> “It’s not in our interest to share product with public or private agencies,” Jurasek said at the time. “You are not the first person to ask for us to give them fire retardant. It happens. It’s not something we do.”
I don’t get why they are acting like they have something to hide. Phosphate is mined from rock, rock contains all sorts of other elements including heavy metals. That’s simply how minerals work. It’s not by itself an indication that anyone has done anything wrong.
Or they don't want to make it obvious that they're taking something cheap and marking it up a million percent and nobody is asking questions. This happens a lot in "our only customers are government or compelled to buy by government" industries of which fire is one.
The usual reflexive secrecy. Nobody gives out any information about what's in any product if they can avoid it. This has really bad economic and environmental effects.
I don't know that this particular retardant is a big deal, but the rule really ought to be that the maker of every product must disclose to the public (not just actual buyers) (a) what they put into it, (b) where they got it, (c) how they assured that it was what they thought it was, (e) how they processed it, (e) exactly what analyses or characterizations they've ever done on the product or anything that went into it, and (f) the complete results of those.
Trade secrets not only shouldn't get any legal protection, but in many cases they should be illegal.
I really hate that companies are allowed to use "natural flavors" and I refuse to buy any products that say that unless they are able to specifically tell me what's not in it.
Lots of people don't realize that "natural" can mean pretty much anything that's not produced in a lab.
There is a trend though where some companies include in the nutrition facts the sources of their ingredients. That's how it should be.
In the US you can write "modified food starch" and that can mean a million different things. In Europe they have specific numbers for different types of "modified food starch."
The characteristic flavor of cinnamon is almost entirely due cinnamic aldehyde.
There's a lot of it in various species of Cinnamomum. My guess is that they are using a mix of true cinnamon and its close relatives.
It occurs rarely and in small amounts in other plants, so small that I don't think it would be economical.
The only other shortcut to "natural" flavor that I can think of would be GMO bacteria or something.
It's very likely that the natural flavors include other things unrelated to cinnamon, like vanillin or eugenol (cloves, carnation). Flavoring is an art closely related to perfumery, by the way.
Unfortunately, excessive litigation is one of the downsides of an under regulated society. If our only protection from corporations is lawsuits then we shouldn't be surprised that people bring a lot of lawsuits.
Companies don't need the threat of litigation to hide information about products. That's why departments like the FDA and USDA were created to begin with. For example, people were selling crude oil as medicine, and people were selling tape worm eggs a weight-loss pills.
Not if it’s below regulatory threshold. Which they seemed to say it was in the article (they said it’s below EPA threshold, so I assume that means the OSHA threshold too).
The article never says how much they detected. I can only assume it’s because it’s a nothing amount. If it was significant they would have been saying how much. It’s hard to take the article seriously as a result. We have crazy sensitive tests now, they do nothing in the article to show it’s not just another story about how sensitive testing is these days.
> The article never says how much they detected. I can only assume it’s because it’s a nothing amount. If it was significant they would have been saying how much. It’s hard to take the article seriously as a result.
Did we read the same article? There's a table with the amounts of different metals, with the amounts found in each of the different samples.
This feels like one of those things where context changes over time and takes a product outside of it's original use case.
Fire retardant is an emergency measure, one that would rightly be expected to see exceptionally low usage overall. But over time, more people and property have gotten closer to the forest; forest fires affect more people for many reasons.
So fire retardant use is not so rare.
The Therac-20 was a fine piece of electro-mechanical-nuclear technology, but the Therac-25 moved the control scheme out of its original context, and took away some of the physical interlocks. The Therac-25 is not remembered fondly.
Context changes over time, and assumptions need to be re-examined.
It reminds me of handling null values or other kinds of exceptional situations in coding.
We can assume they happen for some reason but unless we actually ensure that, the branch for handling the intended exception can silently start handling other use cases too.
- "Phos-Chek MVP-Fx is primarily made of ammonium phosphates, which are derived from phosphate. That rock, when mined, can contain trace amounts of heavy metals."
The thing they're catastrophizing about is rock phosphate—ordinary fertilizer that's mixed into the soil of every food farm in the world.
I'm not sure if the journalists who wrote this article are aware of this. "It's COVERING my garden plants!" reads quite definitely when you recognize it's f'ing Miracle-Gro.
- "Phosphorus is an essential element for plant and animal nutrition. Most phosphorus is consumed as a principal component of nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium fertilizers used on food crops throughout the world. Phosphate rock minerals are the only significant global resources of phosphorus."
- "Risk assessments conducted by the US Environmental Protection Agency and others have concluded that the hazardous constituents in inorganic fertilizers generally do not pose risks to public health or the environment."
The devil is in the details. Even though all minerals contain impurities, NPK fertilizer is processed to reduce them to acceptable levels for agriculture. If they did not do this, places dosed with large quantities of it (year after year after…) would become superfund sites. It is the same reason coal is so nasty: the CO2 is nothing compared to the ash—which is loaded with heavy metals. If the ash retaining ponds around a coal plant ever broke, the land would be uninhabitable for centuries, so the the ppms and ppbs are crucial information here.
So many types of mining have loads of fluoride or heavy metals to discard. Since we’re dealing with minerals, in some cases visual inspection & sorting is sufficient. In other cases where high purity is required, may need to dissolve/melt them and process a series of precipitates & evaporates (i.e. expensive).
> "Risk assessments conducted by the US Environmental Protection Agency and others have concluded that the hazardous constituents in inorganic fertilizers generally do not pose risks to public health or the environment."
What I believe you're missing is where this might be coming from. We live in an Institutional crisis, where for years propaganda was spread and amplified by internal and external actors (like Russia) to undermine institutions, with lies and conspiracy theories.
Bold claims were made that organizations and the government were captured by private interests, completely disregarding that actual qualified people are working to make sure things are safe, like products we consume.
Just for context, RFK Junior is the US Secretary of Health and Human Services.
So, to circle back to your quote, the Risk assessment made by the US Environmental Protection Agency could be easily dismissed by the following unfounded and unsupported claim, "yeah the US Environmental Protection Agency is serving the big companies; they should be dismantled."
Like it would be the easiest thing for Russia to start a trend to sway people to demand a ban on phosphate. They did similar things with regard to Ukraine, to the point where the US Administration is amplifying russian talking points.
To be clear, I'm not saying this article is a propaganda piece; what I'm saying is that this sort of opinion from someone who doesn't seem to fully understand the subject is a prime example of something that could be amplified for propaganda and contribute to institutional demise.
You seem to be implying that all claims of regulatory capture, or even simple incompetence or bias, are all the result of Russian propaganda seems like a pretty bold claim to me.
I am sure there are people who want to sow distrust for their own ends, but there are also good reasons for distrust.
> what I'm saying is that this sort of opinion from someone who doesn't seem to fully understand the subject is a prime example of something that could be amplified for propaganda and contribute to institutional demise.
Part of the solution is transparency and full information.
> “It’s not in our interest to share product with public or private agencies,”
> You seem to be implying that all claims of regulatory capture, or even simple incompetence or bias, are all the result of Russian propaganda
Can you quote me on that? Because it's like you didn't even read what I wrote. How can I be more clear than:
> To be clear, I'm not saying this article is a propaganda piece; what I'm saying is that this sort of opinion from someone who doesn't seem to fully understand the subject is a prime example of something that could be amplified for propaganda and contribute to institutional demise.
How is this implying that ALL claims, incompetence, or bias ARE the result of propaganda? And where am I wrong to say that this sort of thing is being amplified by, for example, popular US Podcasts that were, and some for sure still are, being funded by the Russian regime?[0]
This isn't a conspiracy theory by the way: it's well known that there are people being paid to promote propaganda, and there are people - like you said and well - that want to sow distrust for their ends, and also get paid by Russia to do it. There's still an ongoing investigation about the example I gave, but it's probably a mix of both.
But these aren't just the two types of people in the information space, that's just silly. Still, you should pay attention to who has, or gets, a big reach.
> Part of the solution is transparency and full information.
Is it? Because the solution seems to be about having a certain aesthetic, being loud, and disregarding everything else - you just need to make pauses to say "and that's a fact/the truth is/everyone knows this/it's common sense". Just look at the Trump administration, it's working pretty well for them.
OT: When you read hyperbole, the debate/discussion shifts somewhat subtley but substantially. Exploration and examination of the facts and merits ends - the word 'all' eliminates any variation from the extreme; it becomes attack and defense.
I agree with that, but that wasn't the point of my comment to say that any amount of disinformation is a product of propaganda.
My point is that there's a new Institutional crisis being exacerbated by conspiracies, disinformation, and misinformation. A lot of people have strong opinions based on a shallow perception of reality.
This contributes to the acceleration of Institutional collapse (like Democracy, Public Health, Public Service...), and it's being amplified by foul actors to feed back more into this nonsense. This feeds into distrust or even irrational hate of institutions that contributed to the success of Western countries.
I just gave a few concrete examples, with sources, of such an activity.
I'm not saying everything is right, or that there aren't problems, like corruption, opacity, etc. But it doesn't warrant destroying everything for the sake of an aesthetic or a misplaced sense of resentment acquired on social networks.
> Late last year, LAist requested samples of MVP-Fx from Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service and Perimeter Solutions, which manufactures the product, for the purpose of running an independent analysis for heavy metals. All declined.
> “It’s not in our interest to share product with public or private agencies,” Jurasek said at the time. “You are not the first person to ask for us to give them fire retardant. It happens. It’s not something we do.”
How is this legal? Like how can the government spray random chemicals all over the land and there's no way for the public to compel them or the people supplying them to declare what's in them?
> “You are not the first person to ask for us to give them fire retardant. It happens. It’s not something we do.”
Scary to think what other discoveries were missed if those other investigations had been given the samples they asked for.
I also enjoy how they all pile on to say the results can't be trusted.
> Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service and Perimeter Solutions all dismissed the results of the testing — saying that the samples couldn’t be relied on because they were gathered in the field.
The insane part is you, giving up your power to solve your problems (and encouraging others to). If people voted, it would be much different - it's that simple. If they were politically active, it would be a whole different world - maybe something like the one they wanted.
Instead of doing that, you're spending your energy saying how hard it is.
no regulations are written by specialists and staff that implement the intent of the law passed by legislature or by executive order. Voting only pressures certain parts of that. The US and States have had large scandals regarding heavy industrial wastes over time.
Some of the heavy metals are likely from the fire retardant, and some are likely from the fire. Look at zinc vs lead for example. There is little lead in the unused sample vs the environmental samples, thus most of the lead is likely not from the fire retardant. I would guess the most likely source is lead from roofs of burning houses.
Zinc on the other hand is present in all samples in about the same amount, including the unused one. That means that the zinc is likely from the fire retardant rather than the environment. Other metals are present in slightly higher amounts in the environmental samples, and often only in some of the samples. In that case both the fire retardant and the fires/environment are likely to contribute.
To me it seems like copper, lead and manganese are mostly from the fires, while zinc and chromium seems to be from the fire retardant. Then there is the sample from the Franklin fire, that seems to be higher in everything.
I was trying to figure out what is in class A firefighting foam last week.
Nobody really wants to say, it is all trade secrets, evading a direct response, using vague sweeping terms, like it contains surfactant and foaming agents.
However based on the published MSDS. my guess, soap, it is mainly soap.
Note that I do think it is soap finely engineered for it's fire suppression characteristics. I also think you would get 80% there with a bottle of dish soap.
Ya some of us rural volunteer firefighters will use dish soap instead of foam concentrate. I personally haven't but some of the others in the department have.
Also, real ppm for this kind of thing is supposed to be by weight, so that would ideally be pounds per million-pounds.
IOW if they dumped a million pounds all over the place, and there was 1 ppm of trace lead content, then there was one full pound of unwanted lead scattered across the same acreage as the 900,000+ pounds of active ingredient.
However, ppm for environmental laboratories conventionally means milligrams per liter since that's a close equivalent to weight ppm, but realistically only for water samples. So for test material having a density different than water, some correction is needed which can often be neglected, but the real number is usually within the same order of magnitude.
If there were 280 drops of the DC-10 mentioned in the article, that is a maximum of 280 * 45000 = 12.6M litres of this, spread of 20 square miles.
That is 7.5 kg (16 lbs) of lead.
But what does that tell you? Is that a lot? The EPA warns against soil that is > 400ppm lead, which is a limit almost 1000 times higher than found in this.
It's a lot of raw data, but mainly reveals it's all estimation "all the way down".
Definitely pounds to kilos of heavy metals were dispensed widely which were not there before.
Probably a lot more kilos than people think when you consider all the kinds of heavy metal that's popular today, not only Led ;)
And that's just the initial application.
Contamination migration will be a much less accurately determined phenomenon, while being potentially much more toxic in those areas of concentration, and less so in areas benefitting from dilution.
That kind of thing happens a lot (see “9/11 Syndrome”).
Kind of a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
One of the things about fire, is that it alters chemistry. Perfectly safe materials, can turn into highly toxic gas, when heated. In many cases, this cannot be anticipated, or realistically prevented. There are also firefighting foams and whatnot. I think some of the foams contain fairly significant quantities of questionable chemicals. They are pretty much required, for Li-ion battery fires.
Firemen kinda take the brunt of that. I know a number of retired firefighters, and they all have health issues.
Remember that some of the firefighters are prisoners (as in criminals), a vulnerable population that has less choice and less access to health care or other remedies.
That's an "all or nothing" fallacy, easily countered.
One alternative is water. Plus alternative products might be less efficient but less contaminating. Finally, even with Phos-Check, success is far from guaranteed.
Bottom line: the lack of transparency must be remedied and officials need to be aware and factor in heavy metal contamination into their decisions.
Fires burining neibhorhoods already produce massive ammounts of toxic and heavy metals. It literally is just adding a little more to the already extremly present pollution
The fire retardant ... actually does retard the fire, right. A tiny bit of extra toxicity in trade for much less stuff getting burned may be worth it.
If you're looking for some negative on anything, you will find it. Always. The question should be if it's a net positive or not.
In reality people are just looking for something bad, so they can find something that was wrong/against the law, so they can blame them, so they can get money from them.
> The fire retardant ... actually does retard the fire, right. A tiny bit of extra toxicity in trade for much less stuff getting burned may be worth it.
And water does, too.
The real question is: is this extra toxicity worth it?
I understand your reaction, it's common. But irrational. It's akin to saying "If Trump can improve the country at the cost of some disagreement, then maybe it's worth it, so I voted Trump". What if he doesn't improve the country, and you just get the cost?
It's a good question to ask. You should just not base your opinion on the uninformed assumption you make ("I assume that because it may be worth it, then it actually is worth is").
> It's akin to saying "If Trump can improve the country at the cost of some disagreement, then maybe it's worth it, so I voted Trump"
Frankly in my opinion Trump got elected due to this attitude. Obviously, Trump or no Trump (and when he gets out of office, even if that's only when he dies) we will still have to live with MAGA people, right? They're not going to disappear. And, frankly, the ONLY break on republican power at the moment is that while they have power, they have to live with democrats. No choice. (yes, there's state and judicial power, but at this point there at best reminding Trump he has to live with at least some democrat viewpoints and laws. Not zero, but not much)
Imho Trump, and definitely Trump's actions, are the result of MAGA people shouting very, very loudly "NO COMPROMISE". And, why? Well, the democrat-supported demonstrations (Gaza, BLM, climate, and ...) were to some extent shouting the same. "NO COMPROMISE". No talking. The Gaza demonstrations were totally unwilling to discuss what conditions to force on Hamas, any at all, just as BLM demonstrations were totally unwilling to discuss solutions, just as ... The Gaza demonstrations were about winning, not about Israeli-Palestinian peace. The BLM demonstrations were about winning, not about compromise. And so on. They were just accusing everyone else of being horrible, depraved human beings that should essentially be murdered to the last man because of some (admittedly very fucking serious) mistake they made.
Then some evil election planner went to Trump, and pointed out that the 2016-2020 presidency would come with the ability to get the supreme court in the camp of whoever got elected president AND the 2024-2028 election provided 2+ years majorities in congress, in addition to the presidency ... and Trump (+ cronies) jumped on it. Yes, the goal was probably to get Trump in for 3 terms, so thank God for Biden. But there you are.
But then, at the tail end of Biden's presidency ... the economy showed clear signs of going down significantly (Trump is to blame for the MOMENT of the stock market crash, but imho ... at best 50% for it happening at some point), and the incumbent party was voted out, first in congressional elections, then in the presidency. As always happens in those circumstances. I believe over 200 years only twice has it been different (and one of those 2 times was WW2, so presumably it was a time the average house cat would have agreed there were more pressing matters than the economy)
And now we're here, sitting pretty, after years of shouting "NO COMPROMISE! NEVER" ... with the people we were never going to compromise with in power ... in congress ... in the senate ... and the orange tomato president.
Let's face facts here: we will be making a LOT of concessions before the 2026 elections, because why would republicans give us anything at all? (yes, because we still have to live together). After that less, but still making concessions until, hopefully 2028. People actually thinking about pros and cons, even when there's an easy target to blame, I hope THOSE will bring us forward.
Making a coalition of people who realize that for 2 to 4 years, we'll have to live with republicans in power, and then for at least 4 years hopefully they'll have to live with democrats in power again. People who compromise and live together, THAT is the way forward. And frankly, that answers all the republican shouting points too. A large people who compromise ... can take on China, because over there, there is no compromise, and with that complete morons in power, and zero loyalty. They cannot win against an army of soldiers that believe they'll be welcome in the country they fight for.
My point was really just to say that it's good to say "If this brings X at the cost of Y, then it may be worth it" (that raises great questions), but it is wrong to conclude just from that that it actually is worth it.
I see many people jump to this conclusion, and the logic is flawed. I mentioned Trump because I've heard many people justify their voting for Trump like this.
The correct way of doing it is:
1. "If this brings X at the cost of Y, then it may be worth it"
In your previous post you were making the argument that the cost was not even worth looking at, much less comparing, because that by itself, any compromise, would be bad (and lead to trump)
My point was that the logic "I can imagine that it may be worth doing X even if there is a cost Y, so it must be worth it" is wrong. If it may be worth it, it means that you need to investigate.
Water is not a fire retardant. Water can extinguish fire, but you can't apply water on a forest to prevent a fire from spreading there in the first place.
Your last paragraph seems to agree with parent? We should know what's inside, but it might still be the best solution.
More precisely, not nearly as effective. The fire retardant is effective hours or days after being applied. Water would have long since evaporated and had almost no effect. Even on very short timescales, the retardant is still much more effective than water alone.
Given the temperatures some wildfires are burning at, I suspect water isn’t available in suitable quantities to act as a retardant for fires that require these kinds of measures.
So the article contains the data for the detected concentration. And it's basically a nothingburger.
For example, the samples contained 37 to 80 micrograms per liter of cadmium. The safety limit for _drinking_ _water_ is 5 micrograms. So diluting the retardant with 10 times the water makes it safe enough to drink.
Lead content in the samples was wildly different, from 7 micrograms to 800, indicating that the sampling procedure itself was unreliable.
Similar story for chromium, 100 micrograms is the safe level, and 200-300 micrograms were in the tested samples.
In fact, only arsenic is concerning, with roughly 10-60 times the allowed concentration for the drinking water.
> In fact, only arsenic is concerning, with roughly 10-60 times the allowed concentration for the drinking water.
Even this is unconcerning. The water standard for arsenic is unscientifically low for unrelated political reasons. There is no evidence that it is unsafe at much higher levels, as is common in many locales.
Arsenic is an essential micronutrient in animal biology, similar to selenium. We require some amount of arsenic in our diet and water is a common source. (More surprisingly, there is evidence that lead is an essential micronutrient in trace quantities but its biological function is not currently known.)
>(More surprisingly, there is evidence that lead is an essential micronutrient in trace quantities but its biological function is not currently known.)
Do you have some links about this? I found some papers re arsenic but I can't find anything re lead.
> Lead content in the samples was wildly different, from 7 micrograms to 800, indicating that the sampling procedure itself was unreliable.
That isn't the only possible explanation for the variance. That much variance could have been in the product itself, e.g. if the suppressant was supplied by different companies or by the same company that has sourced raw materials from different mines for different batches.
Do you think they really mean "per liter" of the actual sample or is this possibly the amount in an already diluted solution that they made from the sample? It seems like an odd unit of measurement otherwise.
What would have been helpful in the article was a comparison to the levels produced by the fire itself. Fires in residential areas produce all sorts of nasty stuff. While we should make the retardant as safe as we can, if it prevents something even worse from being released it still could be a win.
Not to mention, if the chemical producer doesn't want to be unfairly charged with toxic pollution that came from other sources, they could supply the damned info and proof of it's veracity, and/or samples.
This ball is entirely in their court and they deserve no benefit of the doubt on something like this.
There is clearly something there. It is 100% rational, from this starting point with the info that is available, to proceed on an assumption that the exact numbers are incorrect, and that we still would not like the correct numbers, even after weighing against not using any fire retardant, or using some other less effective or more expensive alternative.
What is there? The retardant is made from phosphate rocks. The same ones that are used for fertilizer. Lettuce that you eat has cadmium and arsenic from the phosphate (or potassium) fertilizer. It's simply unavoidable.
And of course the manufacturer is cagey. They all know about no-science-allowed wasteland of San Francisco and Los Angeles, with no-brain juries gladly awarding damages based on junk data on "chemicals".
> Do you think they really mean "per liter" of the actual sample or is this possibly the amount in an already diluted solution that they made from the sample? It seems like an odd unit of measurement otherwise.
The article doesn't specify. But it doesn't particularly matter either way.
Basically, don't drink the fire retardant, and you'll be fine. Even habitual exposure is not a big deal at these levels.
First off, water standards were weak in the first place (because of lobbying from the chemical industry) and have been weakened several times since, so they've become a joke. If you're over the federal limits, you're in pretty bad territory.
It's also not a "nothingburger." How much area do you think one liter covers in ground area? Now go look at the giant cargo planes dropping the stuff thousands of pounds at a time?
All that crap washes down into waterways or leeches into the soil, then into the water table.
> Lead content in the samples was wildly different, from 7 micrograms to 800, indicating that the sampling procedure itself was unreliable.
...that's not what that indicates, no. It could also be that lead is very inconsistently spread through the chemical.
Chromium doesn't have a safe level, just like there's no such thing as a safe level of radiation.
Before you start hammering away that the chances to you or me are extremely low: so are house fires, murder, etc. They still happen, and they happen to somebody. A low concentration of chromium consumed by a large population will definitely cause health impacts.
There are areas on Earth where the natural background radiation is literally dozens of times higher than normal. People there don't have elevated cancer risk or shorter life spans.
Radon does cause elevated lung cancer risk, though.
> just like there's no such thing as a safe level of radiation.
This is absolutely untrue. Living organisms _must_ deal with damaged DNA all the time or they wouldn’t be able to live for very long. There are many ways our environment can cause DNA damage, and radiation is definitely one of them. At low levels of radiation our own self–repair mechanisms easily fix the damage and no harm is actually done. This is especially good since we live in a constant bath of radiation all the time. We cannot escape it so it’s a good thing we don’t need to.
What isn’t good is that because of politics and fear most government regulations do not recognize this. Flawed safety regulations like this cost us a huge amount of money every year, both directly in the form of higher costs and indirectly in the form of lost opportunities.
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.
With water? Like, hose it down? It's mostly ammonium phosphate anyway and afaik it's water soluble.
Edit: yes it moves it around, and just like the cleaning person at the office does you move it into the water table or drainage system. Or do you separate your dirt when you mop a floor or wash your clothes?
That isn't actually removing anything, it's just spreading it around.
Removing dirt from the carpet and washing it down the drain is fine because ordinary "dirt" (i.e. soil) is made of non-toxic or biodegradable stuff. By contrast, washing toxic materials or heavy metals into the water table is the place you don't want them. There's a reason it's illegal to pour used motor oil down the drain.
And there are plenty of things it's legal to pour down the drain, but illegal to put in rivers, because it (grey water) needs treatment before release into the environment.
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.
AFFF is being/has been phased out pretty much everywhere in the first world. There is still plenty of it around though - disposing of, and then filling with fluorine free foam can be an expensive process.
Personally, it’s about $10/litre to dispose of. Regardless of concentration. So properly rinsing out old equipment is expensive. But I know the situation differs by country, and what’s deemed “acceptable” varies too.
Powder doesn’t contain fluorinated compounds, at least to my knowledge. The role of fluorosurfactants is in increased wetting and emulsifying with hydrocarbons. Not really applicable to a dry agent.
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.
AFFF is used in far more than just military bases. Outside of the USA, AFFF extinguishers, small vehicle/building hazard suppression systems, etc. are much more common.
This is remarkable, and leads to me question what numbers this article is reporting. Their cadmium figures are parts-per-billion—ranging 30–45 μg/L. That seems impossibly low for something that's mostly phosphate; i.e., the EU's inorganic fertilizer standard[0] is 60 mg/kg, and they call 20 mg/kg "low-cadmium".
This would appear to be several order of magnitudes lower cadmium than "low-cadmium" fertilizer. That doesn't sound very plausible, does it? Given their common component.
OP's using μg/L. What is a "liter" in the denominator? That'd be an odd unit for measuring a dry powder. Is it liters of the solvent they dissolved the sample in, before running the mass spec? Was it intended to be reported as a a quantitative measurement, at all? (Was there maybe a communication error between the lab technician and the journalist?)
The US doesn't have a great track record of caring about the health of its citizens, no need to bring in xenophobia.
Last I checked, parts of the US still have flammable drinking water.
Many neighborhoods still have lead pipes because the companies required to replace them were allowed to offer paying off the affected tenants instead.
The FDA is understaffed and barely tests a fraction of the things you'd expect it to, let alone more than once.
The US has detonated multiple nukes on US soil.
The CIA literally drugged random people with LSD.
Volunteer emergency helpers during 9/11 received literally no meaningful long-term medical support - not to mention US soldiers exposed to the US burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The US even relies on chlorination for poultry - a practice banned in the EU and UK among other places because it is only necessary if you want to compensate for poor hygiene standards.
And do I need to remind you of the handling of the train derailment in Ohio that ended up poisoning the air in 16 states?
Lead is only in avgas used by piston engines. Approximately zero firefighting aircraft use piston engines at this point - turbine power and reliability are so good that most firefighting aircraft that started with piston engines have been retrofitted (e.g. Calfire's Turbo Trackers).
I feel like the economy has become one giant scheme to enable chemical companies to peddle their toxic products onto the oblivious public.
They put preservatives in everything... Even some brands of ice cream has preservatives...they taste awful. I don't know how anyone can eat that... Am I the only one who can taste that horrible bitter aftertaste? These products are inedible.
The irony is that they load up processed foods with preservatives and ship them half way across the world... While people in your local community can't find work... They could have been making better food in a food truck and selling it locally, no need for preservatives. Why is this not possible in most places?
I've lived in a country which had a strong foodtruck culture and the food there was both excellent and cheap. The model is proven yet it doesn't work in a lot of places for some reason. Too much regulation? Regulating the wrong things? They should be regulating chemicals!
Sodium nitrate has a bitter aftertaste to me. A bit like baking soda. I can usually taste it then I check the labels and sure enough I see 'preservative (252)'.
Interesting. After this comment I mentioned it to a family member who is in natural medicine and diet (no fan of preservatives themselves) and they were surprised that I could taste it. So Maybe there is a genetic component. I mean it's more like an aftertaste than a taste but it's obvious to me. Like if you eat pancakes with too much baking soda in them, it leaves a kind of numbing effect and slight bitterness on the tongue... Or maybe that's genetic too haha.
> “It’s not in our interest to share product with public or private agencies,” Jurasek said at the time. “You are not the first person to ask for us to give them fire retardant. It happens. It’s not something we do.”
I don’t get why they are acting like they have something to hide. Phosphate is mined from rock, rock contains all sorts of other elements including heavy metals. That’s simply how minerals work. It’s not by itself an indication that anyone has done anything wrong.
Or they don't want to make it obvious that they're taking something cheap and marking it up a million percent and nobody is asking questions. This happens a lot in "our only customers are government or compelled to buy by government" industries of which fire is one.
The usual reflexive secrecy. Nobody gives out any information about what's in any product if they can avoid it. This has really bad economic and environmental effects.
I don't know that this particular retardant is a big deal, but the rule really ought to be that the maker of every product must disclose to the public (not just actual buyers) (a) what they put into it, (b) where they got it, (c) how they assured that it was what they thought it was, (e) how they processed it, (e) exactly what analyses or characterizations they've ever done on the product or anything that went into it, and (f) the complete results of those.
Trade secrets not only shouldn't get any legal protection, but in many cases they should be illegal.
I once bought a cinnamon spread but the ingredients didn’t explicitly say cinnamon, it just included “natural flavour”.
I asked the company to confirm if cinnamon was one of the “natural flavouring” and they refused to confirm!
I really hate that companies are allowed to use "natural flavors" and I refuse to buy any products that say that unless they are able to specifically tell me what's not in it.
Lots of people don't realize that "natural" can mean pretty much anything that's not produced in a lab.
There is a trend though where some companies include in the nutrition facts the sources of their ingredients. That's how it should be.
In the US you can write "modified food starch" and that can mean a million different things. In Europe they have specific numbers for different types of "modified food starch."
The characteristic flavor of cinnamon is almost entirely due cinnamic aldehyde.
There's a lot of it in various species of Cinnamomum. My guess is that they are using a mix of true cinnamon and its close relatives.
It occurs rarely and in small amounts in other plants, so small that I don't think it would be economical.
The only other shortcut to "natural" flavor that I can think of would be GMO bacteria or something.
It's very likely that the natural flavors include other things unrelated to cinnamon, like vanillin or eugenol (cloves, carnation). Flavoring is an art closely related to perfumery, by the way.
Reminds me the "Sandwich that tastes like sandwich with chicken".
This is one of the downsides of an excessively litigious society.
Being afraid of potential risks, even if there are none, reduces transparency.
Unfortunately, excessive litigation is one of the downsides of an under regulated society. If our only protection from corporations is lawsuits then we shouldn't be surprised that people bring a lot of lawsuits.
And then you have the Germans, where they only feel safe in the most litigious and one of the most highly regulated countries of the world :)
> excessively litigious
I haven't heard evidence that litigation is excessive, except by very wealthy corporations and people.
I think most or many people lack access to litigation - they can't afford to use it or to protect themselves from it.
This industry learned a lesson from the AFFF debacle. And that lesson wasn't "share everything".
Companies don't need the threat of litigation to hide information about products. That's why departments like the FDA and USDA were created to begin with. For example, people were selling crude oil as medicine, and people were selling tape worm eggs a weight-loss pills.
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They're also "hiding" this information from OSHA, as stated in the article.
Not if it’s below regulatory threshold. Which they seemed to say it was in the article (they said it’s below EPA threshold, so I assume that means the OSHA threshold too).
The article never says how much they detected. I can only assume it’s because it’s a nothing amount. If it was significant they would have been saying how much. It’s hard to take the article seriously as a result. We have crazy sensitive tests now, they do nothing in the article to show it’s not just another story about how sensitive testing is these days.
> The article never says how much they detected. I can only assume it’s because it’s a nothing amount. If it was significant they would have been saying how much. It’s hard to take the article seriously as a result.
Did we read the same article? There's a table with the amounts of different metals, with the amounts found in each of the different samples.
Most are in the range of 100X allowable in drinking water in in a liter of the powder. Seems minor.
*100X allowable in a liter of drinking water in a liter of the power
> who decided they would publish this story before even knowing whether there is a story or not.
What makes you say that?
827a's decision to deride the journalist before even reading the article.
This feels like one of those things where context changes over time and takes a product outside of it's original use case.
Fire retardant is an emergency measure, one that would rightly be expected to see exceptionally low usage overall. But over time, more people and property have gotten closer to the forest; forest fires affect more people for many reasons.
So fire retardant use is not so rare.
The Therac-20 was a fine piece of electro-mechanical-nuclear technology, but the Therac-25 moved the control scheme out of its original context, and took away some of the physical interlocks. The Therac-25 is not remembered fondly.
Context changes over time, and assumptions need to be re-examined.
It reminds me of handling null values or other kinds of exceptional situations in coding.
We can assume they happen for some reason but unless we actually ensure that, the branch for handling the intended exception can silently start handling other use cases too.
That is why Therac-25 was mentioned, I guess. Software kills: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
- "Phos-Chek MVP-Fx is primarily made of ammonium phosphates, which are derived from phosphate. That rock, when mined, can contain trace amounts of heavy metals."
The thing they're catastrophizing about is rock phosphate—ordinary fertilizer that's mixed into the soil of every food farm in the world.
I'm not sure if the journalists who wrote this article are aware of this. "It's COVERING my garden plants!" reads quite definitely when you recognize it's f'ing Miracle-Gro.
https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-c...
- "Phosphorus is an essential element for plant and animal nutrition. Most phosphorus is consumed as a principal component of nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium fertilizers used on food crops throughout the world. Phosphate rock minerals are the only significant global resources of phosphorus."
https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/environment/risk/... ("Heavy Metals in Fertilizers")
- "Risk assessments conducted by the US Environmental Protection Agency and others have concluded that the hazardous constituents in inorganic fertilizers generally do not pose risks to public health or the environment."
The devil is in the details. Even though all minerals contain impurities, NPK fertilizer is processed to reduce them to acceptable levels for agriculture. If they did not do this, places dosed with large quantities of it (year after year after…) would become superfund sites. It is the same reason coal is so nasty: the CO2 is nothing compared to the ash—which is loaded with heavy metals. If the ash retaining ponds around a coal plant ever broke, the land would be uninhabitable for centuries, so the the ppms and ppbs are crucial information here.
> Even though all minerals contain impurities, NPK fertilizer is processed to reduce them to acceptable levels for agriculture
Source? What process exactly?
So many types of mining have loads of fluoride or heavy metals to discard. Since we’re dealing with minerals, in some cases visual inspection & sorting is sufficient. In other cases where high purity is required, may need to dissolve/melt them and process a series of precipitates & evaporates (i.e. expensive).
Here’s a fertilizer example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21681395/
You can find similar articles just about everywhere there’s an NPK plant.
I know gypsum, aluminum, uranium are faced with similar obstacles. Google if you want details. (I do control systems if that helps.)
> "Risk assessments conducted by the US Environmental Protection Agency and others have concluded that the hazardous constituents in inorganic fertilizers generally do not pose risks to public health or the environment."
What I believe you're missing is where this might be coming from. We live in an Institutional crisis, where for years propaganda was spread and amplified by internal and external actors (like Russia) to undermine institutions, with lies and conspiracy theories.
Bold claims were made that organizations and the government were captured by private interests, completely disregarding that actual qualified people are working to make sure things are safe, like products we consume.
Just for context, RFK Junior is the US Secretary of Health and Human Services.
So, to circle back to your quote, the Risk assessment made by the US Environmental Protection Agency could be easily dismissed by the following unfounded and unsupported claim, "yeah the US Environmental Protection Agency is serving the big companies; they should be dismantled."
Like it would be the easiest thing for Russia to start a trend to sway people to demand a ban on phosphate. They did similar things with regard to Ukraine, to the point where the US Administration is amplifying russian talking points.
To be clear, I'm not saying this article is a propaganda piece; what I'm saying is that this sort of opinion from someone who doesn't seem to fully understand the subject is a prime example of something that could be amplified for propaganda and contribute to institutional demise.
You seem to be implying that all claims of regulatory capture, or even simple incompetence or bias, are all the result of Russian propaganda seems like a pretty bold claim to me.
I am sure there are people who want to sow distrust for their own ends, but there are also good reasons for distrust.
> what I'm saying is that this sort of opinion from someone who doesn't seem to fully understand the subject is a prime example of something that could be amplified for propaganda and contribute to institutional demise.
Part of the solution is transparency and full information.
> “It’s not in our interest to share product with public or private agencies,”
Is not an attitude that inspires confidence.
> You seem to be implying that all claims of regulatory capture, or even simple incompetence or bias, are all the result of Russian propaganda
Can you quote me on that? Because it's like you didn't even read what I wrote. How can I be more clear than:
> To be clear, I'm not saying this article is a propaganda piece; what I'm saying is that this sort of opinion from someone who doesn't seem to fully understand the subject is a prime example of something that could be amplified for propaganda and contribute to institutional demise.
How is this implying that ALL claims, incompetence, or bias ARE the result of propaganda? And where am I wrong to say that this sort of thing is being amplified by, for example, popular US Podcasts that were, and some for sure still are, being funded by the Russian regime?[0]
This isn't a conspiracy theory by the way: it's well known that there are people being paid to promote propaganda, and there are people - like you said and well - that want to sow distrust for their ends, and also get paid by Russia to do it. There's still an ongoing investigation about the example I gave, but it's probably a mix of both.
But these aren't just the two types of people in the information space, that's just silly. Still, you should pay attention to who has, or gets, a big reach.
> Part of the solution is transparency and full information.
Is it? Because the solution seems to be about having a certain aesthetic, being loud, and disregarding everything else - you just need to make pauses to say "and that's a fact/the truth is/everyone knows this/it's common sense". Just look at the Trump administration, it's working pretty well for them.
[0]https://www.cdmrn.ca/publications/tenet-media-final-incident...
> all
OT: When you read hyperbole, the debate/discussion shifts somewhat subtley but substantially. Exploration and examination of the facts and merits ends - the word 'all' eliminates any variation from the extreme; it becomes attack and defense.
I agree with that, but that wasn't the point of my comment to say that any amount of disinformation is a product of propaganda.
My point is that there's a new Institutional crisis being exacerbated by conspiracies, disinformation, and misinformation. A lot of people have strong opinions based on a shallow perception of reality.
This contributes to the acceleration of Institutional collapse (like Democracy, Public Health, Public Service...), and it's being amplified by foul actors to feed back more into this nonsense. This feeds into distrust or even irrational hate of institutions that contributed to the success of Western countries.
I just gave a few concrete examples, with sources, of such an activity.
I'm not saying everything is right, or that there aren't problems, like corruption, opacity, etc. But it doesn't warrant destroying everything for the sake of an aesthetic or a misplaced sense of resentment acquired on social networks.
Yes, I got your point, which I agree with and was well said. Mine was tangential, as I said.
> Late last year, LAist requested samples of MVP-Fx from Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service and Perimeter Solutions, which manufactures the product, for the purpose of running an independent analysis for heavy metals. All declined.
> “It’s not in our interest to share product with public or private agencies,” Jurasek said at the time. “You are not the first person to ask for us to give them fire retardant. It happens. It’s not something we do.”
How is this legal? Like how can the government spray random chemicals all over the land and there's no way for the public to compel them or the people supplying them to declare what's in them?
> “You are not the first person to ask for us to give them fire retardant. It happens. It’s not something we do.”
Scary to think what other discoveries were missed if those other investigations had been given the samples they asked for.
I also enjoy how they all pile on to say the results can't be trusted.
> Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service and Perimeter Solutions all dismissed the results of the testing — saying that the samples couldn’t be relied on because they were gathered in the field.
The federal government is at least somewhat aware of these issues
https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-t...
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-05/documents/fl...
Historically, its not unusual for California's government and industry to dump chemicals all over the state.
It isn't the responsibility of the manufacturer to provide samples for analysis (unless the law compels them). Take it up with your government.
> Like how can the government spray random chemicals all over the land and there's no way for the public to compel them
There is, by voting.
> It isn't the responsibility of the manufacturer to provide samples for analysis
In a sane world it would be
“Adding a regulation mandating manufacturer to provide samples for analysis would put too much of a regulatory burden on them and destroy the economy”
A conservative representative somewhere, maybe.
The insane part is you, giving up your power to solve your problems (and encouraging others to). If people voted, it would be much different - it's that simple. If they were politically active, it would be a whole different world - maybe something like the one they wanted.
Instead of doing that, you're spending your energy saying how hard it is.
no regulations are written by specialists and staff that implement the intent of the law passed by legislature or by executive order. Voting only pressures certain parts of that. The US and States have had large scandals regarding heavy industrial wastes over time.
Rumor is they couldn't figure out where to put the "warning this product is known to cause cancer in the state of california" sticker on the planes
Prop 65 is written on the propeller
Some of the heavy metals are likely from the fire retardant, and some are likely from the fire. Look at zinc vs lead for example. There is little lead in the unused sample vs the environmental samples, thus most of the lead is likely not from the fire retardant. I would guess the most likely source is lead from roofs of burning houses.
Zinc on the other hand is present in all samples in about the same amount, including the unused one. That means that the zinc is likely from the fire retardant rather than the environment. Other metals are present in slightly higher amounts in the environmental samples, and often only in some of the samples. In that case both the fire retardant and the fires/environment are likely to contribute.
To me it seems like copper, lead and manganese are mostly from the fires, while zinc and chromium seems to be from the fire retardant. Then there is the sample from the Franklin fire, that seems to be higher in everything.
> Some of the heavy metals are likely from the fire retardant
I'm not disagreeing with what you wrote, but they did also analyze unused, "fresh out of the package" retardant.
I was trying to figure out what is in class A firefighting foam last week.
Nobody really wants to say, it is all trade secrets, evading a direct response, using vague sweeping terms, like it contains surfactant and foaming agents.
However based on the published MSDS. my guess, soap, it is mainly soap.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/rm/fire/wfcs/products/msds/foam/silv...
Note that I do think it is soap finely engineered for it's fire suppression characteristics. I also think you would get 80% there with a bottle of dish soap.
Ya some of us rural volunteer firefighters will use dish soap instead of foam concentrate. I personally haven't but some of the others in the department have.
Or diy zip lock bags of baking soda to drop into chimney fires
It's ammonia phosphates with trace amounts of heavy metals.
I wonder who can figure out what the red coloring is ;)
Or if it will be accomplished one way or another?
The red colour is iron oxide (i.e. rust).
Source: https://www.perimeter-solutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/...
All the heavy metals were below 1ppm, are any of the levels concerning?
In case there's some natural accumulation process, the concentration can reach any levels, so absolute quantity might (or might not) matter as well.
I found it a bit concerning that this doesnt talk about safe dosages of any of the heavy metals.
Many of the levels are well above the levels required for drinking water.
That isn't much to go on, however.
Also, real ppm for this kind of thing is supposed to be by weight, so that would ideally be pounds per million-pounds.
IOW if they dumped a million pounds all over the place, and there was 1 ppm of trace lead content, then there was one full pound of unwanted lead scattered across the same acreage as the 900,000+ pounds of active ingredient.
However, ppm for environmental laboratories conventionally means milligrams per liter since that's a close equivalent to weight ppm, but realistically only for water samples. So for test material having a density different than water, some correction is needed which can often be neglected, but the real number is usually within the same order of magnitude.
If there were 280 drops of the DC-10 mentioned in the article, that is a maximum of 280 * 45000 = 12.6M litres of this, spread of 20 square miles.
That is 7.5 kg (16 lbs) of lead.
But what does that tell you? Is that a lot? The EPA warns against soil that is > 400ppm lead, which is a limit almost 1000 times higher than found in this.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-10/documents/le...
Looks like you've added some realistic data.
The more the better.
>But what does that tell you?
It's a lot of raw data, but mainly reveals it's all estimation "all the way down".
Definitely pounds to kilos of heavy metals were dispensed widely which were not there before.
Probably a lot more kilos than people think when you consider all the kinds of heavy metal that's popular today, not only Led ;)
And that's just the initial application.
Contamination migration will be a much less accurately determined phenomenon, while being potentially much more toxic in those areas of concentration, and less so in areas benefitting from dilution.
> Lane feels firefighters were left in the dark
That kind of thing happens a lot (see “9/11 Syndrome”).
Kind of a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
One of the things about fire, is that it alters chemistry. Perfectly safe materials, can turn into highly toxic gas, when heated. In many cases, this cannot be anticipated, or realistically prevented. There are also firefighting foams and whatnot. I think some of the foams contain fairly significant quantities of questionable chemicals. They are pretty much required, for Li-ion battery fires.
Firemen kinda take the brunt of that. I know a number of retired firefighters, and they all have health issues.
Remember that some of the firefighters are prisoners (as in criminals), a vulnerable population that has less choice and less access to health care or other remedies.
We should know what’s in the retardant, yes.
The alternative to retardant at the moment is uncontrolled wildfires.
That's an "all or nothing" fallacy, easily countered.
One alternative is water. Plus alternative products might be less efficient but less contaminating. Finally, even with Phos-Check, success is far from guaranteed.
Bottom line: the lack of transparency must be remedied and officials need to be aware and factor in heavy metal contamination into their decisions.
Fires burining neibhorhoods already produce massive ammounts of toxic and heavy metals. It literally is just adding a little more to the already extremly present pollution
The present pollution is the result of incremental addition of little more to what was little less at that moment, while seeking excuse in alreadism
The fire retardant ... actually does retard the fire, right. A tiny bit of extra toxicity in trade for much less stuff getting burned may be worth it.
If you're looking for some negative on anything, you will find it. Always. The question should be if it's a net positive or not.
In reality people are just looking for something bad, so they can find something that was wrong/against the law, so they can blame them, so they can get money from them.
> The fire retardant ... actually does retard the fire, right. A tiny bit of extra toxicity in trade for much less stuff getting burned may be worth it.
And water does, too.
The real question is: is this extra toxicity worth it?
I understand your reaction, it's common. But irrational. It's akin to saying "If Trump can improve the country at the cost of some disagreement, then maybe it's worth it, so I voted Trump". What if he doesn't improve the country, and you just get the cost?
It's a good question to ask. You should just not base your opinion on the uninformed assumption you make ("I assume that because it may be worth it, then it actually is worth is").
> It's akin to saying "If Trump can improve the country at the cost of some disagreement, then maybe it's worth it, so I voted Trump"
Frankly in my opinion Trump got elected due to this attitude. Obviously, Trump or no Trump (and when he gets out of office, even if that's only when he dies) we will still have to live with MAGA people, right? They're not going to disappear. And, frankly, the ONLY break on republican power at the moment is that while they have power, they have to live with democrats. No choice. (yes, there's state and judicial power, but at this point there at best reminding Trump he has to live with at least some democrat viewpoints and laws. Not zero, but not much)
Imho Trump, and definitely Trump's actions, are the result of MAGA people shouting very, very loudly "NO COMPROMISE". And, why? Well, the democrat-supported demonstrations (Gaza, BLM, climate, and ...) were to some extent shouting the same. "NO COMPROMISE". No talking. The Gaza demonstrations were totally unwilling to discuss what conditions to force on Hamas, any at all, just as BLM demonstrations were totally unwilling to discuss solutions, just as ... The Gaza demonstrations were about winning, not about Israeli-Palestinian peace. The BLM demonstrations were about winning, not about compromise. And so on. They were just accusing everyone else of being horrible, depraved human beings that should essentially be murdered to the last man because of some (admittedly very fucking serious) mistake they made.
Then some evil election planner went to Trump, and pointed out that the 2016-2020 presidency would come with the ability to get the supreme court in the camp of whoever got elected president AND the 2024-2028 election provided 2+ years majorities in congress, in addition to the presidency ... and Trump (+ cronies) jumped on it. Yes, the goal was probably to get Trump in for 3 terms, so thank God for Biden. But there you are.
But then, at the tail end of Biden's presidency ... the economy showed clear signs of going down significantly (Trump is to blame for the MOMENT of the stock market crash, but imho ... at best 50% for it happening at some point), and the incumbent party was voted out, first in congressional elections, then in the presidency. As always happens in those circumstances. I believe over 200 years only twice has it been different (and one of those 2 times was WW2, so presumably it was a time the average house cat would have agreed there were more pressing matters than the economy)
And now we're here, sitting pretty, after years of shouting "NO COMPROMISE! NEVER" ... with the people we were never going to compromise with in power ... in congress ... in the senate ... and the orange tomato president.
Let's face facts here: we will be making a LOT of concessions before the 2026 elections, because why would republicans give us anything at all? (yes, because we still have to live together). After that less, but still making concessions until, hopefully 2028. People actually thinking about pros and cons, even when there's an easy target to blame, I hope THOSE will bring us forward.
Making a coalition of people who realize that for 2 to 4 years, we'll have to live with republicans in power, and then for at least 4 years hopefully they'll have to live with democrats in power again. People who compromise and live together, THAT is the way forward. And frankly, that answers all the republican shouting points too. A large people who compromise ... can take on China, because over there, there is no compromise, and with that complete morons in power, and zero loyalty. They cannot win against an army of soldiers that believe they'll be welcome in the country they fight for.
I'm honestly not sure what you are saying.
My point was really just to say that it's good to say "If this brings X at the cost of Y, then it may be worth it" (that raises great questions), but it is wrong to conclude just from that that it actually is worth it.
I see many people jump to this conclusion, and the logic is flawed. I mentioned Trump because I've heard many people justify their voting for Trump like this.
The correct way of doing it is:
1. "If this brings X at the cost of Y, then it may be worth it"
2. Investigate whether it would actually bring X.
3. Investigate whether it would actually cost Y.
4. Decide whether it's worth it or not.
In your previous post you were making the argument that the cost was not even worth looking at, much less comparing, because that by itself, any compromise, would be bad (and lead to trump)
I wasn't, sorry if I was confusing.
My point was that the logic "I can imagine that it may be worth doing X even if there is a cost Y, so it must be worth it" is wrong. If it may be worth it, it means that you need to investigate.
Water is not a fire retardant. Water can extinguish fire, but you can't apply water on a forest to prevent a fire from spreading there in the first place.
Your last paragraph seems to agree with parent? We should know what's inside, but it might still be the best solution.
Yeah you can! Wet forest does not burn as well as dry forest!
Water is absolutely a fire retardant, however it may not be quite as effective as the red stuff from the article.
More precisely, not nearly as effective. The fire retardant is effective hours or days after being applied. Water would have long since evaporated and had almost no effect. Even on very short timescales, the retardant is still much more effective than water alone.
Given the temperatures some wildfires are burning at, I suspect water isn’t available in suitable quantities to act as a retardant for fires that require these kinds of measures.
So the article contains the data for the detected concentration. And it's basically a nothingburger.
For example, the samples contained 37 to 80 micrograms per liter of cadmium. The safety limit for _drinking_ _water_ is 5 micrograms. So diluting the retardant with 10 times the water makes it safe enough to drink.
Lead content in the samples was wildly different, from 7 micrograms to 800, indicating that the sampling procedure itself was unreliable.
Similar story for chromium, 100 micrograms is the safe level, and 200-300 micrograms were in the tested samples.
In fact, only arsenic is concerning, with roughly 10-60 times the allowed concentration for the drinking water.
> In fact, only arsenic is concerning, with roughly 10-60 times the allowed concentration for the drinking water.
Even this is unconcerning. The water standard for arsenic is unscientifically low for unrelated political reasons. There is no evidence that it is unsafe at much higher levels, as is common in many locales.
Arsenic is an essential micronutrient in animal biology, similar to selenium. We require some amount of arsenic in our diet and water is a common source. (More surprisingly, there is evidence that lead is an essential micronutrient in trace quantities but its biological function is not currently known.)
>(More surprisingly, there is evidence that lead is an essential micronutrient in trace quantities but its biological function is not currently known.)
Do you have some links about this? I found some papers re arsenic but I can't find anything re lead.
The amount of slop on Google has ruined everything, it is hard even for me to find papers and I know about it. But I do have a starting point for you:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2246629/
It is genuinely surprising but there is evidence for it.
> Lead content in the samples was wildly different, from 7 micrograms to 800, indicating that the sampling procedure itself was unreliable.
That isn't the only possible explanation for the variance. That much variance could have been in the product itself, e.g. if the suppressant was supplied by different companies or by the same company that has sourced raw materials from different mines for different batches.
Do you think they really mean "per liter" of the actual sample or is this possibly the amount in an already diluted solution that they made from the sample? It seems like an odd unit of measurement otherwise.
What would have been helpful in the article was a comparison to the levels produced by the fire itself. Fires in residential areas produce all sorts of nasty stuff. While we should make the retardant as safe as we can, if it prevents something even worse from being released it still could be a win.
Not to mention, if the chemical producer doesn't want to be unfairly charged with toxic pollution that came from other sources, they could supply the damned info and proof of it's veracity, and/or samples.
This ball is entirely in their court and they deserve no benefit of the doubt on something like this.
There is clearly something there. It is 100% rational, from this starting point with the info that is available, to proceed on an assumption that the exact numbers are incorrect, and that we still would not like the correct numbers, even after weighing against not using any fire retardant, or using some other less effective or more expensive alternative.
> There is clearly something there.
What is there? The retardant is made from phosphate rocks. The same ones that are used for fertilizer. Lettuce that you eat has cadmium and arsenic from the phosphate (or potassium) fertilizer. It's simply unavoidable.
And of course the manufacturer is cagey. They all know about no-science-allowed wasteland of San Francisco and Los Angeles, with no-brain juries gladly awarding damages based on junk data on "chemicals".
> Do you think they really mean "per liter" of the actual sample or is this possibly the amount in an already diluted solution that they made from the sample? It seems like an odd unit of measurement otherwise.
The article doesn't specify. But it doesn't particularly matter either way.
Basically, don't drink the fire retardant, and you'll be fine. Even habitual exposure is not a big deal at these levels.
First off, water standards were weak in the first place (because of lobbying from the chemical industry) and have been weakened several times since, so they've become a joke. If you're over the federal limits, you're in pretty bad territory.
It's also not a "nothingburger." How much area do you think one liter covers in ground area? Now go look at the giant cargo planes dropping the stuff thousands of pounds at a time?
All that crap washes down into waterways or leeches into the soil, then into the water table.
> Lead content in the samples was wildly different, from 7 micrograms to 800, indicating that the sampling procedure itself was unreliable.
...that's not what that indicates, no. It could also be that lead is very inconsistently spread through the chemical.
Chromium doesn't have a safe level, just like there's no such thing as a safe level of radiation.
Before you start hammering away that the chances to you or me are extremely low: so are house fires, murder, etc. They still happen, and they happen to somebody. A low concentration of chromium consumed by a large population will definitely cause health impacts.
> just like there's no such thing as a safe level of radiation
You're being pounded with 1-4 mSv per year of ionising radiation right now. Everyone has been, all the time, for millenia.
The safe limit for people working in the nuclear industry is 12 times higher than this.
> It's also not a "nothingburger." How much area do you think one liter covers in ground area?
Quite a lot? This makes it even safer. The next rainfall, and all the retardant is diluted to safe levels.
> All that crap washes down into waterways or leeches into the soil, then into the water table.
It's already there. Where do you think arsenic, chromium, lead, and other minerals come from?
> Chromium doesn't have a safe level
You do realize that chromium is a component of stainless steel? Your cookware leeches plenty of it.
And it's not particularly dangerous, either, unless it's in its hexavalent form.
> just like there's no such thing as a safe level of radiation.
There is. The normal background are about 20 micro-Roentgens per hour.
I could totally believe that it would be good for our health if we could somehow eliminate the radiation background (but it's clearly not feasible).
There are areas on Earth where the natural background radiation is literally dozens of times higher than normal. People there don't have elevated cancer risk or shorter life spans.
Radon does cause elevated lung cancer risk, though.
Radon does, also, oddly have a therapeutic effective with treating arthritis [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14673618/].
> just like there's no such thing as a safe level of radiation.
This is absolutely untrue. Living organisms _must_ deal with damaged DNA all the time or they wouldn’t be able to live for very long. There are many ways our environment can cause DNA damage, and radiation is definitely one of them. At low levels of radiation our own self–repair mechanisms easily fix the damage and no harm is actually done. This is especially good since we live in a constant bath of radiation all the time. We cannot escape it so it’s a good thing we don’t need to.
What isn’t good is that because of politics and fear most government regulations do not recognize this. Flawed safety regulations like this cost us a huge amount of money every year, both directly in the form of higher costs and indirectly in the form of lost opportunities.
I was always told it was boron (or borate?). People always called them boron bombers.
Yes, that was a thing. https://www.borax.com/news-events/november-2022/boron-flame-...
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.
> 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.
How are you supposed to clean up fire retardant dropped from a plane over a large area?
With water? Like, hose it down? It's mostly ammonium phosphate anyway and afaik it's water soluble.
Edit: yes it moves it around, and just like the cleaning person at the office does you move it into the water table or drainage system. Or do you separate your dirt when you mop a floor or wash your clothes?
That isn't actually removing anything, it's just spreading it around.
Removing dirt from the carpet and washing it down the drain is fine because ordinary "dirt" (i.e. soil) is made of non-toxic or biodegradable stuff. By contrast, washing toxic materials or heavy metals into the water table is the place you don't want them. There's a reason it's illegal to pour used motor oil down the drain.
And there are plenty of things it's legal to pour down the drain, but illegal to put in rivers, because it (grey water) needs treatment before release into the environment.
Editing a comment is not the way to reply.
So the alternative is to let uninformed civilians clean it with their hose and bare hands?
Presumably some of the alternatives include informing them of what to do and devising less toxic means of fire suppression.
> 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.
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.
AFFF is being/has been phased out pretty much everywhere in the first world. There is still plenty of it around though - disposing of, and then filling with fluorine free foam can be an expensive process.
Personally, it’s about $10/litre to dispose of. Regardless of concentration. So properly rinsing out old equipment is expensive. But I know the situation differs by country, and what’s deemed “acceptable” varies too.
Powder doesn’t contain fluorinated compounds, at least to my knowledge. The role of fluorosurfactants is in increased wetting and emulsifying with hydrocarbons. Not really applicable to a dry agent.
Phos-check doesn’t contain fluorinated compounds.
https://nyulangone.org/news/flame-retardants-pesticides-over...
I don’t think it is shown that the flame retardants used by cal fire are the same as those in the article from nyu.
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.
AFFF is used in far more than just military bases. Outside of the USA, AFFF extinguishers, small vehicle/building hazard suppression systems, etc. are much more common.
But yes Phos-check isn’t that
Source Please?
Some phosphate rock deposits have very high levels of cadmium. Phosphate fertilizers derived from high Cd rocks can have up to 100 ppm cadmium.
- "up to 100 ppm cadmium"
This is remarkable, and leads to me question what numbers this article is reporting. Their cadmium figures are parts-per-billion—ranging 30–45 μg/L. That seems impossibly low for something that's mostly phosphate; i.e., the EU's inorganic fertilizer standard[0] is 60 mg/kg, and they call 20 mg/kg "low-cadmium".
This would appear to be several order of magnitudes lower cadmium than "low-cadmium" fertilizer. That doesn't sound very plausible, does it? Given their common component.
OP's using μg/L. What is a "liter" in the denominator? That'd be an odd unit for measuring a dry powder. Is it liters of the solvent they dissolved the sample in, before running the mass spec? Was it intended to be reported as a a quantitative measurement, at all? (Was there maybe a communication error between the lab technician and the journalist?)
[0] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20181119IP... (Fertilisers/cadmium: Parliament and Council negotiators reach provisional deal")
This is much cleaner--35 /ppb/.
Really irresponsible and bad journalism.
Where is it manufactured? In USA or somewhere else?
If it is manufactued in other country then they might not care about heavy metals in the product.
The US doesn't have a great track record of caring about the health of its citizens, no need to bring in xenophobia.
Last I checked, parts of the US still have flammable drinking water.
Many neighborhoods still have lead pipes because the companies required to replace them were allowed to offer paying off the affected tenants instead.
The FDA is understaffed and barely tests a fraction of the things you'd expect it to, let alone more than once.
The US has detonated multiple nukes on US soil.
The CIA literally drugged random people with LSD.
Volunteer emergency helpers during 9/11 received literally no meaningful long-term medical support - not to mention US soldiers exposed to the US burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The US even relies on chlorination for poultry - a practice banned in the EU and UK among other places because it is only necessary if you want to compensate for poor hygiene standards.
And do I need to remind you of the handling of the train derailment in Ohio that ended up poisoning the air in 16 states?
This is like antivaxx. Yes you will find heavy metals pretty much everywhere if you test sensitively enough.
Great investigative reporting!
It would have been a first for an *ist.
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Breathing? That's not listed as a benefit in your job description!
Makes me think of the 9/11 first responders, and Jon Stewart fighting politicians who want to cut off their benefits...
I only just came across his speech to Congress in 2019, highly recommend it, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uYpDC3SRpM
I wonder if some of the high levels of lead found in the samples are from the airplane fuel, Which is sadly still leaded in the us
It wouldn't be. Only avgas is leaded. Avgas is only used in piston engines. Turboprops and jet engines use jet A. Jet A is kerosene.
Lead is only in avgas used by piston engines. Approximately zero firefighting aircraft use piston engines at this point - turbine power and reliability are so good that most firefighting aircraft that started with piston engines have been retrofitted (e.g. Calfire's Turbo Trackers).
Why would there be any interaction or correlation between aviation fuel and fire retardant?
Fire retardant is typically delivered via air. If the aircraft is running on avgas, the retardant may mix with the exhaust on release.
I feel like the economy has become one giant scheme to enable chemical companies to peddle their toxic products onto the oblivious public.
They put preservatives in everything... Even some brands of ice cream has preservatives...they taste awful. I don't know how anyone can eat that... Am I the only one who can taste that horrible bitter aftertaste? These products are inedible.
The irony is that they load up processed foods with preservatives and ship them half way across the world... While people in your local community can't find work... They could have been making better food in a food truck and selling it locally, no need for preservatives. Why is this not possible in most places?
I've lived in a country which had a strong foodtruck culture and the food there was both excellent and cheap. The model is proven yet it doesn't work in a lot of places for some reason. Too much regulation? Regulating the wrong things? They should be regulating chemicals!
The most common preservatives in food are salt, sorbic acid (occurs naturally in fruit), and sodium nitrate (mined directly out of the ground).
If you constantly experience a bitter taste when eating foods you should speak to your doctor. It can be a sign of an infection or liver issues.
Sodium nitrate has a bitter aftertaste to me. A bit like baking soda. I can usually taste it then I check the labels and sure enough I see 'preservative (252)'.
I wonder if it's a genetic thing. I have a family member who complains about preservative taste, but I can't taste it.
Interesting. After this comment I mentioned it to a family member who is in natural medicine and diet (no fan of preservatives themselves) and they were surprised that I could taste it. So Maybe there is a genetic component. I mean it's more like an aftertaste than a taste but it's obvious to me. Like if you eat pancakes with too much baking soda in them, it leaves a kind of numbing effect and slight bitterness on the tongue... Or maybe that's genetic too haha.