By Penelope OvertonPortland Press Herald
BRUNSWICK, Maine — Nobody knows how much toxic firefighting foam concentrate there is in Maine, where it is, or if it is safely stored.
But state environmental officials do know Brunswick Executive Airport isn’t the only place still using this kind of chemical concentrate to fight fires, nor is it the only place where the foam has been dumped on the ground, washed down sewer or storm drains, or spilled into streams and seas.
About a quarter of the time, these discharges have been accidental — the result of broken equipment, a training mishap or improper storage, with no working fire in sight, according to state Department of Environmental Protection records that go back 10 years.
It wasn’t until two years ago that Maine passed a law requiring people to report foam discharges to the state, so state records before that are spotty. But federal records show this week’s Brunswick spill is the biggest accidental discharge in Maine since it began keeping records in the 1990s.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Brunswick spill — 1,450 gallons of aqueous film-forming foam concentrate mixed with 50,000 gallons of water — is the sixth-largest U.S. spill in 30 years, behind others in Florida, Alabama, Arizona (which had two larger spills) and Ohio.
The forever chemicals in the foam can cause serious harm, even in small amounts, said Jared Hayes, senior policy analyst at Environmental Working Group, a health nonprofit in Washington, D.C. This will likely create a long-lasting contamination problem for the Brunswick area, he said.
“Neighbors should be concerned,” Hayes said. “So, yeah, this is a problem. It’s a pretty big problem.”
Hayes’ group monitors foam spills across the country, the majority of which link back to the military. The Brunswick airport is on the site of a former U.S. Navy base.
According to the EPA data, which is based on information collected by the U.S. Coast Guard’s National Response Center, 1,200 spills of firefighting foam containing toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS or forever chemicals, have occurred across the country since 1990.
Aqueous film-forming foam, or AFFF, is used by firefighters to fight high-intensity fuel fires at military bases, civilian airports, fuel terminals and industrial plants that use a lot of chemicals, such as paper mills. The foam forms a film or blanket over the fire, depriving it of the oxygen it needs to burn.
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Firefighting foam is the most common source of forever chemical contamination in the U.S., according to the EPA, but PFAS has shown up in trace amounts almost everywhere, from Arctic polar bears to Maine dairy farmers.
Maine has struggled with the agricultural legacy of turning PFAS-tainted sewage sludge into fertilizer, which has resulted in hundreds of farm fields and wells across Maine testing above safe state or federal levels for water, soil, food and livestock.
Even trace amounts of some PFAS are considered a public health risk, according to federal regulators. High exposure over a long time can cause cancer. Exposure during critical life stages, such as in early childhood, can also cause life-changing harm.
For decades, military and civilian firefighters used special foam containing forever chemicals to smother the intense flames caused by fuel fires. While manufacturers can no longer use two variants of the chemicals, large amounts of “legacy” PFAS-containing foam are still out there.
The country’s largest-ever discharge of AFFF happened when lightning struck a hangar at the Melbourne Orlando International Airport in Florida in 1995, causing the fire suppression system to release 805,000 gallons of foam made up of concentrate and water.
Brunswick Executive Airport also was the site of what had been Maine’s biggest AFFF spill before this week. In 2000, back when the Navy still operated a 3,100-acre naval air station there, a power outage knocked a fire suppression system offline, spilling 500 gallons of foam. All but five gallons were recovered.
In 2019, a regular test of the fire suppression system in Hangar 4 went bad when someone forgot to close a drain that should have kept all the firefighting foam out of the sewer line. But that mishap resulted in a few dozen gallons being spilled, not tens of thousands.
After last week’s spill, DEP officials estimated that Clean Harbors, a private contractor hired to contain and clean up the mess, had collected about 6,000 gallons of the 51,450 gallons of foam and water discharged. The state is awaiting test results to see how much reached nearby Harpswell Cove.
Maine has tried before to find out how much AFFF is out there in fire truck tanks, suppression system tanks or even storage closets. But a survey of fire stations and “industry partners,” including airports, fuel terminals and chemical plants, was largely ignored.
Only 60 of Maine’s 305 fire stations and eight of 20 industry partners responded to the survey, according to state records.
In 2021, Maine adopted legislation prohibiting the sale or distribution of new AFFF that contains PFAS, but it carved out notable exemptions for companies that could prove they were required by federal law or contracts to have the legacy-style foam on hand, such as Bath Iron Works or any federally controlled airport.
Others had to switch to PFAS-free firefighting foam, which takes a little longer to put out a high-intensity fire and often requires the purchase of new distribution systems. The state exemption was to disappear if the Federal Aviation Administration or the U.S. military dropped their legacy foam requirement.
Both have since done so, but the National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit organization that sets national fire safety codes, has yet to modify its firefighting foam requirements to match. Maine adopts the NFPA code as its own, and Brunswick in turn adopts and enforces the state code.
That means Brunswick Executive Airport couldn’t switch to a PFAS-free firefighting foam right now even if it wanted to, according to Brunswick Fire Chief Ken Brillant. It will take a couple years for Maine, and then Brunswick, to catch up. Until then, a Maine airport has no choice but to employ the PFAS foam.
Some Brunswick-area state lawmakers want to change that, even though foam-makers warn that the new PFAS-free concentrates may be just as bad for the aquatic environment as the old foam. If it does that, the state will still have to come up with a disposal plan for the thousands of gallons of old foam concentrate that remain.
Based on limited survey numbers, Maine DEP Commissioner Melanie Loyzim estimates it would cost $2 million to incinerate all of Maine’s legacy AFFF foam. That is the plan for the AFFF that will be recovered from Monday’s spill: send it to a burn facility in Texas.
But Loyzim doesn’t want to ship Maine’s dirty foam off to another state for incineration. That feels like passing the buck. Incinerated PFAS will simply fall back down to the soil — Texas soil, in this case — and eventually end up in the groundwater, where it might leach into a residential well or irrigate a farm field.
She’d rather do what New Hampshire is doing and send it to Ohio to be broken down by super-heated water — a green but very costly disposal option.
First, they have to reclaim as much of the Brunswick spill as possible, and then they’ll turn their attention to trying to make sure this won’t happen again.
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