Shall we just change the standard?
In 2017, at the same time the Fairchild Air Force Base was owning up to it’s PFAS contribution to groundwater contamination on the West Plains, Spokane International Airport (SIA) quietly sampled several test wells on its property for PFAS. When the tests came back with high concentrations consistent with decades of use of PFAS-containing Aqueous Fire-Fighting Foams, the SIA board, SIA’s CEO, Larry Krauter, and Spokane County Commissioner Al French kept the results quiet, resulting in seven more years of French’s constituents drinking PFAS contaminated water from private wells. During those years Mr. French blocked county government from even considering administration of grant money that would have offered well testing to investigate the extent of the spread of PFAS to private wells.
During those seven years not only did Krauter and French on the SIA board seek to avoid exposure of the test results and block investigation into the extent of contamination, but at various times lobbied against laws regulating the use of PFAS-containing Aqueous Fire-Fighting Foams, a complicated story laid out by Aaron Hedge in his article “Airport CEO: Lawmakers should ‘wait and see’ before banning toxic PFAS.”
All of which begs the question of how these officials could sleep at night knowing that they were keeping people in the dark while their constituents, their children, their farm animals, and their gardens drank PFAS-laden water for seven years longer than necessary? Denial is the key.
It seems likely based on SIA’s lobbying activity that, without saying so openly, Al French, Mr. Krauter, and others engaged in denial of the science linking PFAS to cancer, birth defects, liver and kidney problems. Certainly there is precedence for this view. Mr. French, past master of political games himself, is quick to label the science of global heating (aka “climate change”) as a “politically driven agenda.” Mr. French’s arrogant disdain for public health and medical science was on display during the Covid pandemic in his engineered firing of Dr. Bob Lutz from his position with the Spokane Regional Health District. For Mr. French any science that conflicts with his development goals is to be discounted as “playing politics”, not legitimate science.
So as to the question of how one sleeps at night knowing that one’s silence is poisoning people, there’s a simple answer: “I don’t believe that PFAS is really dangerous (even if I won’t come right out and say I’m a ‘PFAS denier’).
So where does the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership,” come in. Project 2025 is the blueprint for the remake of government that would occur in the event of a second Trump administration. It is 920 pages of rather dense reading. On page 431, the issue of PFAS is addressed in a couple of bullet points under “New Policies, Superfund”:
- “Revise groundwater cleanup regulations and policies to reflect thechallenges of omnipresent contaminants like PFAS.
- “Revisit the designation of PFAS chemicals as “hazardous substances”under CERCLA.” [Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 that established Superfund]
Clearly, the easiest way to dispose of an environmental threat is to use political power to change the standards by which the threat is judged. Nevermind the science, if we can just raise the acceptable level of PFAS in drinking water from say 4 ppt to 70 ppt, which, after all, we believe (based on our arrogance) is perfectly safe, then most of the problem of PFAS poisoning wells pretty much goes away, businesses will thrive, and money will be made. Voila! Problem solved! All we need is the power to take over the decision making process.
Mr. French is up for re-election this November. We should encourage him to retire.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry