| Hi,
I became “the water boy” on February 28th 2016 while a founding member of the Warminster Township Environmental Advisory Council. We are the only municipally appointed body in Pennsylvania addressing (among other things) the pollution from PFC’s in firefighting foam. Warminster Township is home to the Naval Air Warfare Development Center (Johnsville), home to one of the most tainted wells in America. Warminster Township’s water had the third highest level of PFOS’s and PFOS’s in the country. (Ref: Poisoning the Well by Sharon Lerner in The Intercept). We had been unknowingly drinking poisoned water for at least 3 decades. Fox News calls our area “The Flint of Foam”.
Our EAC had the responsibility for the 32,000 residents of Warminster. In all, over 70,000 current residents have been exposed. The total, including military personnel, who have cycled through this area in the last 30 years could exceed a quarter million.
My father-in-law worked at Johnsville after serving heroically in North Africa in WW2. He died of gastric lymphoma in 1986 after 20 years at Johnsville. I have bladder cancer and my wife almost died on March 2 last year from probable endocrine disruption. She is currently disabled, has not fully recovered and will likely not.
I’ve had suspicions about the EPA due to their inconsistent behavior. Among what I found was the following:
“EPA does not use science to guide
regulatory policy as much as it uses regulatory policy to steer the science.
This is an old problem at EPA. In 1992, a blue-ribbon panel of EPA science
advisers that [sic] 'science should not be adjusted to fit policy.' But rather
than heed this advice, EPA has greatly increased its science manipulation.” Jonathan
Swan Mike Allen Jan 23 AP "This is blatantly obvious in
the way the EPA originally announced safe limits for PFC toxins in drinking
water in Bucks and Montgomery Counties. The announced a “working limit” (since
there was no official enforceable limit on an emerging contaminant) without
announcing that it was a “short-term” limit. When pressed on this they stated
that short-term was for 30 to 90 days. When further challenged on why the limit
announced here was twice as much as for Hoosick Falls, NY, which had the same
contaminant, they lowered the time limit, again without properly defining the time
limit. When other sources stated that short term exposure limits were 10 to 30
days, the EPA set a provisional lifetime exposure limit of 70 parts per
trillion. This limit was 70 times too high according to the best available
studies (from Harvard and other highly respected and reputable institutions). “ WTEAC
The following makes interesting reading and we’ve had co-author Richard Clapp in Warminster at an educational event we held here last year. Erin Brockovich also made a brief appearance here and attracted quite a crowd (1000+) at a school not far from JRB Willow Grove (in Horsham PA). The base at the old NASWG is also highly polluted. and still partly in use by the Air National Guard, reported to be a drone control center for Middle Easter Operations. Scientific Solutions
Perfluorinated Alkyl
Substances: Emerging
Insights Into Health Risks
Philippe Grandjean1 and Richard Clapp2 Harvard University Chan School of Public Health Abstract
NEW SOLUTIONS: A Journal of
Environmental and Occupational
Health Policy
2015, Vol. 25(2) 147–163
! The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1048291115590506
new.sagepub.com
I hope this has been helpful. It is my opinion that the Navy, EPA, and the Federal Government is trying to minimize their costs. Proper remediation at the national level could exceed $1T. As they say at jump school, we are the “wind dummies”.
Larry
Larry Menkes: cSBA
Sustainable Transitions US
Relocalization & Transition Strategies 267.992.8020
Founder & CEO: Bucks County Veterans Green Jobs Initiative Warminster Township Environmental Advisory Council (Co-Founder)Member: Post Carbon Institute Member: Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO)
The way to predict the future is to design it. R. Buckminster Fuller The way to understand the present is to accept responsibility for what we designed: LM
"Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know." M. King Hubbert
“The cheapest and most available new source of energy is the energy we waste” Samuel Bodman, former U.S. Secretary of Energy
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