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By PAUL DELANEY
Staff Reporter 

Adding an important ingredient to Airway Heights water

Write to the Point

 

Last updated 6/15/2017 at 8:38am



The all-clear siren was sounded last week for the people in Airway Heights to come out of their bottled water shelters.

The water crisis, or whatever it will be referred to in the days and years to come, has apparently flowed on by.

But through all the reporting, that admirably began in our paper back on April 20 with a story that private groundwater wells would undergo testing, I found one thing largely missing among dozens and dozens of other media accounts, both print and electronic.

Context has been as sparse as the 70 parts-per-trillion number the Environmental Protection Agency says are the dangerous levels for Perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) and/or Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) contamination.

Of course context is often missing these days in numerous news stories where figures are tossed about with little concern of meaning.

It hit me when an early report from the Spokesman Review stated, “Scientists have yet to gain a thorough understanding of the chemicals and their effects on the human body, although decades of research have linked them to an array of health defects, including high cholesterol, thyroid disease and pregnancy-induced hypertension.”

Heck, I have high cholesterol, a friend from Portland will have surgery to correct thyroid problems and neither of us have drank Airway Heights water. Hypertension? Ask my daughter about that when she has to run all over town with an eight and three year-olds confined in the backseat?

But back to that context which has been MIA in Airway.

Not once did anyone put 70 parts per trillion into some kind of view that can be fathomed. And while some may question some of what Wikipedia might call a gospel in the quest for answers, it seemed they could not go all that wrong here.

“One part per trillion (ppt) denotes one part per 1,000,000,000,000 parts of whatever,” or “This is equivalent to one drop of water (0.05 mL) diluted into 20 Olympic-size swimming pools 2,500 m3), or about three seconds out of every hundred thousand years.”

So for that microscopically infinitesimal amount we have watched untold numbers of people euphemistically have their hair catch on fire amidst the daily showers of millions and million of gallons of water that have been flushed through the pipes in Airway Heights.

The good thing is it will return to the ground — safe we’re told and purified to the extent that only someone capable of understanding what 70/1,000,000,000,000 really means.

“We are in the midst of compiling those cost(s). Presently they are not available,” Airway Heights City Manager Albert Tripp wrote in a June 9 email.

Others compiling the costs on a regular basis are several dozen Airway Heights food businesses. I wonder if they are also pondering those scientists who “have yet to gain a thorough understanding of the chemicals and their effects,” as they not only deal with, for some, a dwindling bottom line.

One Airway Heights restaurant calculated a 30–40 percent drop in business in the month of all this “hydra-tension.”

As KREM-2 reported on June 11, “Area businesses were hit hard by the water advisory,” but maybe not in ways most people think.

Along with shorter lines at the cash registers, how does a place with no huge walk-in cooler store hundreds of pounds of ice or store and recycle bottles of water? And was having to spend hundreds of dollars a week for that ice ever figured into the budget?

Another number of note is the state of Washington taxpayers get to cover whatever the cost of over 300,000 pounds of frozen meat and poultry products recalled for use by the Department of Corrections in Airway Heights.

Amidst all the chaos, if there are kudos to be given in this whole muddy mess, they go out to Fairchild Air Force Base, the ones at the center of the controversy for use of a fire retardant that contained the chemicals in question. They have been up front from the get go, provided emergency water and marshaled their personnel to assist in its distribution.

Fairchild already has, and will also do what is necessary to make sure the problem is mitigated to the best of their ability.

It’s a big job, however. Especially when one really begins to try to wrap their mind around the effect of what 70 drops of a chemical mean when mixed with 12 million gallons of water.

Paul Delaney can be reached at pdelaney@cheneyfreepress.com.

 

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