Please help us pay for testing
By Pat Elder
January 31, 2022
A view of contaminated water at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Indian Head, Maryland. The DOD isn’t telling us the truth about what’s in the water and how it is poisoning our food.
Dear friends,
Can you help us pay for PFAS testing of surface waters at nine military installations in the southeast? Military Poisons and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom-U.S. are on a roll. We’ve raised $5,000 for testing and we’ve shared our shocking results with the world. Thank you!
We’ve been successful in bringing public attention to the military’s contamination of rivers and fish. Our activism has helped to further regulatory, legislative, and legal remedies aimed at protecting human health.
The test kits are $79 each. $20 will go a long way. $2,000 would pay for the trip.
Please Help us with this new testing!
The method to our madness
The four branches of the armed services have published engineer’s reports concerning the pathways PFAS travel for human ingestion. The compounds flow from fire training areas and hangars on military installations into groundwater and creeks. PFAS courses through toxic landfills on bases and it transforms into deadly liquid leachate that also empties into our aquifers and surface water. High concentrations of PFAS from military bases pass through wastewater treatment plants and are released, untreated, into our rivers.
Meanwhile, the DOD claims “the pathway to human ingestion is incomplete,” although they’re only referring to municipal drinking water sources which typically filter out the chemicals. Most of these carcinogens in our bodies are from the food we eat, especially the seafood.
PFAS foam often collects at beaver dams in streams leaving military bases, like this stream draining the Camp Johnson Army National Guard base in Vermont.
Contaminated surface waters may be used for irrigation, so the military is also poisoning crops and farm animals across the country. It is reassuring that affected communities across the country are speaking out and demanding restitution. Putting the words “military” and “poisons” together is no longer taboo. Things are changing.
The military is not about to change its behavior, while federal agencies are generally complacent. It’s up to local and state jurisdictions to take measures to protect human health. Women who are pregnant or may become pregnant should not eat food loaded with these carcinogens.
The Air Force has poisoned Largemouth Bass in the Potomac River in Maryland and they’ve poisoned Sea Trout in Charleston, South Carolina. The Navy has contaminated the Mussels in Maine and the Oysters in Florida. Overhead suppression systems, like this one at Dover AFB, frequently malfunction.
I’ve identified nine of the most contaminated military bases along the Rt. 95 corridor from Virginia to Florida. The average facility has more than a million parts per trillion of mostly PFOS in groundwater, while public health officials say one part per trillion in drinking water is dangerous.
I’ve read the detailed descriptions of PFAS contamination in surface water leaving these facilities. For instance, Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Hampton, Virginia - a base the Air Force says contains more than 2 million parts per trillion of PFAS in groundwater - contains this description regarding the surface water pathway of PFAS:
“Surface water on the Installation runs overland or is carried by the stormwater system at JBLE-Langley to the Back River and its tributaries and eventually to Chesapeake Bay. Additional waterways within the area are Tide Mill Creek, Brick Kiln Creek and Tabbs Creek, which drain through marshes to the Back River, which discharges into the Lower Chesapeake Bay.”
Collecting a water sample requires looking at Google maps and determining access to these creeks as close to the perimeter of the installations as possible. See the red Xs on this map in residential areas just south of Langley.
Usually, we can pull over on the side of the road and leisurely take a sample from water passing under the road.
This campaign involves testing surface waters draining from Langley Air Force Base Virginia, Oceana Naval Air Station Virginia, Seymour Johnson AFB North Carolina, Myrtle Beach AFB South Carolina, Charleston AFB South Carolina, Shaw AFB South Carolina, Jacksonville Naval Air Station Florida, Jacksonville International Airport Florida, and Patrick Air Force Base, Florida. We need your dollars to make this happen.
We’ll send stories and results to local litigators, regulators and lawmakers. Corporate media sites are increasingly willing to report our findings. This puts pressure on state regulators to get on the ball.
We will report our results from Hawaii soon. We’ve already detected high levels of PFAS draining into the ocean at Pearl Harbor. We’re waiting for additional results.
Please Help us with this new testing!
Thank you, Pat Elder