Name: How Military Pollution Could Cause The Next Water Crisis
Uploaded: 2021-05-23T15:35:15.000Z
Duration: 21 min 28 s
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For me, you know, it's a life of crabs and fishing and chickens and oysters

I actually picked up my morning paper one day and saw a headline that said

the next Flint may be in northern Michigan, or something like that.

And I thought oh boy that's really bad and then they had a picture – it

These training facilities would spray this firefighting foam where

it'd wash into the ground, wash into a nearby stream and it's actually

soaked into the ground and contaminated groundwater and surface water in

The military's use of a firefighting foam with the intention to save lives

could have dire consequences for the people who handled it and the people

Now, communities are wondering what it means for their health and their

homes, snd who's responsible to clean it all up.

The investigations are tangled up in politics and national security.

The chemicals in the foam itself are the subject of corporate lawsuits,

scientific discovery and an ongoing threat to human health.

We know the anecdote that the Roman Empire went down because of lead

I didn't know until about 10 or 12 years ago that this was something that I

military has used a firefighting foam called AFFF since the late 60s.

It's good at putting out jet fuel fires really fast.

But over the past couple decades, scientists have found that one of the

chemical compounds that makes AFFF so effective might also be poisoning

the people who live and work in and around the bases that use it.

The chemicals at the center of it all are called PFAS, short for per- or

poly-fluoroalkyl substances. Think of PPAS like the umbrella term for

hundreds of these chemical compounds that are based on fluorine-carbon

bonds. The most common ones are PFOS and PFOA.

What make PFAS so useful in manufacturing is how the chemicals fit

together. The fluorine atoms just so happened to fit perfectly around the

carbon atoms to create a bond that resists things like heat, oil and

And so that's actually what's led to a lot of the contamination issues.

PFAS don't occur naturally in the environment.

The chemical compounds were invented by scientists in the late 30s early

40s. Then came two of the most widely used inventions that were made with

Those product lines have revolutionized home cooking and cleaning along

Today PFAS are used in a ton of products, from raincoats to waterproof

shoes, non-stick pots and pans, microwave popcorn bags and even cosmetics.

But over the last few decades, companies have had to shell out hundreds of

millions of dollars in settlements over PFAS contamination stemming from

manufacturing. 3M, DuPont and Chemguard settled these multimillion dollar

The producers have said all there's absolutely no risk and they're not

That's Phillipe Grandjean, one of the world's leading PFAS researchers.

Documents that have been made available in legal cases involving 3M and

DuPont show the companies had been studying the health effects of PFAS for

decades. One document is a 1999 resignation letter from a 3M environmental

specialist saying his resignation was prompted by his "profound

disappointment" in the company's handling of risks associated with PFOS.

In another instance, Bucky Bailey, the son of a former DuPont factory

worker who worked in the Teflon division, was born with one nostril and a

He's been outspoken about PFAS contamination, though the C8 Science Panel

could not conclude his deformities were linked to PFAS.

Chemours, which was spun off from DuPont in 2015, told CNBC it does not

currently use PFOA or PFOS in any of its manufacturing processes.

And 3M announced the phase out of the two PFAS compounds in 2000.

To make sense of how the military fits into all of this, I called Dr.

Stephen TerMaath, an Air Force official working on the cleanup of

PFAS contamination at the Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Oscoda, Michigan.

Active duty soldiers left the base in the 90s, but contamination from past

Today Wurtsmith is home to housing complexes, local businesses and a giant

filter that's working to remove PFAS from the water.

Meanwhile, active military bases across the country are still using AFFF

that contains PFAS, even though the military recognizes its dangers.

That's because technically, they're required to.

Other countries like Australia have started to roll out fluorine-free

Navy said it's working on developing a new PFAS-free formula and

minimizing the additional release of the foam into the environment.

Service members who have already been exposed to AFFF are trying to put

I talked with James Bussey, an Air Force veteran who was stationed at

The Environmental Working Group and Northeastern University have been

mapping out all of the known PFAS contamination sites across the U.S.

As of July 2019, there were more than 700 locations across 49 states.

The contamination at the hundreds of other locations were found at public

water systems, airports, industrial plants and firefighter training sites.

And there have been reports of PFAS contamination on military bases in

But for this video we're just going to focus on how it's affecting people

Exposure to the chemical compound has been linked to some pretty serious

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How Military Pollution Could Cause The Next Water Crisis

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