julieturkewitzVerified account

This is a complex story, so I'm going to break it down.

PFAS are a broad class of chemicals developed in the 1940s. Because they repel grease and water, they have been used across industries for decades, often to prevent stains.

They are man-made and placed in a dizzying array of products: food packaging, nonstick pans, clothing, furniture. You have almost definitely ingested some amount of them. (Most Americans have at least a small amount of these chemicals in their blood.)

But the chemicals move quickly through the earth and into water, where they persist indefinitely. Some scientists have deemed them “forever chemicals."

Over the last two decades, a growing body of research has shown that PFAS compounds meant to help us are likely hurting us.

The best data, based on a study of 69,000 people living near in a West Virginia DuPont plant, say exposure is associated with kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol and ulcerative colitis, among other problems.

So where does the military come in?

The real problem for humans, the science is telling us, is repeated exposure to PFAS.

In recent years, companies like DuPont have come under fire for leaching PFAS into water systems in places across the country: West Virginia, North Carolina, and more.

But the military has used PFAS extensively at bases around the nation and globe. For decades. Specifically, the chemicals are present in a firefighting foam it uses to extinguish fuel-based fires.

Servicemen and women would spray the toxic foam in copious amounts during trainings, year after year, sometimes into unlined pits.

It's not difficult to see how the toxic chemicals made their way into the drinking water systems by the bases.

For decades, the military had signs that the chemicals in its firefighting foam were dangerous.

The Army Corps of Engineers told Fort Carson to stop using the foam in 1991, calling it “harmful to the environment.”

In 2000, under pressure from the E.P.A., 3M phased out production of some of the PFAS compounds, announcing that they could “could potentially pose a risk to human health.” Five years later, the E.P.A. declared that another compound was “likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”

But the military continued to use firefighting foams containing the chemicals because E.P.A. doesn’t regulate them.

Industry officials have said they are following E.P.A. rules, while the E.P.A. has said it is still exploring regulation.

“You know the Shaggy song, ‘It wasn’t me’?’” one lawyer told me. “It’s like that.”

Then something dramatic happened. (Dramatic in the world of chemical regulation.) Around 2015, the E.P.A. started asking some communities to test their water for two types of PFAS. This was a step toward possible regulation.

Suddenly, military families around the country began learning that they had been drinking water polluted by the very government they were serving. There was fear, outrage and a mad scramble for answers.