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memkit | 11 months ago

Fire retardant itself is much more harmful than heavy metals in this context.

It essentially causes neurodegenerative diseases, especially if you inhale it.

This applies to unintuitive routes of exposure, like taking a hot shower on an Air Force base that used flame retardant in fire drills decades prior and breathing in the water suspended in air.

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mike_d|11 months ago

> It essentially causes neurodegenerative diseases, especially if you inhale it.

Good thing they do mandatory evacuations before using it and don't let people back in until clean up has happened.

AnthonyMouse|11 months ago

How are you supposed to clean up fire retardant dropped from a plane over a large area?

cyberax|11 months ago

> Fire retardant itself is much more harmful than heavy metals in this context.

I haven't found any studies about that, can you link them? It doesn't look like ammonium phosphate is dangerous.

KennyBlanken|11 months ago

They are talking about PFAS, which was (is?) in aqueous foam firefighting chemicals that were (are?) in widespread use.

At air force bases, airports (both the trucks and hangar suppression systems), firefighter training facilities. Municipal fire departments have metering devices on their trucks and can mix in the foam additive if it's warranted. Foam is incredibly effective on a lot of fires.

It gets into the groundwater from stuff like accidental hangar fire suppression system triggering, training exercises (at an airport near me, they have a dedicated steel structure that vaguely resembles a jetliner which they use for training, and yes, they use foam every time.) There are a lot of videos on youtube of the systems going off, intentionally (certification after installation - the system has to fill the hangar to X feet of foam within Y time), or accidentally being triggered because someone didn't respond to the prealarm fast enough to get to the control panel and stop it before the system started discharging.

At AF bases, FF training facilities, and airports it gets into the groundwater and it's game over - everyone who gets water from that water table has to install an expensive filtration system. And that's assuming it doesn't get into a nearby river or stream. The stuff gets used on a lot of vehicle fires on highways, those are often near riviers, streams, lakes, reservoirs....

I hadn't heard that PFAS or related chemicals were in the colored flame retardant used in forest fire fighting, though.

droopyEyelids|11 months ago

It's a doomscroller-brained comment, confusing the PFAS fire retardant foams used on military bases with this ammonium phosphate made from mined Phosphorite rock.