A lot of people have their lives in limbo because of soil contamination caused by the fire fighting chemical PFAS. This is regarded as an essential for snuffing out fires caused by the ignition of petrol or kerosene and consequently it is widely used at airports and fuel terminals. The runoff finds its way onto adjacent land and since the risk factor received wide media attention the use of that land has been virtually sterilized.
Owners putting it on the market are unlikely to find a buyer and the contamination risk makes it unsuitable for any form of agricultural use. At this stage, the extent of the risk is yet to be determined and the government is facing multiple class actions to gain compensation because the risk originated from fire fighting on nearby government property.
Apart from this financial risk, there is the danger of personal injury to those who came into contact with PFAS when they lived on worked on these contaminated properties and a media investigation has revealed a wide discrepancy on the results of blood tests carried out by government and private testing agencies.
What started alarm bells ringing loudly was testing of water samples from a drain near a military establishment where polyfluoroalkyl was used. When this was tested the contamination level was thirty-four times higher than the result reported by the authorities.
An owner of land adjacent to the Williamstown RAAF base had his blood sampled twice on the same day, March 19. It was scanned for a range of PFAS chemicals by a government and a private agency and there was a glaring difference in the results for perfluro-hexane sulfonic acid. (PFHxS ). The government test detected chemical blood contamination at 21 ng/ml while the private test found more than twice that, at 49 ng/ml.
Obviously, varying test results will come into play when the courts determine the contamination levels and its effect on the compensation ordered. It is not a level playing field when the testing from different agencies is in dispute. To further complicate this issue PFAS is still in use and looks like being the prime fire fighting method for volatile fires well into the future, simply because there is nothing else that delivers the same result.
Quite apart from the property value issue, it seems that PFAS is a potentially carcinogenic material and the degree of contamination is more than of passing interest to those affected. There is the likelihood that what it circulating in their blood stream will have a dramatic effect on their lives at some time in the future.
When the same type of scientific testing delivers different results there is suspicion that this is not an accident. The courts will make up their own minds on these discrepancies but this result makes it obvious that government agency tests should be duplicated by the same test from a reputable private agency to check authenticity.
If for no other reason than for what someone once famously said : " To keep the bastards honest " !
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