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, which stocks the stream with trout, says trout don’t survive very long in Montour Run, either because they will be caught by people or other animals, or because they don’t do well once the weather gets hot.
So he says it’s unlikely that PFAS will build up to dangerous levels in the trout.
“The results that we are looking at when it comes to consumption advisories would be based on the amount of PFAS present in fish tissue or fish meat,” Parker said.
Parker says the commission has a one-meal-per-week advisory for any fish caught in Pennsylvania. When it issues a “Do Not Eat” advisory, as it has for the three PFAS-polluted streams elsewhere in the state, it stops stocking those streams.
But it has not done this for Montour Run.
The state tested fish in Montour Run in 2022 and found their PFAS levels were below health-based thresholds. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection is planning to conduct more of this sampling later this summer.
Shader said the advisory will be activated if the samples surpass “established health thresholds for human consumption.” For PFOS, an advisory of “one meal per month” starts at levels of 50,000 parts per trillion. For a “Do Not Eat” advisory, that level is 200,000 parts per trillion.
The Allegheny County Airport Authority, which runs the airport, said in an email that public safety is its “top priority.” It has submitted a PFAS reduction plan to the DEP, which the agency is currently reviewing.
But some in the area say the airport and other agencies should have done more to keep PFAS out of Montour Run.
“When you have a concentrated and known source, there’s no excuse for letting that happen,” said Don McKee, board president of Hollow Oak Land Trust. The trust conserves and manages land in Pittsburgh’s western suburbs, including several plots around Montour Run.
“When it’s been released, and it’s spread across huge geographic areas, it’s much harder to control, but when you can control it near the source, that should be something that’s addressed,” he said.
McDonough doesn’t have final numbers for the PFAS analysis she’s conducted on water, sediment and animal samples, but said the preliminary data indicate that PFAS are present, “and they look consistent with AFFF contamination.”
In the meantime, anglers like Ken Fellows will still be fishing in Montour Run, which has undergone a resurgence after decades of acid mine drainage made it practically a dead stream.
When Fellows was a boy, he says, nobody fished there. Now lots of people do.
“When I was a kid, this was not a place to fish. There weren’t any fish here,” he said. “It’s come a long way in, you know, 50 years. A long way.”
He says he’s still interested in catching turtles, too. Just not in Montour Run.
