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

226 points by longdefeat 8y ago

post_break 8y ago
Is this because military bases aren't held to the same standard a house next door to the base would be?
Trisell 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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_ 8y 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 8y ago
  Doesn't drinking distilled water in significant quantities remove important minerals from your body?
  - JohnJamesRambo 8y 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-water https://www.healthline.com/health/can-you-drink-distilled-wa...
    - gorilla_fight 8y ago
      From the very article you linked to: "Because it doesn’t contain its own minerals, distilled water has a tendency to pull them from whatever it touches to maintain a balance. So when you drink distilled water, _it may pull small amounts of minerals from your body, including from your teeth._" How does this contradict lr4444lr's claim "drinking distilled water in significant quantities remove important minerals from your body"? Are you arguing it is a matter of degree, that while distilled water does remove minerals from your body, the "myth" is that it is significant? > Food has plenty of minerals etc compared to what you get via tap water. How many minerals do you receive from food and how do you know this is sufficient? There is research showing a (weak) correlation between hard water (high in mineral content, as opposed to the low/zero mineral content of distilled water) and cardiovascular health, eczema, and dermatitis: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969781800472 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896978... Studies of water quality and cardiovascular disease in the United Kingdom https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935103000689 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393510... Ecological association of water hardness with prevalence of childhood atopic dermatitis in a Japanese urban area https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(16)30187-7/fulltext https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(16)30187-7/ful... Association between domestic water hardness, chlorine, and atopic dermatitis risk in early life: A population-based cross-sectional study
hu3 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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.shtml https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/drinking_water/wsstate.sh...
  - ams6110 8y 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.
- bitexploder 8y ago
  They will not be punished. They never are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Flats_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Flats_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory#Controversy_and_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_States 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.
joshuathomas096 8y ago
This is terrible. Why do we treat people that protect our freedoms this way?
- salawat 8y 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 8y ago
  "our"?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- lostlogin 8y ago
  This is your freedom.
caseymarquis 8y 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?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- rjf72 8y 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/ https://facts.usps.com/one-day/
shereadsthenews 8y ago
We really need to switch to a regime under which we first establish the safety of a compound and then mass-produce it.
DoreenMichele 8y 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."
- Para2016 8y ago
  Are you kidding me? Medicine is utilitarian. I'll trade you and your problems for widespread vaccination. It's insane you have an audience on HN that buys into your vague complaints of "serious health problems" and "bad genes". Here's what you have - Fibromyalgia and a personality disorder. Congratulations, you're boring and no one is coming for you
  - 8y ago
Svperstar 8y 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 8y 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 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.
- londons_explore 8y 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.
- lostlogin 8y 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/80fdd245-8515-4ac9-89e7-b761faf13aed https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/amp.rnz.co.nz/article/80fdd24...
apo 8y 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/ https://theintercept.com/series/the-teflon-toxin/ The Netflix documentary "The Devil We Know" is also worth watching: https://www.netflix.com/title/80997719 https://www.netflix.com/title/80997719
- Spooky23 8y ago
  The military has a long history of dumping toxic crap and handling substances with at best negligence.
- mirimir 8y 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.
jorgesborges 8y 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 8y 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 https://www.epa.gov/pfas 2. https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/index.html https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/index.html
renholder 8y 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 8y 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.
- CptFribble 8y 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."
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sigzero 8y 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.
- alexandercrohde 8y 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.
- potiuper 8y 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://psmag.com/environment/what-happened-at-camp-lejeune. https://www.popsci.com/dry-cleaning-chemicals 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.
forgotmypw3 8y 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...
- hu3 8y 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 8y 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?
    - hu3 8y ago
      Don't know exactly what labs I'll use yet. It depends on where you live. This is the article that got me interested: http://blogs.worldbank.org/water/how-test-water-quality-chemical-tests-limited-budgets http://blogs.worldbank.org/water/how-test-water-quality-chem...
dlandis 8y 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?
- potiuper 8y ago
  At least 91 per Northeastern University - https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/2017_pfa/ https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/2017_pfa/ Here's a different one: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-3M-groundwater-pollution-problem/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-3M-groundwater-pollu... All public landfills can be added to those maps.
gumby 8y ago
Are US military bases overseas doing the same to other countries?
- potiuper 8y 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-Compounds/ 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.

226 points by longdefeat 8y ago

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

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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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_ 8y 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 8y ago
Doesn't drinking distilled water in significant quantities remove important minerals from your body?
- JohnJamesRambo 8y 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-water https://www.healthline.com/health/can-you-drink-distilled-wa...
  - gorilla_fight 8y ago
    From the very article you linked to: "Because it doesn’t contain its own minerals, distilled water has a tendency to pull them from whatever it touches to maintain a balance. So when you drink distilled water, _it may pull small amounts of minerals from your body, including from your teeth._" How does this contradict lr4444lr's claim "drinking distilled water in significant quantities remove important minerals from your body"? Are you arguing it is a matter of degree, that while distilled water does remove minerals from your body, the "myth" is that it is significant? > Food has plenty of minerals etc compared to what you get via tap water. How many minerals do you receive from food and how do you know this is sufficient? There is research showing a (weak) correlation between hard water (high in mineral content, as opposed to the low/zero mineral content of distilled water) and cardiovascular health, eczema, and dermatitis: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969781800472 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896978... Studies of water quality and cardiovascular disease in the United Kingdom https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935103000689 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393510... Ecological association of water hardness with prevalence of childhood atopic dermatitis in a Japanese urban area https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(16)30187-7/fulltext https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(16)30187-7/ful... Association between domestic water hardness, chlorine, and atopic dermatitis risk in early life: A population-based cross-sectional study

hu3 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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.shtml https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/drinking_water/wsstate.sh...
- ams6110 8y 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.
bitexploder 8y ago
They will not be punished. They never are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Flats_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Flats_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory#Controversy_and_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_States 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.

joshuathomas096 8y ago

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

salawat 8y 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 8y ago
"our"?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
lostlogin 8y ago
This is your freedom.

caseymarquis 8y 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?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rjf72 8y 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/ https://facts.usps.com/one-day/

shereadsthenews 8y ago

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

DoreenMichele 8y 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."

Para2016 8y ago
Are you kidding me? Medicine is utilitarian. I'll trade you and your problems for widespread vaccination. It's insane you have an audience on HN that buys into your vague complaints of "serious health problems" and "bad genes". Here's what you have - Fibromyalgia and a personality disorder. Congratulations, you're boring and no one is coming for you
- 8y ago

Svperstar 8y 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 8y 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 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.

londons_explore 8y 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.
lostlogin 8y 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/80fdd245-8515-4ac9-89e7-b761faf13aed https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/amp.rnz.co.nz/article/80fdd24...

apo 8y 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/ https://theintercept.com/series/the-teflon-toxin/ The Netflix documentary "The Devil We Know" is also worth watching: https://www.netflix.com/title/80997719 https://www.netflix.com/title/80997719

Spooky23 8y ago
The military has a long history of dumping toxic crap and handling substances with at best negligence.
mirimir 8y 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.

jorgesborges 8y 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 8y 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 https://www.epa.gov/pfas 2. https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/index.html https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/index.html

renholder 8y 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 8y 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.
CptFribble 8y 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."

deleted 8y ago

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sigzero 8y 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.

alexandercrohde 8y 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.
potiuper 8y 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://psmag.com/environment/what-happened-at-camp-lejeune. https://www.popsci.com/dry-cleaning-chemicals 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.

forgotmypw3 8y 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...

hu3 8y 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 8y 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?
  - hu3 8y ago
    Don't know exactly what labs I'll use yet. It depends on where you live. This is the article that got me interested: http://blogs.worldbank.org/water/how-test-water-quality-chemical-tests-limited-budgets http://blogs.worldbank.org/water/how-test-water-quality-chem...

dlandis 8y 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?

potiuper 8y ago
At least 91 per Northeastern University - https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/2017_pfa/ https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/2017_pfa/ Here's a different one: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-3M-groundwater-pollution-problem/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-3M-groundwater-pollu... All public landfills can be added to those maps.

gumby 8y ago

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

potiuper 8y 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-Compounds/ 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.