Brunswick Landing is Maine's largest firefighting foam leak in 30 years

No one knows how much toxic firefighting foam concentrate is in Maine, where it is located, or whether it is stored safely.

But state environmental officials know that Brunswick Executive Airport is not the only place where this type of chemical concentrate is still used to fight fires, nor is it the only place where the foam has been dumped on the ground, washed into sewers or storm drains, or washed into streams and oceans.

About a quarter of the time, these releases are accidental, the result of broken equipment, a training accident or improper storage, with no fire in sight, according to state Department of Environmental Protection records going back 10 years.

It was only two years ago that Maine passed a law requiring citizens to report foam spills to the state, so state records before that date are spotty. But federal records show that this week’s Brunswick spill is the largest accidental spill in Maine since the state began keeping records in the 1990s.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Brunswick spill — 1,450 gallons of aqueous film-forming foam concentrate mixed with 50,000 gallons of water — is the sixth-largest U.S. oil spill in 30 years, behind those in Florida, Alabama, Arizona (which had two larger spills) and Ohio.

The permanent chemicals in the foam can cause serious harm, even in small amounts, said Jared Hayes, a senior policy analyst at the Environmental Working Group, a health nonprofit in Washington, D.C. That will likely create a lasting contamination problem for the Brunswick area, he said.

“The neighbors should be concerned,” Hayes said. “So yes, it’s a problem. It’s a pretty significant problem.”

Hayes' group monitors foam spills across the country, the majority of which are military-related. Brunswick Airport is on the site of a former U.S. Navy base.

According to EPA data, which is based on information collected by the U.S. Coast Guard's National Response Center, there have been 1,200 spills of firefighting foam containing toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS or forever chemicals, across the country since 1990.

Aqueous film-forming foam, or AFFF, is used by firefighters to fight high-intensity fuel fires at military bases, civilian airports, oil terminals and industrial facilities that use a lot of chemicals, such as paper mills. The foam forms a film or blanket over the fire, depriving it of the oxygen it needs to burn.

According to the EPA, firefighting foam is the most common source of ongoing chemical contamination in the United States, but PFAS have shown up in trace amounts almost everywhere, from polar bears in the Arctic to dairy farmers in Maine.

Maine has had to deal with an agricultural legacy of turning PFAS-contaminated sewage sludge into fertilizer, leading to hundreds of farm fields and wells across Maine testing above state or federal safety levels for water, soil, food and livestock.

Even trace amounts of some PFAS are considered a public health risk, according to federal regulators. Prolonged exposure to high levels can cause cancer. Exposure at critical stages of life, such as in early childhood, can also cause life-changing damage.

For decades, military and civilian firefighters have used special foams containing permanent-residue chemicals, or PFAS, to smother the intense flames caused by fuel fires. Although manufacturers can no longer use two variations of these chemicals, large quantities of “traditional” foams containing PFAS are still available.

The largest AFFF release ever recorded in the United States occurred when lightning struck a hangar at Melbourne International Airport in Orlando, Florida, in 1995, causing the fire suppression system to release 805,000 gallons of foam concentrate and water.

Brunswick Executive Airport was also the scene of what had been Maine’s largest AFFF leak before this week. In 2000, when the Navy still operated a 3,100-acre naval air station there, a power outage knocked out a fire suppression system, releasing 500 gallons of foam. All but five gallons of the rest were recovered.

In 2019, a routine test of Hangar 4’s fire suppression system went awry when someone forgot to close a drain that should have kept all the firefighting foam from entering the sewer line. But that incident resulted in a few dozen gallons, not tens of thousands.

After last week's spill, DEP officials estimated that Clean Harbors, a private company hired to contain and clean up the mess, had recovered about 6,000 gallons of the 51,450 gallons of foam and water that spilled. The state is awaiting test results to see how much reached nearby Harpswell Cove.

The state of Maine has already tried to determine the amount of AFFF in fire truck tanks, sprinkler system tanks, and even storage closets. But a survey of fire stations and “industry partners,” including airports, fuel terminals, and chemical plants, has been largely ignored.

According to state records, only 60 of Maine's 305 fire stations and eight of 20 industry partners responded.

In 2021, Maine passed legislation banning the sale or distribution of new AFFF containing PFAS, but provided notable exemptions for companies that could prove they were required by federal law or contracts to have the traditional type of foam on hand, such as Bath Iron Works or any federally controlled airport.

Others have had to switch to PFAS-free firefighting foams, which take slightly longer to extinguish a large fire and often require the purchase of new delivery systems. The state exemption was set to disappear if the Federal Aviation Administration or the U.S. military dropped their previous foam requirements.

Both states have since adopted the measure, but the National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit organization that sets national fire safety codes, has yet to change its firefighting foam requirements to comply. Maine adopts the NFPA code as its own, and Brunswick adopts and enforces the state code.

That means Brunswick Executive Airport couldn’t switch to PFAS-free firefighting foam right now, even if it wanted to, according to Brunswick Fire Chief Ken Brillant. It will take a few years for Maine, and then Brunswick, to catch up. Until then, one Maine airport has no choice but to use PFAS foam.

Some Brunswick-area lawmakers want to change that, even though foam manufacturers warn that the new PFAS-free concentrates could be just as harmful to the aquatic environment as the old foam. If that happens, the state would still have to come up with a plan to dispose of the thousands of gallons of old foam concentrates that remain.

Based on limited survey numbers, Maine DEP Commissioner Melanie Loyzim estimates it would cost $2 million to incinerate all of Maine's AFFF. That's the plan for the AFFF that will be recovered after Monday's spill: Send it to an incineration facility in Texas.

But Loyzim doesn’t want to ship Maine’s dirty foam to another state to be incinerated. That would be a shift away from liability. The incinerated PFAS will simply fall back into the soil—in this case, Texas’s—and eventually end up in groundwater, where they could leach into a residential well or irrigate a farm field.

She would rather do what New Hampshire did and send the product to Ohio to be broken down by superheated water, an environmentally friendly but very expensive solution. First, they need to reclaim as much of Brunswick's wastewater as possible, and then they'll focus on how to make sure this doesn't happen again.

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