RANGE continues to report on PFAS in West Plains groundwater. If you have information you would like to share about this topic, we’d love to hear from you at team@rangemedia.co.
Poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are a family of more than 4,000 synthetic compounds corporations have used to manufacture common household and industrial products. Because they are liquid-proof, they’re used in packaging, outerwear, carpets, furniture, Teflon (the coating on stovetop pans that prevents food from sticking to them) — basically anything that prevents wetness.
PFAS break down so slowly in physical environments — including human bodies — that they are known among environmental groups as “forever chemicals.” They have been linked to a range of health problems in humans and animals since at least 1979, when a test group of rhesus monkeys died after being exposed to high doses of PFAS during internal corporate research by the manufacturing giant 3M.
According to the National Institutes of Health, PFAS in humans can cause conditions like “altered immune and thyroid function, liver disease, lipid and insulin dysregulation, kidney disease, adverse reproductive and developmental outcomes, and cancer.” Researchers believe nearly all people on Earth have detectible levels of PFAS in their bloodstreams.
When these facts were established mostly by private researchers working for large corporations like 3M and DuPont, the companies did not disclose them to the public. Instead, they rested on the fact that the federal government had not yet classified PFAS as hazardous to claim they had no responsibility to report even though they knew the chemicals were potentially dangerous. This history is illuminated in the 2019 book Exposure by the corporate attorney Robert Bilott.
Despite the health dangers, PFAS is poorly understood, largely because the best knowledge about the compounds was hidden by the corporations that used them for so long that the studies are still being revealed.
And though Bilott notched some victories in class action lawsuits against some of those companies in the aughts and 2010s, but the time he did, PFAS had been served into our bodies and our most precious natural resources.
In addition to widespread use in household goods, PFAS chemicals were crucial components in industrial and defense manufacturing processes and safety products. One of the most important was aqueous film-forming foams, or AFFF, which are used to extinguish petroleum-based fires. AFFF came into widespread use at military installations and airports after a deadly 1967 fire on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal. As the ship was staged for operations in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Vietnam War, a rocket was inadvertently fired, striking a jet whose fuel spilled across the ship’s flight deck. Flames quickly spread, killing 134 sailors and causing more than $72 million in damage to the ship.
This became known as one of the most prominent tragedies in U.S. naval history; it is a cautionary tale repeated often in the profession in training environments and safety stand downs. Institutions working with liquid fossil fuels realized they needed a more effective way to extinguish petroleum-based fires in the chaotic, fuel-soaked environments of flight decks and land-based runways. AFFF, which the Navy and 3M began developing in 1966, became the solution. When sprayed, it works by covering petroleum-based liquid spills, cutting off oxygen and extinguishing the fire. A key ingredient that made these compounds effective is a “fluorocarbon surfactant,” a PFAS chemical which improves the durability of the foam. The main drawback: when consumed, they cause cancer.
After the Forrestal fire, Fairchild Air Force Base and Spokane International Airport were both required to use AFFF that contained PFAS when they conducted firefighting drills.
“AFFF was used extensively at Fairchild AFB from the 1970s until 2016 to fight petroleum fires,” says FAFB’s website about its cleanup efforts. This AFFF ran off the hard tarmac surfaces and seeped into the interconnected aquifer systems under the West Plains. PFAS is invisible and only detectable through special methods that are not part of normal water quality tests. Researchers have to look specifically for PFAS because they cannot find it by happenstance.
In 2017, after the Air Force discovered this crisis, the drinking water in Airway Heights was deemed unsafe.
Two and a half years later, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry collected blood and urine samples from 333 Airway Heights residents looking for seven kinds of PFAS known to have been used in AFFF. The study found that one kind of PFAS was present in the blood of Airway Heights residents at 56 times the national average. It further noted that it’s impossible to know whether these folks’s blood had high levels of PFAS because of the drinking water because researchers did not measure for PFAS in the municipal supply until 2017. The dramatic levels measured in Airway Heights blood could not be explained by normal exposure. It had to be something else, and the City of Airway Heights was so alarmed that it cut off the water that sprang from the West Plains aquifers.
Since 2017, Airway Heights has bought its water from the City of Spokane.
“They call it a forever chemical for obvious reasons,” Bob Lutz, the former Heath Officer of Spokane County, told RANGE. “When it’s estimated that 97 percent of Americans have PFAS in them, it’s because PFAS is ubiquitous. It’s used in everything. Unfortunately for the Airway Heights region, it was used in firefighting foam and because of the hydrogeology, it’s in the groundwater and people have been consuming it unbeknownst to them for decades.”
Because Airway Heights is not the only municipality on the West Plains, and because thousands of residents in the rural area don’t get their water from a municipal service, but from private wells, the chemicals that have leached their way under the plains and arroyos west of Spokane represent a massive public health crisis. We still don’t know the full scale of the contamination.
Scientists and activist groups, including the West Plains Water Coalition founded by the former executive director of the Spokane Symphony John Hancock, are trying to map the contamination. This will be a project years in the making. In the meantime, West Plains homeowners can’t drink their water and feel they can’t sell their plots.
Hancock said that though PFAS is a chemical and has physical properties that can be studied and understood by humans, societies must develop political ways to cope with its existence.
“Science and medicine have known about PFAS for a long, long time,” he said. “So if it was just science and medicine, this would have been solved a long time ago. It’s politics and government that have kept the lid on this story. And that’s where the solution has to come from. It’s government politics. Because scientists can’t clean it up.”
