Energy & Environment

Energy & Environment

The Big Story

How the military's use of PFAS impacted communities

Colorado Springs and its suburbs in El Paso County are surrounded not only by natural wonders like the Garden of the Gods, a massive park filled with red rock formations, but also several military installations, including Peterson Space Force Base, the U.S. Air Force Academy and the U.S. Army’s Fort Carson.

© Illustration / Samantha Wong; and Adobe Stock

Mark Favors grew up in the shadow of these bases, part of a tightly knit Black family within the largely white Colorado Springs.

Mark is himself a veteran, as is his uncle and multiple other relatives. His large squadron of cousins, multiple-times-removed — some blood relations, and others not — have served in most branches of the military, leaving an intercontinental web of bootprints in their wake.

It is a staunchly patriotic family — but one that has, in recent years, begun to question why this long history of military service seems to dovetail with an extensive pattern of disease.

Members of the Favors family had no idea that the firefighting foam being used on nearby bases contained PFAS, or that those chemicals were dangerous, or that they were leaching into the local water supply.

But the military, like industry, already had some indication of aqueous film-forming foam's (AFFF) toxic effects decades before such information became public knowledge.

In 1971, the Air Force Research Laboratory flagged the foam in use at the time — 3M’s “Light Water” — as both a possible threat to certain fish and a “serious pollutant,” due to its inability to easily break down in water.

A few years later, Air Force researchers tested another iteration of Light Water and deemed it “less toxic” than previous PFAS-based foams, but still said it should not be released in substantial quantities if animals would be exposed for several days after the release.

In the same era, a 1975 report prepared by a contractor for the Defense Department affirmed that AFFF foams contain PFAS “which are largely resistant to biodegradation.”

Read more at TheHill.com and in the new book by Rachel Frazin and Sharon Udasin.

Welcome to The Hill’s Energy & Environment newsletter, I'm

© The Hill