Pollution ‘likely’ came from airport operations, report says

A new report commissioned by Spokane International Airport (SIA) into “forever chemicals” pollution reveals more details about the extent of the chemicals’ historic use on airport grounds. It also addresses a controversy over whether the contamination came from the airport’s operations, saying it “likely” stemmed from firefighting training that used a special foam designed to extinguish petroleum-fueled fires.

The report is one of the first stages in a state-mandated environmental cleanup of the pollution at the airport.

The Washington Department of Ecology last week published the 397-page document that was prepared by global engineering consulting firm GSI Environmental and can be read here . The airport discovered the contamination at the south end of its campus in 2017. It is not known yet how far the PFAS has spread, but levels of PFAS many times the level allowed by federal regulators have been found in private wells drilled downstream of the airport in the same water channel.

The report narrates decades of SIA’s use of a firefighting foam with active ingredients that included several kinds of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS — which was mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) at all commercial airports.

PFAS is the umbrella term for thousands of chemicals federal health agencies have said can increase risk for several health problems, including birth defects, liver diseases and some deadly cancers. As a result of SIA’s activity, the report found, the chemicals sank into the soils around the airport and found their way into groundwater in aquifers from which thousands of people drank for decades.

“PFAS found in the environment onsite thus far are likely due to FAA-mandated storage, handling and testing of [the foam] as part of SIA’s federal mandate to maintain their [federal airport] Certification and remain operational as a commercial airport,” the GSI report concluded.

Last month, County Commissioner Al French, a long-serving member of the airport board who is running for what he says will be his final term on the Spokane County Board of Commissioners this November, released a timeline detailing his understanding of the contamination saga since 2017. In that document , French deflected blame for SIA’s contamination to Fairchild Air Force Base (FAFB), which had discovered similar contamination in its own test wells that year stemming from decades of firefighting drills, in which large amounts of the foam were washed into the soil.

“The original suspicion about contamination on SIA property from FAFB comes from the fact that there is an existing stormwater drainage easement allowing FAFB to drain stormwater onto SIA property,” French wrote. “That stormwater drainage is at both the surface and subsurface levels allowing the transfer of PFAS from FAFB to SIA.”

SIA’s new report appears to contradict French’s assertion.

Reached via email for comment, French directed RANGE to SIA spokesperson Todd Woodard. Woodard did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. We will update this story if he does.

It’s true that contamination could flow from Fairchild onto SIA property, and that the groundwater may carry that contamination between separate water channels that lie under each airport. But the Washington Department of Ecology has been confident since the spring of 2023 — when it first learned of the contamination — that some of the chemicals came from SIA.

Jeremy Schmidt, the site manager assigned to oversee the SIA cleanup, told RANGE the airport was responsible for at least some of the contamination of the West Plains aquifers.

“Whether there could be some commingling and where that may exist, we don’t know yet,” Schmidt said. “But I think what you’re hearing the airport accept is that at least some of the PFAS that they’re seeing in their wells likely came from their own testing that was required by the FAA.”

One step in a long process

Schmidt said the next step in the cleanup is an initial work plan that SIA will follow to determine the extent of the contamination. The deadline for SIA to submit that plan is September 19. Schmidt said Ecology will review it over the course of the “next month or two” before publishing the findings.

Though PFAS have been around since the 1930s and manufacturers have long known them to be linked to severe health problems and death in factory workers and laboratory animals, their potential toxicity has only recently become known to regulators, doctors and the general public. Because of this, and because of the chemicals’ ubiquity and longevity in physical environments around the world, there aren’t any well-established ways of getting them out of the soil.

“Once we can capture the PFAS, we have great technologies to treat or destroy it,” Schmidt said. “The tricky part is, it sits in the soil, it sits in the soil groundwater interface … for long periods of time.”

He said the average environmental cleanup in Washington — which follows a process established in the Model Toxics Control Act (MTCA) — takes in excess of a decade. But given PFAS’s novelty as a category of contaminants, no one knows how long it will take to rid the SIA site of the chemicals.

When PFAS were discovered in West Plains groundwater in 2017, the city of Airway Heights started buying clean municipal water from the city of Spokane, but more than 1,000 private wells between the two cities did not benefit from the program.

Part of the MTCA process is to get clean drinking water to those affected communities. Ecology is working with the Environmental Protection Agency to get clean water to owners of contaminated wells.

Swapping out the foam

According to the report, SIA firefighters used to train to use the compound — called aqueous film forming foam (AFFF) — with military firefighting teams on the south side of the campus. It was possible that the foam was “sprayed from Air National Guard equipment during these trainings,” the report stated. After 1999, SIA stopped its AFFF training at that location.

The report also details a 2016 incident in which  AFFF tanks on firefighting trucks were washed out onto a concrete pad, and the foam drained onto the sandy soil.

Ironically, the tanks were being washed out because SIA was replacing its inventory with a safer kind of AFFF, made with what was thought to be a less dangerous active ingredient, after it became aware that the original foam was toxic. The original AFFF was created using PFAS, which is a carbon-based compound with a long molecular chain that makes it durable in physical environments. But because it doesn’t dissolve, it can build up and alter the chemistry of an environment.

In addition to military and industrial applications, the compounds are used in an array of consumer products, from non-stick coatings on cooking pans to fast-food wrappers. Most humans are believed to have at least trace levels of PFAS in their blood, but people on the West Plains have consumed it in much larger quantities and for much longer lengths of time than is typical.

The new AFFF was manufactured with a similar molecular compound, which creates a durable foam but with a shorter carbon chain thought to break down more easily. But even though the airport was using this “safer” version of AFFF after 2016, the damage had been done, according to the report.

In 2023, that version was largely replaced at commercial airports, including SIA, with a version called “fluorine-free foam,” or F3, which isn’t as effective for fighting fires but is thought to be much safer to human health.

Read RANGE’s in-depth reporting on the airport’s years of silence on its contamination here .

The post Pollution ‘likely’ came from airport operations, report says appeared first on RANGE Media .