What’s in Your Drinking Water?

Credit: Shutterstock.com

By Nancy Price
Co-chair, Earth Democracy Issue Committee

Do you know what’s in your drinking water? Today, we are facing a national and global drinking water crisis caused by a large group of dangerous, toxic, man-made chemicals known as PFAS. PFAS chemicals are called “forever chemicals” – they bio-accumulate and take forever to break down in the environment. Exposure to these chemicals is associated with chronic, life-threatening, and fatal diseases throughout life including problems for the developing fetus and young children, different cancers, immune systems disorders, and much more.

Today, 110 million or more Americans are drinking PFAS-contaminated water and over 98% of people globally have PFAS in their blood. PFAS chemicals are found in placental tissue, umbilical cord blood, and breast milk.

From the 1950s on, PFAS chemicals were manufactured and widely used both in commercial consumer products and by the military. Corporate scientists and managers and the US Department of Defense all knew PFAS chemicals were highly toxic and carcinogenic, but they looked the other way to protect their profits and avoid liability.  

Among the PFAS group, PFOA and PFOS, developed by DuPont and 3M, have been used the most over the decades in consumer products such as: nonstick cookware (Teflon), food packaging, waterproof clothing, stain-resistant furniture & carpeting (Scotchgard), cosmetics, and artificial turf. Today, these chemicals are leaching out of landfills where these products have been dumped and are degrading.

Photo: Firefighters at Peterson Air Force Base conduct live training with AFFF. Notice the grassy area just beyond the foam. July 21, 2014. Photo by Michael Golembesky / US Air Force.

PFOA and PFOS were also used in a specially formulated AFFF (aqueous film-forming foam) form developed by 3M in the 1970s for fighting intensely hot jet fuel fires. Used on military bases in constant firefighting trainings, drills and with actual fires, AFFF is responsible for contaminating the land, and has been seeping or flowing directly into water sources for military base residents and those in surrounding communities. Newer replacement GenX chemicals are considered potentially just as toxic.

The Environmental Protection Agency has still not set a legally-binding Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) for these chemicals to protect the environment and drinking water sources. Therefore, the Department of Defense continues to argue that they cannot set a MCL level. 

What You Can Do

Here are some actions you can take to become informed and to help build the broad intersectional movement we need right now:

Go to the movie Dark Waters with friends and family, opening at a theater near you on November 22. Discover the lengths DuPont went to hide the truth about PFAS and to avoid liability. And read the book on which the movie is based, Robert Bilott’s Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer’s Twenty-Year Battle against DuPont (Atria Books, 2019).

Help rally around the call for closing US bases and to end militarism and wars and to liberate the billions of dollars from the military budget. This is necessary in order to fund the Superfund cleanup of contaminated military sites, to fund health care for on- and off-base victims of contaminated water, and to repair and build new “state of the art” public, not privatized and corporate owned, drinking water and water treatment systems to fully realize the human right to water for all. 

Read Pat Elder’s articles at www.militarypoisons.org about the extent of PFAS contamination on military bases, especially in California, as part of Earth Democracy’s California project, “The Pentagon: Exposing the Hidden Polluter of Water.”

Help Earth Democracy and Disarm/End Wars spread the word on the extent of the military’s contribution to the global environmental and health crisis. 

Together, we can build a broad, intersectional movement of environmental, health, water justice, and peace groups to protect the environment and the health of current and future generations.