[Military Environmental Forum] PFAS: "No Name Ditch" at Fairchild Air Force Base (WA)

[Lenny Siegel <Lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

The urgencies of "No Name Ditch"

By TIMOTHY CONNOR
Substack
July 26, 2026

Who’ll stop the drain? And when?

A few weeks before I wrote my first piece on the West Plains “forever chemical” saga, the founder of the West Plains Water Coalition, John Hancock, offered a road tour. I took him up on it.

This was May of 2023. For over three hours we traveled the length of the problem—from the source of the PFAS (Per-and polyfluoralkyl Substances) contamination at the two airports—Fairchild Air Force Base and Spokane International Airport—to the northern reaches of the Deep Creek community, where John and his wife Jane live, more than five miles away. It was from his Deep Creek neighbors—whose well water had tested positive for PFAS—that Hancock began to learn just how widespread the PFAS groundwater contamination problem was, and how devastating exposure to the synthetic chemical could be.

At the southern edge of the tour, along the southeastern boundary of the Air Force base, John drove us by “No Name Ditch.” The ditch is an unlined waterway that carries PFAS contaminated water away from the base. In most references to No Name Ditch (including a major report prepared last year by a Seattle engineering firm) the water in the ditch is described as stormwater.

…

For the entire article, see
https://tconnor.substack.com/p/the-urgencies-of-no-name-ditch

—

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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