[CPEO-MEF] PFAS: "Pentagon slow to remedy forever chemicals in water around hundreds of military bases"

[Lenny Siegel <LSiegel@cpeo.org>]

Pentagon slow to remedy forever chemicals in water around hundreds of military bases

By Hannah Norman and Patricia Kime
KFF Health News
December 21, 2023

Oscoda, Michigan, has the distinction of being the first community where “forever chemicals” were found seeping from a military installation into the surrounding community. Beginning in 2010, state officials and later residents who lived near the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base were horrified to learn that the chemicals, collectively called PFAS, had leached into their rivers, lakes and drinking water.

Thirteen years later, the community is still waiting on whatever it will take to clean its water. As a result of dogged activism and pressure from government officials, the Air Force has finally taken initial steps simply to contain the chemicals.

Wurtsmith is just one of hundreds of contaminated U.S. military sites. Under congressional pressure, the Defense Department has acknowledged it has a big mess to clean up. It has spent years trying to grasp the scale of the contamination and assess the costs U.S. taxpayers will shoulder to clean it all up. Further, there’s no clear scientific agreement on how to destroy the chemicals, even as companies pitch their scientists’ best solutions in a bid for a share of billions of dollars in looming government contracts.

…

For the entire article, see
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/12/21/pentagon-pfas-forever-chemicals-military-bases/71992575007/

—

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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