Workers clean up a Chemical spill at Brunswick Executive Airport on August 19. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

This editorial board published a preliminary response to the spill of toxic firefighting foam concentrate in Brunswick on Aug. 25 (“Our View: Response to Brunswick foam spill a multifaceted failure”). At that time, there were more questions than there were answers.

Even then, however, the scope and severity of the damage to our state was clear. This past week, some of our questions were answered. And those answers were very unsettling.

Staying on the story, the Press Herald’s Penelope Overton reported galling context Thursday. The fire suppression system in question at Brunswick Executive Airport was deemed “deficient” in the months before the leak.

Worse than that, the inspector’s report declared the potential for “accidental foam discharge” as – and this is a big word – “tremendous.”

Nothing was done to mitigate this formally established risk; no sprinkler repair person was called. Why? The airport’s owner, Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority, reportedly couldn’t find anybody to do it. The account given is extremely murky and maddening.

The executive director of the authority, Kristine Logan, put it this way. “We went back and forth with them until September,” Logan said of the company that conducted the inspection. “So then, when we couldn’t get them back in, we started calling around to other places to say ‘Hey, would you guys come out and do that?’ But nobody wants to do anything with PFAS anymore.”

Nobody wants to do anything with PFAS anymore.

Hey, guess what? PFAS – the toxic forever chemicals contained in some life-saving and some decidedly less life-saving products – are a hard, painful fact of life where we live. The damage wrought by sludge contamination has already ruined many lives and livelihoods in Maine. The efforts to contain and filter out these disease-causing chemicals are worthwhile, if very arduous and uncertain. They fall to the state, to our municipal bodies and to private business and individuals. 

If it really was the case that there are no willing or able professionals on offer to the authority, some official intervention must be explored. Certainly, inspection and maintenance of this significance – with these harrowing downsides, where neglected or avoided – is not optional. It is not something that can fall foul of the whims of the market.

Now, the Brunswick story appears to be wending its way into an unseemly legal battle between the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority and the business that conducted the inspection – the business that warned Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority that “next steps,” steps to mitigate the risk, would necessarily run to tens of thousands of dollars.

No kidding. That’s what dealing with these substances costs. As we wrote in this space back in June, we’ve got to wrap our heads around the rising costs of solving this problem – they are only going to rise.

Attention to the crisis of PFAS contamination at the state level has been well above average; Maine has invested more than $100 million in its response to PFAS in the past two years and spent about $15 million to help those materially affected. Even then, we are only getting started down this extremely long and difficult road.

Private enterprise is likely to pay as much attention to the crisis as laws, rules and effective enforcement commands it to. If the Brunswick fiasco is anything to go by, the attitude toward the responsible management of material that poses an inordinate threat to public health if irresponsibly managed is … lacking, if not cavalier. It is a sorry state of affairs when it takes a catastrophe like this one to sharpen the focus of our regulatory bodies and our codes. Our treasured local environment is not a testing ground. We know more than enough about what needs to be done and insisted on when it comes to curtailing toxic chemical contamination. 

Knowing what we know, prevention is non-negotiable. Accountability and liability need to be crystal clear; the buck has to stop somewhere. And the consequences, where it doesn’t stop, need to be grave enough to be effective.

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