Good morning. 
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 75. Sunrise is 5:48 AM and sunset 8:13 PM, for 14h 24m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 32% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission Grants and Sponsorship Sub-Committee meets at 4:30 PM.
On this day in 1939, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard write a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging him to begin the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear weapon.
Recommended for reading in full —
Hannah Knowles reports ‘I should have gotten the damn vaccine,’ woman says fiance texted before he died of covid-19:
Micheal Freedy was not opposed to vaccination, his fiancee said. Like many Americans who have yet to get their coronavirus shots, the 39-year-old father just wanted to wait and learn more about how people reacted to the vaccines.
“All we were doing is waiting one year,” Jessica DuPreez, 37, told The Washington Post on Sunday.
Then everything changed. This weekend — DuPreez’s grief days old and her voice breaking — the Las Vegas mother of five gave interview after interview to spread the same message: Get the vaccine. She said Freedy came to the same conclusion early on in the fight with covid-19 that put him in an intensive care unit in July.
“I should have gotten the damn vaccine,” he texted DuPreez, according to a picture she shared with The Post.
Freedy, who is listed in her phone as “My Heart,” died on Thursday, leaving behind young children, including a 17-month-old.
Danielle Kaeding reports Town of Peshtigo Residents Have Lived with PFAS Pollution for Years. They’re Still Waiting for a Permanent Source of Safe Water:
Furton and around 140 other residents in the corner of northeastern Wisconsin have been drinking bottled water for years due to PFAS pollution of private wells. The contamination stems from the use of firefighting foam that contained the chemicals at Tyco Fire Products’ fire training facility in Marinette.
Residents knew little about PFAS when the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources directed the company to investigate in the fall of 2017. Several years later, they’re no closer to a permanent source of clean, safe drinking water.
“It shouldn’t be a normal part of life that the water coming into your home isn’t safe,” said Furton.
PFAS are a class of thousands of harmful chemicals that have been linked to serious health issues including testicular and kidney cancers, fertility problems and thyroid disease. Often called forever chemicals because they don’t break down easily in the environment, PFAS substances are used in firefighting foam and everyday products like nonstick cookware and stain-resistant clothing.
Furton was diagnosed with thyroid disease a year after they moved back. She can’t say for sure that it’s due to the contamination, but residents reached a $17.5 million settlement with Tyco earlier this year over their exposure to the chemicals in private wells.
PFAS has seeped into so many parts of their lives that they even give filtered water to their pet chickens Gertrude and Mayo. While they would joke about it, research has shown a link between PFAS concentrations in hens’ drinking water and the levels detected in eggs.
“It just highlights the multiple paths of exposure,” she said.
Peshtigo was the first of many communities in the state to deal with pollution from PFAS. Eau Claire is one of the latest cities to find PFAS in municipal wells.