The U.S. Air Force has agreed to reimburse the city of Airway Heights for water it’s purchasing from the city of Spokane, months after the revelation that firefighting operations at Fairchild Air Force Base have contaminated the former city’s drinking water system.
The Air Force will pay Airway Heights for up to 440 million gallons of clean tap water with a potential cost of more than $687,000 during the next year, according to Air Force officials based in San Antonio.
Military installations across the country – and their civilian neighbors – are trying to quantify the environmental and physical health effects of perfluorinated compounds known as PFOA and PFOS, which were key ingredients in a foam used to douse ship and aircraft fires.
Lawsuits and tort claims have been filed.
And numerous studies, including some commissioned by the military and the chemicals’ manufacturers, hinted at those health effects decades ago.
Air Force officials have been testing wells in phases for about a year in an attempt to trace how the chemicals migrated through the water table.
Marlene Feist, a spokeswoman for Spokane’s public works department, said the city sold Airway Heights an average of about 92 million gallons per year from 2012 to 2016.
“We’re used to them pumping during the summertime,” she said, “so for them to pump during the winter months is basically no big deal.” She noted that Airway Heights’ total annual water usage, about 450 million gallons, is still less than 2 percent of the 23 billion gallons that Spokane pumps from its system each year.
Cleanup and mitigation of perfluorinated chemicals near more than 400 U.S. military installations may cost up to $2 billion, according to some estimates.
Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray (D-Wash.), and other lawmakers, are pushing to include an extra $62 million for that effort in this year’s National Defense Authorization Act.