Column: Military will default to secrecy, as Red Hill shows

Many on Oahu have expressed the view that the U.S. Navy command is entirely incompetent in its response to last year’s fuel leak and the recent leak of firefighting foam containing highly concentrated carcinogenic PFAS (per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances), commonly known as “forever chemicals.”

I don’t think so. You underestimate them at your own peril.

The Pentagon and its officials have a game plan. They are wizards at propaganda and they’re using the same playbook from here to Okinawa to South Korea to Germany to Maryland and hundreds of locations in between.

Go back and read what the Navy’s people have been saying to you. They’ve been reassuring, and their message echoes in hundreds of media outlets worldwide over and over and over again.

The Pentagon wants you to believe the recent leak of the aqueous film forming foam (AFFF) fire suppressant was relatively small. It has a point, right? 1,300 gallons compared to 20,000?

It doesn’t want people to know that the foam at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa contained 9.5 billion parts per trillion of PFAS (https://apjjf.org/2020/16/JMitchell.html). A teaspoon of this stuff will poison a city’s drinking reservoir.

The naval command wants you to know the cleanup is already underway. It’ll remind you with film and photos and statements over and over and over again. They’re cleaning it up. Yes sir!

They don’t want anyone to know that it’s impossible to clean up. They say they’ve removed 3,000 cubic feet of soil. It sounds like a lot, but it equates to a patch of soil that is 25’ by 40’ by 3’ deep, like the size of your garden plot.

Last month, the Corps of Engineers awarded a contract at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska to clean up about 3.5 million cubic feet of contaminated soil. In my estimation, the PFAS contamination of soil is likely to be greater on Oahu.

The Pentagon doesn’t know what to do with the deadly soil once it’s been excavated. They can’t bury it and they can’t burn it.

The thing is, we don’t know the levels of contamination that exist throughout the island because the U.S. Department of Defense isn’t telling us. This explains why few seem to know much about PFAS.

The Navy follows the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund or CERCLA (Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act) process for AFFF cleanup.

The first two steps are the Preliminary Assessment and the Site Inspection. They tell us where the releases of PFAS are in the environment and they tell us about the concentrations in various media, like surface water, groundwater, soil, sediment, etc. Although we have all of this data from bases in much of the mainland, it’s more secretive on Oahu.

The command wants you to believe the spill doesn’t threaten the aquifer and even if it did, there are no drinking wells around for miles.

At the Naval Research Lab in Chesapeake Beach, Md., the Navy has been spilling AFFF into the soil since 1968, longer than anywhere. It reported 171,000 parts per trillion at 30 feet down and reported 18 parts per trillion 200 feet down. It’s a ticking aquifer time bomb. Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California has 8 million parts per trillion of mostly PFOS — perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, a chemical group of PFAS — millions of times over the EPA limit.

The Navy doesn’t want you to know that the DOD dictates environmental policy in the United States of America.

There are multiple pathways to human ingestion, like poisoned seafood, deadly air and poisoned dust in our homes. The Navy never talks about these things. It never talks about incineration of materials containing PFAS or the PFAS that course through the wastewater treatment plant into the sea, or the contamination caused by the poisonous sludge.

We cannot allow the Navy to control the narrative.

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Pat Elder is director of Military Poisons, a project of the nongovernmental organization, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).