This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here. This story was supported in part by a grant from Grist.
One resident of a Fairfield mobile home park doesn’t let her children play under a sprinkler or fill up a kiddie pool in the summer because the park’s water has often contained harmful bacteria and “forever chemicals.” She would like to plant a garden but said she’s afraid what grows may be contaminated.
Sometimes Sunrise Serenity mobile home park shuts off the water completely, prompting her to rent a nearby hotel room so her kids can take a shower before school.
A second resident drives to a truck stop to take a shower. When the water is running, it stains this woman’s shower curtain orange. The water in her toilet tank is brown and grainy.
Farther along the gravel, pothole-ridden cul de sac that connects the mobile home park’s dozen or so modest homes, a third resident said he has lost three washing machines to the silty water running through his pipes. He said he hasn’t taken a sip of the tap water since moving in.
It has been nearly three years since the state discovered bacteria in Sunrise Serenity’s water system, prompting it to order residents to boil their water before drinking it. Six current and former residents who spoke to The Maine Monitor said they stopped consuming the water altogether.
Over that time, state records show the park — owned by C37 Capital LLC, which is registered to Mark Hsu — continued to have unhealthy levels of bacteria and forever chemicals in its wells despite the Maine Department of Health and Human Services granting it at least four extensions to abide by deadlines for testing and fixes.
It wasn’t until Sunrise Serenity received nine drinking water rule violation notices that the state intensified its oversight in November, and the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Drinking Water Program within DHHS proposed an administrative consent order with the mobile home park.
Hsu signed the final order this February and agreed to improve Sunrise Serenity’s water system or risk a $4,000 fine and legal action.
Lindsay Hammes, a spokesperson for DHHS, said Sunrise Serenity tested negative for bacteria in January and must continue to test negative for 12 consecutive months before the state removes the boil water order. The state has instructed Sunrise Serenity’s owner to take various measures to decontaminate the water, such as by installing a disinfection system.
Fairfield is a hotspot in Maine for contamination from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, which appear to have seeped into groundwater and wells across the town after contaminated sludge was spread for years on local fields.
Sunrise Serenity first tested for PFAS in the summer of 2023, when results showed the park’s drinking water had a PFAS concentration of 275 parts per trillion, nearly 14 times greater than the state’s interim limit and among the highest results of any public water system at the time.
The forever chemicals were so much of a concern at Sunrise Serenity that the state gave the mobile home park a $249,000 grant in 2024 for a PFAS filtration system that was installed last September, according to the administrative consent order and a DHHS grant database.
Hammes, with DHHS, stated in an April 6 email that the treatment system had been effective because the most recent test results did not detect any PFAS at the start of 2026. She did not say when the system started operating.
Residents said they have experienced additional water outages throughout March — information backed up by notices sent to them by park management — and were never told the chemicals had been reduced.
Neither Hsu nor Roger Brault, owner of the park’s management company, RCM Property Management, responded to The Monitor’s emails, phone calls or letters over four weeks.
In addition to not having clean drinking water, residents’ costs to live in the mobile home park have grown. On top of paying for bottled water and incurring expensive damage to their appliances, rent for their lots have increased as much as 50% since 2023 — and 25% since last year, according to financial statements three residents showed The Monitor.
The five current residents who spoke with The Monitor requested that they not be named because they feared being evicted in retaliation.
In videos and photos they shared from as recently as April 1, the park’s water appears murky; three residents said it’s often sticky to the touch. Four residents provided 10 different notices from park management outlining separate times since 2023 when management shut off the park’s water for maintenance or general problems.
According to a state dataset of PFAS test results from the end of 2025, two other mobile home parks appeared to be among a total of six drinking water systems in Maine that still weren’t meeting the state’s interim PFAS standard of 20 parts per trillion, which went into effect in 2021. (Not all water systems are required to test regularly for PFAS, however, so the publicly available numbers may not be exhaustive.)
The interim standard is in effect until April 2027 when stricter limits on PFAS of 4 parts per trillion in drinking water go into effect.
The two mobile home parks tripped the state’s PFAS standard of 20 parts per trillion in the past six months. Sunrise Serenity’s water contamination, meanwhile, lasted years.
Residents said they are fed up by the shutoffs and how long fixes have taken.
“The well is broken half the time, and we keep getting notices of contaminations,” one resident said. “I don’t see any results.”
‘I can’t consume it in any aspect’
Many residents have fond memories of Sunrise Serenity before water quality issues became more widely known in 2023. They saw a nice neighborhood where children played freely outside and parents looked after one another’s kids.
“Everyone was really nice and really kind of welcoming,” one resident said. “It was like a little community.”
Then in May 2023 the state designated the park as a public water system due to its population size, requiring Sunrise Serenity to take a slew of drinking water tests. They showed elevated levels of coliform bacteria, including E. coli.
Coliform is a broad family of bacteria that live in the intestines and are mostly harmless to humans, but their presence in drinking water means that other bacteria, viruses and parasites may have gotten into the water supply by the same route. The state warns that any water with fecal coliforms is not safe to drink and therefore prohibits bacteria in drinking water altogether.
Some E. coli infections in humans can cause vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration or fever, while severe infections can lead to kidney failure, dysentery, hepatitis or death, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is why Maine required that Sunrise Serenity issue a boil water order in June 2023: to kill off bacteria and make the water safer for human consumption again.
Boiling water to clean dishes or store for baths is extra labor, residents said, and it seems to have little effect on the layer of grime the water leaves behind.
“We don’t even really boil that water [anymore] because, when we used to, it would leave this rim on [the dish,]” said the mother who sometimes rents a motel for her kids to shower. “I can’t consume it in any aspect, so I just go through bottles and bottles of water.”
In July 2023, just a month after Sunrise Serenity’s positive coliform results, Serenity also tested positive for elevated levels of PFAS, which are impervious to boiling.
PFAS represent a broad range of human-made compounds that receive their “forever” moniker from the significant amount of time they take to break down in the environment.
They’ve commonly been found in some consumer products produced by chemical manufacturers 3M and DuPont, such as non-stick cookware or food packaging. In Maine they may be more widely known for their presence in wastewater sludge, which the state permitted to be spread across Maine farmland for decades, or in the type of firefighting foam accidentally released at the former Brunswick Naval Air Station in 2024.
Research on PFAS is still evolving. As it does, state and federal PFAS regulations have evolved, too. Peer-reviewed studies have found that exposure to certain PFAS concentrations may lead to increased risk of some cancers, weakened immune responses, developmental delays in children and heightened blood pressure in pregnant women.
The state and Hsu, Sunrise Serenity’s owner, agreed to an administrative consent order this February that requires Sunrise Serenity to test monthly for coliform and other contaminants, treat them, identify and repair any leaks in the water system, and conduct more frequent tests for PFAS.
But the state issued another notice of violation on March 10, saying Sunrise Serenity violated state drinking water rules again when it failed to document any corrective actions it may have taken to address a past positive test for coliform bacteria.
Hammes, with DHHS, said the violation notice went out before staff with the Drinking Water Program’s rules group learned that the consent order had been issued to wrap all previous violations together. The state may resolve the new violation “depending on the outcome,” she said.
If Sunrise Serenity is found to violate the consent order, it could face legal action or be fined up to $4,000 — equivalent to six months of rent for a standard lot at the park for one resident. The potential fine is lower than the maximum $7,000 fine that an earlier draft of the order said state law allows.
Penalties are calculated based on the number and severity of outstanding violations, Hammes said. The potential penalty amount was ultimately reduced because Sunrise Serenity met one requirement, which canceled out a violation.
According to the order, the park’s problems likely stem from leaks in the park’s distribution system, which can cause water pressure to drop and allow contaminants such as coliform to enter.
The state told Sunrise Serenity’s management multiple times to disconnect one especially contaminated well, but, when it did, the park ran out of water — prompting the park to reconnect it.
‘Do the right thing’
At the other end of the well are Sunrise Serenity’s residents, who have seesawed between a flow of murky, contaminated water and no water at all. They would move but said they can’t afford to haul away their homes.
“I can’t really afford to move my house,” said the resident with multiple broken washing machines. “I really don’t have much of a choice.”
One former resident, Renee Reynolds, found a way to leave Sunrise Serenity, though she said it took her family of five several years to save up enough money to buy their mobile home — which many people at the park rent.
She then had to find a new place nearby amid rising lot rents and find $3,500 to transport their mobile home to its new location in Fairfield. But her family got lucky, she said. The new landowner offered to loan them the money required for the transport costs, and they moved in 2023.
Reynolds’ family first joined Sunrise Serenity roughly two years before C37 Capital purchased it in 2020. The park had some pre-existing water quality issues, she said, but it was nothing like what followed.
By 2022, the water had consistently low pressure and a brown tint to it, she said, sometimes causing her skin to break out when she washed her face with it. Showering left her family unclean and made them feel generally unwell, so they went to a relative’s house to bathe and do laundry, while dishes piled up in the sink at home.
Eventually, she noticed the water outages becoming more frequent, Reynolds said, including a five-day span in February 2023 when her home’s water shut off without notice. To get her water, the park laid a small gray hose across the Reynolds’ driveway, so water could flow from a neighbor’s house to theirs, according to Reynolds and a photo reviewed by The Monitor.
In an email to her, RCM Property Management apologized “for the water problems in the park in the past few days.” It added, “We had the water working earlier and when it went back out we found that the well had went dry.”
Shortly after, the park posted its first boil water order.
“Having to boil a lot of water just to wash up was exhausting. It’s brutal,” Reynolds said, and buying bottled water “just added to the grocery bill that we already have for a family of five.”
Current residents follow a similar routine: They boil water to clean dishes and buy pallets of bottled water or 5-gallon drums for drinking. Sometimes park management provides bottled water when the park water is shut off, they said, but not always.
For Reynolds, life is easier now. Her house is on town water, and her three kids often play in the woods behind the lot — though they know they can’t escape the presence of PFAS. The farmland across the street from their new address was licensed to receive PFAS-laden sludge in the past.
But “once we moved over here, and we had clean water, fresh, we were starting to feel better. It was a very different experience,” Reynolds said.
The family still visits old neighbors at Sunrise Serenity, said Reynolds, who remains frustrated that her friends continue to live with an unreliable water system.
“They just need a fresh start,” Reynolds said. “They spend way too much money trying to do simple fixes, putting a Band-Aid on it, and they just need to take accountability and do the right thing.”
