Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water Leave Military Families Reeling

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/us/military-water-toxic-chemicals.html

by longdefeat • 7 years ago

226 109 7 years ago

Trisell• 7 years ago

Once again we see that government doesn’t have regard for doing the best for its citizens. It’s only regard is doing what is best to keep itself alive.

skh• 7 years ago

How do you eplain all the instances of when government has shown regard for doing the best for its citizens? Do you apply the same logic you used here for government on corporations? Instead of focusing on the fact that it was a government agency in this instance let’s focus on the fact that without proper oversight bad things can happen. This is true for corporations, individuals, government agencies, non-profit agencies, and all other organized groups of people.

deogeo• 7 years ago

Do you apply the same logic you used here for government on corporations?

Obviously not, since the article says DuPont did the same, but that elicited no anti-corporate criticism: "While the military has used the chemicals extensively, it is far from the only entity to do so, and in recent years, companies like DuPont have come under fire for leaching PFAS into water systems."

refurb• 7 years ago

People like to blame capitalism for creating incentives for bad behavior when in fact the problem is just humans in general. Faced with certain incentives they will make decisions that hurt people even if there is no financial incentive.

dade_3• 7 years ago

I'll stick to my distilled water. I still don't understand why they aren't more popular. Here they add a chemical to our tap water that bonds to lead so that there will be less (hopefully no) lead from the lead water pipes/solder/fittings. No thank you.

lr4444lr• 7 years ago

Doesn't drinking distilled water in significant quantities remove important minerals from your body?

JohnJamesRambo4• 7 years ago

No that is a common myth. Food has plenty of minerals etc compared to what you get via tap water.

https://www.healthline.com/health/can-you-drink-distilled-wa...

dade_3• 7 years ago

Not true, but misinformation is probably a major factor.

krastanov• 7 years ago

The minerals you can get elsewhere, but it seems some people get surprised by the taste of demineralized water and dislike it.

JohnJamesRambo4• 7 years ago

You can get an undercounter reverse osmosis system for not much more than $100 that would save you a lot of trouble and expense. If you want to get really crazy hook up a deionizing filter after it to get <10 ppm water.

dade_3• 7 years ago

RO systems are excellent for water purification as well and certainly more convenient if you own your home. So I will restate, I don't understand why RO or distillation systems aren't far more common.

yumraj• 7 years ago

I just searched for RO systems and found it interesting that their storage tank is made of plastic.

I wonder if drinking water stored in that plastic tank is healthier than using one of the on-faucet systems like Pur.

hu33• 7 years ago

This is really bad. Most bad things in life are reversible but this degree of health damage isn't.

May everyone responsible for this be exemplarily punished to deter this kind of disregard for human life from happening again.

Since then, the Defense Department has admitted that it allowed a firefighting foam to slip into at least 55 drinking water systems at military bases around the globe, sometimes for generations. This exposed tens of thousands of Americans, possibly many more, to per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a group of man-made chemicals known as PFAS that have been linked to cancers, immune suppression and other serious health problems.

jacobush• 7 years ago

When I was a kid, every year the firefighting department would flush a meadow full of that foam, for all the kids to play in.

Oh well.

codyb• 7 years ago

One of my favorite things about NYC are the quarterly water resevoir updates. They test constantly (more than bottled water is required to) and release detailed reports about the state of things [0]

Not only that but they'll send you water bottles to fill up and then test your water for lead and give you results which is neat too.

The United States as a whole has done some incredible things in regards to air quality, and water quality. We should keep it up. Travesties like these and Flint are not okay.

[0] https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/drinking_water/wsstate.sh...

ams6110• 7 years ago

How do you know that this testing isn't anything other than a facade?

Where I live, they do the same thing. You get a water quality report in the mail a couple of times a year. However the level of the one thing that's most likely to be a problem here (PCBs) is not included.

bitexploder2• 7 years ago

They will not be punished. They never are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Flats_Plant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_...

The "problems" kill people. From the governments perspective this soft, civilian side, collateral damage is a required cost of our military machine. Inside of the military you have no real chance unless it is egregious beyond comprehension to ever get any kind of remedy.

The government will poison you and your family and then look at you with dead eyes and pat your survivors on the head and tell you to move on. EVERY one of those sites have a history of medical issues in the nearby community. A little "light" water table poisoning is nothing to the government if people can't pursue the vast history and documented scope of nuclear weapons production poisoning people.

hanniabu• 7 years ago

Unfortunately we have an issue where we don't learn until the effects become unbearable. The sad part is that the effects that we're inducing on the environment are largely undoable. When we finally learn our lesson and decide that money and power shouldn't be able to override not just local health, but global health, it'll be too late and we'll just need to learn to live with the shitty world we've left for ourselves.

MRD85• 7 years ago

This isn't just the military. Corporations rarely are held 100% accountable for the damage they do. The only person who cares about individuals are individuals.

meko• 7 years ago

It's important to note that 'the government' you mention, is doing the poisoning, is actually through private companies.

lkrubner• 7 years ago

The curious thing is, it takes a lot of money to train military personnel. You’d think the military would hesitate to inflict an injury on itself such as this. If a terrorist organization did this then the USA would go to war.

Asooka• 7 years ago

Personnel doesn't last long, no more than ~10 years for infantry. So if the damage doesn't impede combat function over the expected useful lifetime of the person...

joshuathomas096• 7 years ago

This is terrible. Why do we treat people that protect our freedoms this way?

salawat2• 7 years ago

We don't set out to. Mistakes, however, do happen. Sometimes the cause is preventable, sometimes it's a lapse in protocol, or maintenance. Sometimes it's just a calculated risk. Sometimes we just don't know until after the damage is done.

And sometimes we did know, but the damage gets done anyway because no one knew to ask the question or do the test, or were afraid of the repercussions of being the one to call out the problem.

The military/government service is a whole bunch of things. Perfect is never and sufficiently equipped for the job at hand are frequently not one of that bunch.

It's what makes work in those sectors kind of interesting when Congress can get their stuff together.

Change the world on pocketchange.

eeZah7Ux• 7 years ago

"our"?

lostlogin3• 7 years ago

This is your freedom.

caseymarquis2• 7 years ago

I wonder if there's a way to democratize inexpensive health testing and see these trends faster? Imagine a world where you're testing your blood/sweat/saliva/vitals daily and semi-anonymously sending the results to be analysed using statistical methods. A doctor can give you a one time use current diagnoses voucher to add into the system for serious diseases. The whole thing is voluntary. There's definitely some dystopian abuse potential, but in the US healthcare is already a disaster for a large portion of the population, and this could lessen that. Is it possible for something like this to be created?

drharby• 7 years ago

If only there were a medical device company capable or cheap blood test processing to disrupt and innovate this field:^)

caseymarquis2• 7 years ago

Is that the actual constraint on the system though? Are existing technologies not up to the task? Or are we failing to build a system like this with existing technology even though it's possible. Would a robotic assembly line with existing medical testing technologies be possible?

rum3• 7 years ago

The US health care system is dystopian. These are just challenges that are not possible to ignore.

dwighttk2• 7 years ago

have to weigh your benefits against the ballooning number of false positives and negatives.

agumonkey2• 7 years ago

I so wish states were massive scale testing device machines/manufacturer.

ps: a lot of systemic issues are due to lack of information and trust. To exemplify, there was a story about people electricity consumption. Those with a counter in the basement used a lot more than those with the counter near the front door.

dredmorbius• 7 years ago

Counter? Electricity meter?

rjf72• 7 years ago

There's one general point that has to always be considered in these sort of ideas. Resources are not infinite. Of course you realize this, but I think we who come from the software world can fail to appreciate how severely restricting a problem this actually is. There are 325 million people in the US. Let's imagine a very high participation rate and just exclude infants and some outliers, just so see what would happen. So we'll call it 300 million.

That's 300 million tests per day or about 110 billion per year. The cost there is already going to be extreme. Even if you can get the tests down to $10/person, which you probably cannot, that's more than a trillion dollars a year -- upwards of 5% of the GDP. But the bigger issue here is what money represents: resources.

Machinery, maintenance, operation, even the strain on the transportation system would be intolerable. For instance think about the little kit you send over with your sample. I mean you'd think just getting it there would be negligible, but it'd be anything but. The USPS currently handles 20.2 million pieces of mail per hour. [1] Just handling these packages alone would increase the entire postal system's burden by more than 60%!

Or even consider the simple packaging that needs to be produced and disposed of. How small of a kit can we get to ensure sterility, sufficient sample size, and transportation safety? Let's say 100 grams. That doesn't seem like that much, but again think about it at scale. That's 30 million kilograms. For some sort of scale, The Statue of Liberty weighs about 200,000 kilograms. So each day you're talking about 150 Statues of Liberty of packaging and material that needs to be manufactured, distributed, delivered, processed, and disposed.

Big ideas in the physical world have quite tremendous barriers.

---

As one interesting aside, imagine you took the market value for literally every single consumed good and service in the US, the sum total of money invested by businesses, and all government expenditure on top of it. And then you divided that equally among every man, woman, and child. How much would it be? It's interesting to compare expectation versus reality there. Conveniently what I described is really easy to measure - it's the GDP/capita. And it's less than $60,000. I always find that number quite bemusing when thinking about it contrasted against our economic ideals in various matters.

[1] https://facts.usps.com/one-day/

adamsea• 7 years ago

Well, considering how the U.S. (where I live) spends about 1 trillion + on war or war-related stuff each year, and, considering all the people in the country with crappy jobs that can't pay the bills, seems like shifting even say $500 billion (plenty enough left to bomb people) to hire or train folks to solve these problems would be a good investment.

LargoLasskhyfv• 7 years ago

Don't be so pessimistic. Show some innovative thinking! What about "The Internet of Things" (down there)? Imagine something like these japanese super potties with integrated bidet function. Make it smart with all sorts of sensors which ANALyze urine, stool and for good measure add an anal probe. Couple this with something from Apple like iHealth and call it iShit, connect it to some insurer and everyone's a winner! Almost instant feedback from INPUT to OUTPUT, even the ability to prove how badly something on your daily commute has influenced some level of something because of course you have constant gps-coverage of your whereabouts, like everybody else too? Think Big Data! CACC™ = comfortably autoclaim compensation

/me vanishes whinnying into the off... (sorry, for some reason i really couldn't resist)

edit:spelling/wording/trademarking

shereadsthenews• 7 years ago

We really need to switch to a regime under which we first establish the safety of a compound and then mass-produce it.

DoreenMichele6• 7 years ago

I was a military wife for a lot of years. I have very serious health problems. Doctors officially blame that on my genes, which can't be changed, so it's a de facto means to throw their hands in the air and call me unfixable.

I think environmental factors are a big part of the problem and that those can be addressed.

I lived on a military base for 2.75 years where there was one tap in the house labeled "potable water." You weren't supposed to drink water from the bathroom sink while brushing teeth, yet we bathed in this stuff and washed our dishes with it, etc.

The house was not very far from Hinkley, CA, location of the hexavalent chromium plume made famous in the movie "Erin Brockovich."

When I have said on the internet that I believe hexavalent chromium poisoning is one of my problems, I have been dismissed as a nutter and conspiracy theorist by internet strangers who are confident they know all about my life better than I do.

I actually spent some years on an antivaxxer email list. They had a lot of interesting and useful information that helped me begin turning my health around while my doctor expressed zero curiosity about my improvement, advised me other patients needed him more and scheduled me fewer appointments.

YouTube recently demonitized anti vax channels (seemingly part of general trend to shut down such views). Most people seem to think that's a good thing. It leaves me wondering where people like me are supposed to go in a world where "fringe" views cannot be discussed in good faith on the internet. Are we supposed to just quietly die because that's the PC answer when doctors tell you "People like you don't get well. Symptom management is the name of the game."?

If you make zero effort to get me well and write me off for dead because of the label you gave me, wouldn't my decline and death be a form of self-fulfilling prophecy?

And when I defy that prediction, I'm written off as a crazy person and thrown off of one forum after another.

Insert some quote about "And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak."

orf2• 7 years ago

Seems your condition is very different from that of a newborn baby with an under developed and fragile immune system, who's mothers are fed mistruths about how harmful vaccines are.

I don't see how your story relates in any way about harmful anti-vax groups (and vaccines in general) other than "I got some unrelated help at one point". So yes, we can absolutely be happy they are being demonitized.

That being said I am sorry that your doctor treated you like that and I am glad you did manage to help yourself.

jorgesborges3• 7 years ago

I think there's a relationship but it's tenuously stated. Anti-vax is in part due to an erosion of trust in our experts and institutions. This case is a prime example. You have people that have been poisoned for decades by their government. It's no surprise to me that a person who can't trust the safety of her own drinking water is reluctant to receive government-sponsored injections.

save_ferris• 7 years ago

Embracing the anti-vax movement because the standard healthcare system has failed this individual isn't something I considered before, but it makes a lot of sense. Our healthcare system is expensive, difficult to navigate, and the quality of care is wildly inconsistent.

I'm by no means an anti-vaxer, but there have to be millions of Americans that are fed up with the state of healthcare and looking for an alternative.

mindslight2• 7 years ago

The person you're responding to is a decade-long HN commenter. Currently, her comment is sitting at [dead].

I myself don't necessarily agree with her chain of implications, but it was her journey. This isn't directly solely at your comment (but I can't respond to the top one directly, as it's dead) - When you latch on to it simply to beat the anti-anti-vax dead horse, you're doing everyone a disservice.

IMHO if you want to know why online discourse has turned into such shite, then examine this. The noble ethos of judging words on their own merit has devolved into a tyranny - when you remove the "inertia" of individual reputation, each comment stands in isolation. Rather than seeing a larger pattern of a person being generally reasonable, giving the benefit of the doubt to a questionable comment, and perhaps extracting something worthwhile from it... we instead quickly judge it as "other" and move on.

salawat2• 7 years ago

I'm saddened it sounds like you've apparently fallen victim to a doctor who has more "important" things to do than see you. I've been in that position before, and have found that there is nothing more dangerous to society than a physician that simply can't be bothered. It undermines the credibility of every other practitioner out there, and makes the already non-trivial task of maintaining Public Health even more difficult.

However, a couple points.

A) Don't get discouraged. Tricare us one of the most widely accepted insurances, and I can guarantee there are physicians worth their salt out there that can help you. You might have to travel further than you like if you do have legitimate genetic conditions, but I can guarantee the extra travel will be worth it for the expertise. Many doctors entered the field for the paycheck, and will balk at difficult patients. If you are one, it is upon you to become an expert on yourself and find the physician who can work with you. It's tough, believe me, but the right physician is worth the trouble.

B) Anti-Vaxxers: I'm not going to say you're a crank. When you've been burned by someone who purportedly took an oath to do no harm, yet is doing so through inaction and uncaring, you start looking for help anywhere you can get it. That's just human nature. Please understand though that distinguishing the hokey, and the harmful from what might be the truth is extremely difficult. Alternative medical practices will require you to be your own scientist, and I don't recommend approaching anything with blind trust. You have to become your own expert, which means figuring out how to read the few relevant studies the occasional researcher can cobble together the resources to do.

But for the love of all that is good, don't buy into "don't vaccinate". It's one of the biggest public health threats out there. The diseases that are prevented are crippling, if not lethal, and can be easily prevented through vaccination.

Don't let a medical asshat turn you off of medicine. It just means you need to look elsewhere.

ip26• 7 years ago

The anti vax channels were not silenced. They just don't make money off you anymore.

specialist• 7 years ago

"...turning my health around while my doctor expressed zero curiosity about my improvement, advised me other patients needed him more and scheduled me fewer appointments."

I can relate.

Noobs should also know that few doctors will escalate if they don't know how to help you.

USA healthcare providers are playing twenty question lightning rounds. Ask as many questions as your 15 minute time window permits. Oops, time's up. Next!

Medicine has changed dramatically the 20+ years since my transplant. Patient care is no longer the norm.

Which is why I now pay extra for "concierge" style healthcare from my primary doctor. She can now afford (time, money) to do whatever it takes to fix each new problem.

DoreenMichele6• 7 years ago

Ask as many questions as your 15 minute time window permits.

Yeah. When I was having my big health crisis and having about two medical appointments per week, I came to hate the 15 minute appointment vastly more than anything else about modern medicine.

_usmn• 7 years ago

I grew up on a military base and we were told on certain days not to drink the water but on other days it was "fine"

I wonder about the after effects.

js2• 7 years ago

I grew up drinking and bathing in the toxic waters around a military base in North Carolina. Thirty years later, I went back to investigate.:

https://psmag.com/environment/what-happened-at-camp-lejeune

From the 1950s until at least 1985, the drinking water was contaminated with toxic chemicals at levels 240 to 3400 times higher than what is permitted by safety standards. ... Camp Lejeune has been characterized as a candidate for the worst water contamination case in U.S. history—and I am one of up to a million people who were poisoned. The tragedy, though, is hardly all in the past.

According to the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), the military's failures are continuing today; mistakes are being repeated at our bases overseas, and, in foreign cases, it took a whistleblower to prompt action on contaminated water. A 2013 investigative report produced by the Navy inspector general, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, reveals "shortfalls in the oversight and management of drinking water for Navy personnel stationed overseas—even in wealthy, developed countries." The report concludes that "not a single Navy overseas drinking water system meets U.S. compliance standards" or the Navy's own governing standards," according to POGO.

lostlogin3• 7 years ago

I don’t know where the ‘foreign’ place referred to is, but this is playing out in New Zealand too. The slow moving shambles is shameful. https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/amp.rnz.co.nz/article/80fdd24...

londons_explore• 7 years ago

In general, overseas millitary based have no concern for the health or well-being of the people around them without US passports.

They won't deliberately give them all cancer, but they also won't raise a finger to prevent it.

apo• 7 years ago

Blood testing has emerged as a sticking point. Specifically, a growing movement of veterans and others, united in advocacy groups with names like Fountain Valley Clean Water Coalition and Need Our Water, are asking the military test their blood for the chemicals, hoping to bring results to their doctors or use them in lawsuits.

Strange that the article is being so cagey about why this might be the case.

Every human blood sample tested since the 1950s has shown detectable perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA aka C8, a member of the PFAS class of chemicals mentioned in the article). The problem was so bad that DuPont had to search high and low for blood samples that weren't contaminated with PFOA. They did eventually find clean samples - archived from a group of recruits for the Korean War.

A little about the chemistry. Think of most forms of grease as a greasy, long, water-repellant chain of carbon-hydrogen bonds attached to a small water-attractive "polar" head. PFASs replace all of the carbon-hydrogen bonds in the greasy tail with carbon-fluorine bonds. This makes the molecule repel grease (great for non-stick coatings throughout the house). But the carbon-fluroene bond is quite inert, thus the name "forever chemical." There are few environmental mechanisms that can degrade them - either exposed or inside a body.

This article fails to put the problem into proper context - making it sound unique to military bases. That not true. PFOA is a problem at numerous sites. Nobody knows the long-term consequences of releasing this much highly-inert, carcinogenic material into the environment. What is known is that those unfortunate enough to have worked on PFOA production and who received high exposure to it developed horrific problems including cancers.

The Intercept did a massive series on this:

https://theintercept.com/series/the-teflon-toxin/

The Netflix documentary "The Devil We Know" is also worth watching:

https://www.netflix.com/title/80997719

whalabi• 7 years ago

This article fails to put the problem into proper context - making it sound unique to military bases

From the article:

While the military has used the chemicals extensively, it is far from the only entity to do so, and in recent years, companies like DuPont have come under fire for leaching PFAS into water systems.

CptFribble2• 7 years ago

Another very interesting long-form article on the C8 thing:

https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/welcome-to-b...

amelius• 7 years ago

That's a nice explanation. But what I don't get is: if the chemical is highly inert that means it doesn't react easily with other substances, so how then can it be carcinogenic?

coryrc• 7 years ago

Something doesn't need to react to influence the environment; it can act as a catalyst, cause damage physically, or bring smaller things with it pass defenses.

cell_death• 7 years ago

Anything that promotes cell death, and/or division it probably carcinogenic.

Figure cellular membranes are sensitive to intracellular volume, ergo, pack a cell with inert space filling molecules that never leave, and are not evacuated, and the cell splits more readily, faster than usual.

Also, because it doesn't react, it probably creates obstacles and cytoplasmic traffic jams, as objects traverse the endoplasmic reticulum, if timing is thrown off for critical functions, the cell probably dies, due to improperly tuned pathways that don't signal each other properly, leading to flame-outs, stalls and caustic burns or wasted energy inside the cell.

kbenson• 7 years ago

It doesn't react chemically but is useful for its physical properties, which means it does influence the environment it's in in that manner. I wouldn't rule it out as carcinogenic because it's mostly chemically inert because of the same reasoning, namely that there are other ways it may change the environment than chemically.

ridgeguy• 7 years ago

Even if not reactive in the sense of forming chemical bonds with cellular material, interactions through mechanisms like Van der Walls forces could change 3D shapes of enzymes, altering their reactivity. If those enzymes participate in cellular replication, the effect could be carcinogenic.

Poor car analogy: tossing a ball bearing into the open oil fill cap in your car will probably not cause the ball bearing to bond with the lifters, valve springs & stems, etc. But it will probably damage your engine.

mirimir3• 7 years ago

Here's a simple example, showing how "doesn't react with" doesn't imply "doesn't interact with": CO poisoning. In the normal course of things, hemoglobin in our blood binds O2 in our lungs, and releases it downstream. But if we breath CO, it also binds to hemoglobin. Very tightly. A lot more tightly than O2 does. So eventually, there's too little free hemoglobin for carrying O2. And we die.

Spooky23• 7 years ago

The military has a long history of dumping toxic crap and handling substances with at best negligence.

mirimir3• 7 years ago

Yes. It's not just military bases.

But it's worse, because it's not just PFAS. There are probably 10^5-10^6 chemicals in commercial use. Many of them are persistent. Maybe not "forever chemicals", but persistent enough to be problematic. And we're all carrying them in our fat.

Rather like global climate change, it's just too late.

jorgesborges3• 7 years ago

I wish there were established means by which institutions and individuals could admit fault in order to expedite problem solving. So much energy is wasted trying to conceal blame and responsibility. The problem becomes harder to tackle because nobody can acknowledge it.

jnhnum1• 7 years ago

FWIW, I found the EPA [1] and CDC [2] sites on these chemicals to be extremely informative. Definitely gives me an appreciation for the "good" parts of government.

1. https://www.epa.gov/pfas

2. https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/index.html

renholder• 7 years ago

But the military has said it continued to use firefighting foams containing the compounds because companies have continued to produce them and the E.P.A. doesn’t regulate them.

Isn't the point of capitalism that if 'x' company isn't doing 'y', you can take your dollars to company 'zed' and drive the market to the desired result[s]?

They make it sound like no one in the history of ever has produced a firefighting foam without those chemicals. Erring on the side of caution (e.g.: if that were truly the case), couldn't they have used their research arms (e.g.: DARPA) to come-up with an alernative, on their own? After all, it's been 28 years since the Army Corps of Engineers sent the warning out, according to the article, yeah?

I find the thought incredulous, at best, that they had no alternative but to keep using the same foams.

StreamBright• 7 years ago

Governments are not subject to capitalism this is exactly the reason we need smaller governments so the damage they can do to society is also smaller.

CptFribble2• 7 years ago

I think this is the big weakness in our current implementation of capitalism/market economy. It's supposed to depend on perfect information about producers and products, but how can the average person know what's in a firefighting foam, and how it will affect them?

Even if you take the government aspect out of it - consider if your bought this foam for your own use. How would anyone know what it would do to them and their family, in time to make an educated decision to avoid poisoning themselves? Are we supposed to all get a degree in chemistry, build a lab in the basement, and analyze every product we bring into our homes?

If no one knows it's poison, or if the only ones who know are the producers, or if the purchaser is separated from whoever gets poisoned (i.e. govt purchasing personnel -> people drinking the water at the bases), then there's no incentive for anyone to make an alternate foam, especially if the most effective/cheapest version is the poisonous one.

A less effective or more expensive foam would be a hard sell when the people buying are not the people getting poisoned.

Without a requirement to verify that a compound is safe for long-term exposure before being sold, this is going to keep happening, no matter who is buying or selling. Unfortunately, you can't say regulation in the USA without getting shouted down as "anti-capitalist" or worse, "socialist."

sigzero• 7 years ago

I am affected by the Camp LeJeune water issue. I have cancer because of it. I am on my appeal process with the VA over it. It sucks and it's still going to be a long fight.

potiuper3• 7 years ago

Camp Lejeune is more known for cheap dry cleaners using PERC and dumping it rather than perfluorinated contaminants https://psmag.com/environment/what-happened-at-camp-lejeune. https://www.popsci.com/dry-cleaning-chemicals points out newer water-detergent machines, but states they cost $40~80k. Best cheap solution has been to use hydrocarbon solvents and incinerate the waste. I do not know of any list of dry cleaners that do so.

alexandercrohde• 7 years ago

Sorry, to hear that, good luck, and I'm very glad you're sharing your story. It makes things more real for people and matters a lot.

forgotmypw3• 7 years ago

People often seem to think I am being unreasonably paranoid for saying that you have to look out for yourself and your family when it comes to exposure to dangerous chemicals, and not just trust the Environmental Pimping Agency (or your local equivalent) to do it for you...

hu33• 7 years ago

You're not paranoid in the least. My family always went to great lengths to ensure we never had to drink tap water. Always buying and stocking mineral water from respectable brands.

In my generation I'm going a bit further and using filters for shower/tap water. And I plan to test the mineral water brands we consume at least once a year.

apta• 7 years ago

And I plan to test the mineral water brands we consume at least once a year.

How do you conduct these tests out of curiosity?

dlandis• 7 years ago

That was 2016. Since then, the Defense Department has admitted that it allowed a firefighting foam to slip into at least 55 drinking water systems at military bases around the globe, sometimes for generations.

Where's the list of locations for the 55 systems?

potiuper3• 7 years ago

At least 91 per Northeastern University - https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/2017_pfa/

Here's a different one: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-3M-groundwater-pollu...

All public landfills can be added to those maps.

gumby• 7 years ago

Are US military bases overseas doing the same to other countries?

potiuper3• 7 years ago

If jet fuel is stored on base, then it is part of the standard fire suppression operating procedure. https://www.afcec.af.mil/WhatWeDo/Environment/Perfluorinated... I cannot fault that given the cost of the jets, but if they use any fire retardants and a good job of cleaning any mess up is not done, then the users need to be given a stern talking to as everyone will be drinking the stuff in a few years.

post_break• 7 years ago

Is this because military bases aren't held to the same standard a house next door to the base would be?

Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water Leave Military Families Reeling

Related Stories