[CPEO-MEF] PFAS: Former Wurtsmith Air Force Base (MI)

[Lenny Siegel <LSiegel@cpeo.org>]

A Michigan community’s long battle with PFAS and the Pentagon
Defense spending bill includes a mandate to act on contaminated sites

By Valerie Yurk
Roll Call
October 4, 2022 

It was five years ago while kayaking with his wife on northeast Michigan’s Van Etten Lake adjacent to a former Air Force base, says attorney Anthony Spaniola, when he spotted a work crew testing a foam substance on the beach.

He says he’d heard that the state had found astronomically high levels of toxic per- and polyfluorinated substances, or PFAS, in the foam that formed a snowlike crest around the lake. The foam was said to contain 2,200 parts per trillion of PFOS, a type of PFAS. The Environmental Protection Agency has set the current safe level of PFOS at 0.02 parts per trillion. 

Spaniola paddled over to the contractors testing the foam to see what results they were getting. 

“I said to them, ‘I saw that story in the paper about 2,200 parts per trillion. That seems really high to me,’” Spaniola said in a recent interview. “And in a moment of candor, one of them said to me, ‘Buddy, we got way higher than that.’”

Spaniola was discovering what hundreds of communities across the country have been learning with increasing frequency in the past decade: U.S. military installations have colossal problems with PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down naturally, like the coatings on non-stick cookware and the compounds that resist flames in firefighting foam used by the military. The chemicals are also highly toxic, having been linked to a wide range of health problems even at very low exposures.

…

For the entire article, see
https://rollcall.com/2022/10/04/a-michigan-communitys-long-battle-with-pfas-and-the-pentagon/

—

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org
Author: DISTURBING THE WAR: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford University out of Southeast Asia - 1965–1975 (See http://a3mreunion.org)

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