Read the full article by Clare Fieseler and Tyler Fedor (The Post and Courier)
“George and Jonathan Hilton moved into a new home in Crescent Mobile Home Park nearly three years ago. There’s a fence separating their community from Shaw Air Force Base. At first, they didn’t mind. Every night at 5 p.m., they hear the Star-Spangled Banner from over the fence line.
But they soon found out that something dangerous was drifting in from the same direction, a cocktail of toxins causing them to reconsider life there.
Every month, a truck delivers eight 5-gallon jugs of water to the Hiltons’ driveway. The U.S. Department of Defense pays for it. According to a spokesman for the base, 176 nearby residences and two other mobile home parks currently receive the same delivery because their well water contains harmful levels of so-called ‘forever chemicals.’
The government acknowledges that the U.S. military’s activities at Shaw have contaminated their water, as well as thousands of private drinking water wells around 63 military bases in 29 states nationwide.
Next year, the number of residents eligible for free bottled water could double. But only if the military’s standards keep up with the Environmental Protection Agency’s new stricter limits, anticipated for 2024.
Newly released government data shows that hundreds more wells around the Shaw base are testing at dangerous levels of the toxins commonly called PFAS. Scientists know them as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances.
The chemicals are synthetic and, once they get into the environment, they don’t break down. A PFAS chemical was once the secret sauce that made Teflon famous for making non-stick pans. They are still found in an abundance of water- and grease-resistant products.
The chemicals are also closely associated with an industrial firefighting foam the Air Force used for decades during accidents and training exercises.
Elevated PFAS levels in the human body have been linked to a laundry list of health effects, including decreased fertility, high blood pressure during pregnancy, developmental delays in children, hormonal disruption, reduction of the immune system and an increased risk of certain cancers.
The Defense Department’s current policy is to provide bottled drinking water to communities near military installations where PFAS levels are above 70 parts per trillion, standards set by the EPA in 2016 known as ‘lifetime health advisories.’
Newly proposed science-backed limits would bring those standards down more than a thousandfold. The new EPA limit for each of the two of the most harmful PFAS chemicals is 4 ppt.
‘Essentially, the EPA wants the limits to be as close as possible to zero as a growing body of research has shown how toxic these compounds are,’ Philippe Grandjean, an adjunct professor at Harvard University, said about the new standards.
Jared Hayes, a senior policy analyst for the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Working Group, said the problem for Sumter County residents is that military officials haven’t committed themselves to changing their policy to be in step with the EPA’s news stricter limits: ‘They’ve only said they will review it.’
A spokesman for Shaw Air Force Base, located in the greater Cherryvale area, confirmed this. In a Dec. 1 email to The Post and Courier, he said: ‘In anticipation of the final standard that EPA expects to publish in 2024, the Department is assessing what actions DoD can take to be prepared to incorporate EPA’s final regulatory standard into our current cleanup process, such as reviewing our existing data and conducting additional sampling where necessary.’
A new analysis by the Environmental Working Group of Defense Department data indicates there are 205 wells belonging to homes near Shaw AFB that currently test above the newly proposed 4 ppt standard but below the old standard. In other words, hundreds of residents reportedly rely on tap water that scientists deem unsafe but don’t yet qualify for bottled water from the government agency tied to the contamination.
This is a nationwide problem.
The same study showed that 2,805 drinking water wells around 63 other bases are in a similar kind of limbo, testing above the EPA’s new science-backed 4 ppt limit but below the military’s 70 ppt limit.
The problem affects a dozen or so contaminated wells in Joint Base Cape Cod in Massachusetts and over 100 wells at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado.
Other South Carolina bases also reported wells above 4 ppt: McEntire Air Guard Base in Richland County reported 16, while Marine Corps Air Station in Beaufort reported three.
Shaw ranks third in the nation for the number of nearby residences testing at above the 4 ppt new health standard, the study found. Only Reese Air Force base in Texas and Fairchild Air Force base in Washington have more. A full list of all bases included in the study is posted on the EWG website.
The military did not address the new study directly but said through a spokesman, ‘The Air Force is proud to be a leader in the response to PFOS/PFOA in drinking water, and we will continue to work with our neighbors, regulators, and elected officials to protect human health and our environment.’
George Hilton, 62, is a retired nurse and part-time cashier at the local Food Lion. He said he heard about toxins in the water only after he and his husband moved there. A maintenance worker told them about it, he said.
‘I was like, “Where is everybody getting bottled water? What’s going on?”’ Hilton said. He and his husband said they were confused as to why so many people in a low-income area were seemingly buying something so expensive when they saw empty jugs sitting outside double-wides.
Hilton didn’t know that in 2020, S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control confirmed that three water wells at their mobile home park were contaminated with PFAS.
The state’s test results confirmed earlier water sampling paid for by The Post and Courier, which showed concentrations of the chemicals above the 2016 health limit.
Mark Kinkade, a spokesman for the Air Force, told The Post and Courier in 2020 that it had reviewed DHEC’s test results and determined the military base is a ‘likely contributor’ to the contaminated drinking water wells. Since then, the known ties between groundwater contamination and military installations have grown.”…