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Firefighting foam contaminated groundwater beneath O’Hare and Midway airports with PFAS chemicals, military investigators have found. It’s unclear how far it has spread.
Brett Chase
November 11, 2023
When an American Airlines jetliner caught fire on an O’Hare Airport runway in October 2016, firefighters rushed to the scene.
Within three minutes, they’d blanketed the flames with a suffocating foam, a product used at airports for half a century.
Known as AFFF, it has been used by Chicago and military firefighters because it can extinguish intense jet fuel fires.
The foam, now being phased out, also contains toxic substances known as forever chemicals that have been linked to cancers, liver damage, low birth weights, high cholesterol and other health threats.
Those chemicals contaminated groundwater beneath city of Chicago-run O’Hare and Midway airports, military investigators have found. As part of a Department of Defense-initiated cleanup nationwide, they plan another round of testing as soon as next year. The department estimates that national cleanup costs will come to $39 billion.
Little has been made public about the extensive use of the firefighting foam in Chicago, but the Defense Department is examining the spread of the chemicals from the city’s two airports, where military stations once operated.
The chemicals — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS for short — contaminated groundwater at the airports, investigators found, though the extent of the spread isn’t clear.
“PFAS was the go-to firefighting chemical on airfields — both civilian and military across this country for the longest time,” U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Illinois, says. “We had no idea what the consequences of PFAS exposure was.”
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