ANDY: Hello, welcome back. My name is Andy Singleton. I am running for Recording Secretary for the UFA, representing the firefighters of the FDNY. Hopefully you enjoyed the first podcast I did with Staten Island borough president Jimmy Otto going over just basic congress and bills are passed in New York State, the assembly and everything like that. But today, this is gonna be a much more pertinent conversation for firefighters. Specifically with FDNY firefighters and I’ll get into that a little bit more later.
I have three quests with me tonight. I have not only Paul and Diane Cotter but, Doctor Graham Peaslee, who’s a physicist from Notre Dame University and they’ve been making quite a lot of noise the last couple of years, more specifically the last couple of months with all the attention they’re drawing to the level of PFOA’s in bunker gear and just how dangerous this is to firefighters, and the carcinogens, being absorbed and passed through, i thought it would be a great idea to get it from the horses mouth and let us know what their findings have found and everything like that.
So just to kind of briefly give you a little background and i’ll let them start talking, Paul is a veteran firefighter from Worcester, Mass, and came down with cancer. And going through this whole process your wife was doing a lot of studying and found out that this might not of just been, you know, the things that we were told, you know hazards of the job — so, I’m gonna let you guys take over now, kind of give a background of how this whole project started.
DIANE: Hi Andy thanks, and thanks for the opportunity, we’re really so grateful to be able, to be able to share with you how um, this began and pretty much how it progressed. It did begin with Paul’s cancer and ah that diagnosis came in October of 2014, one month after he was promoted to the lieutenant and when that diagnosis came the career ended because we then began a battle for his life as anybody that goes through cancer diagnosis then treatment knows, it’s, it’s a very arduous task and you’re left with months and months of worry and it’s really a life changer. It changes your financial situation, um, it changes who you are. You know Paul was just a fabulous firefighter and we lived for his stories every day, and we still do. But, as he was adjusting to a new life of you know, not being a firefighter, I began immersing myself on the internet in, in looking into the, the materials used in turnout gear.
But it didn’t start with PFOA. To be honest with you it literally started when I started to look at safety hazards and I looked back to 1999 and found that there was a recall for a moisture barrier, called Breathtex moisture barrier and what stunned me about that was how the manufacturers refused to answer the IAFF’s plea for a recall and you gotta figure you know, Paul and I had been married almost 30 years at this point. He’d been a firefighter for 27 years and I can remember the days of turning the pages of our firefighter magazines and seeing you know um, ‘every manufacturer loves you, got you, we got you’ you know and um, you would never.. you know it shocked me I have to say — gullible, I was so gullible then. It shocked me that the manufacturers would not immediately respond to the IAFF’s plea.
At any event then I started looking into the Nomex and Kevlar because I had seen something that discussed ‘screen door effect’ from the New Jersey firefighter who died a horrible death of the screen door effect. When I saw that I literally ran downstairs to my basement and grabbed Paul’s bunker gear and I shined a flashlight through his gear, in the crotch area — in the groin, and I could see that it looked fine on the outside, and it looked fine on the inside, but if you took the flashlight and shined it, you’d see these quarter-sized holes of fiber that was missing. And I, I say it looks like an oven mitt that looks fine on both the inside and outside but there’s nothing left so you’d be burned if you were to try to use it.
Immediately I thought to myself, ‘this is crazy’, because this is, you know, the, the area where our reproductive organs are, and then I’m starting to think, ‘oh my goodness — testicular cancer, kidney cancer’, my husband had prostate cancer. At any event I started to reach out to, I’ll just tell you at least, at last count was 1600 people, but I stopped counting two years ago so I don’t even know what the number is anymore, and started asking about, you know, carcinogens, and you know Boston had come out with their fabulous video on firefighter cancer. And, we got a call from an environmentalist who asked if there was PFOA in the turnout gear. And, that’s what turned out world upside down because man, when we started to check on that we found that Europe was already transitioning to non-PFOA PPE, and we did not get a good response here when we tried to figure out what we knew in the USA about it. It was a lot of, there was a lot of ‘hush-hush’, and ‘no this can’t be true’, and ‘shoot the messenger’.
ANDY: Well money is you know the root of all evil in this country as we’re all well aware and you mentioned PFOA, so that just sounds like letters, and I’m gonna ask Doctor Graham Peaslee to kind of give a little background on himself and what those are — but real quick I just want to say, you mentioned your husband Paul had prostate cancer, so, you have had a full recovery?
PAUL: As of today.
ANDY: Alright, look, and that’s the good news, and that’s what we love to hear. And I was telling you guys before we started this, you know, FDNY — Worcester, our departments are very closely related, we have great camaraderie with you guys. We’ve always had a good history with Worcester, we’re just happy to hear you’re doing well. This whole 1600 contacts and all those researching, all the emails your sending, all the phone calls you were making, led you to a nuclear physicist from Notre Dame University. Doctor Graham Peaslee. So Doctor welcome aboard and thank you for joining us. Please give a little background about yourself and, what exactly PFOA’s are and how you became a part of this whole crusade.
GRAHAM: Thank you Andy, I had met Diane electronically about two years ago when I got this heartfelt email, so I was one of the 1600 people she reached out to. I ah, I got this email about her husband and her husband’s cancer that was in remission thankfully, and that she was worried about the turnout gear. And I didn’t know anything about it, I said well you can certainly test to see if it’s fluorinated. We have a quick and easy test. I had gotten into PFAS oh, about three or four years earlier, been doing it now seven years, um, where we have a measurement technique that allows us to see the presence of fluorine. And if you can see fluorine in places there shouldn’t be fluorine then somebody’s treated it with PFAS, because that’s their primary ingredient, what these chemicals per and polyfluorinated alkyl substances are, it’s in their name — fluoro — so if you can measure fluorine then there’s likely somebody put some PFAS there.
And it can come in all sorts of forms. It comes in the moisture barriers you have in the turnout gear, it comes in the outer shell, and it comes ah, in all sorts of other things — the sprays, you can get waterproofing sprays for your clothes at home, shoes, and you can also do in on your carpets. The Scotchguard on your carpets was all PFAS as were the old GoreTex uniforms and things like that.
And this was a big revolution cause we could keep our firefighters dry, and that’s important, cause if you’re gonna carry 60 pounds of gear you don’t want 60 pounds of water to go along with it. And that really cuts down on fatigue levels, and so, somebody said ‘ah, this is the best waterproofing agent we’ve ever made’. And it’s true, it is. It’s a very strong waterproofing agent. It completely hates oil, completely hates water, and it resists it as best it can and keeps the suit dry. Of course all the manufacturers then jumped on it and started manufacturing the gear with this stuff since the oh — mid 80’s, 90’s I guess.
And, it has been widely used and nobody’s paid any attention to it until Diane sent me a piece of her husband’s gear and said ‘oh, can you tell me if there’s PFAS in this’. And my test is only just for fluorine so I tested it, and it was really, very, very fluorinated and had some of the highest levels I’d seen in a textile and said “wow, somebody’s treated this a lot”. And we did send it out and have it tested in the lab (commercial) just to make sure it was fluorinated chemicals but it was. It wasn’t say, anything that he’d added to it because he was walking around in it, or um, you could use it, um the concern nowadays PFAS is a household word among firefighters because of AFFF, Class B foams.
When you put out a petrochemical fire the, the best surfactant we ever made was this PFAS and so you’ve used it as the basis in all the, all the firefighting foams since 1970. Ah, there was that USS Forrestal fire in 1967 that ah, killed 134 sailors, and that’s the one where they developed the PFAS foam for and it works better than anything else — you’ll never find anything as good as that and they’ve held that true for 35 years and every aircraft carrier in the country has used this so every military base in the country has used this for 35 years.
Fast forward a little bit and we now discover that the chemicals used are these PFAS chemicals, are ‘Forever Chemicals’, they last forever. Ah, nothing eats them, ah they’re very strongly bonded to each other, ah, they don’t degrade naturally, ah and then they bioaccumulate — they get into plants and animals. They get into humans because we eat plants and animals, and they get into polar bears. Ah, well polar bears don’t eat the same stuff we do, they’re eating the seals, that eat the fish, that swims though the lakes, so the oceans that the PFAS is being dumped into ‘as firefighting foam is safe as soap’ has always been thrown away. So this, this vicious circle of you know you create a chemical that never goes away, starts to pile in things where biota that accumulate this — so humans at the mid-latitudes, polar bears up north, and you can see this is a worldwide effect. And people began, and scientists, to get concerned with it, and I knew that aspect of it, but I didn’t know it was happening even with the turnout gear. I’d heard about running suits, and I’d heard about other things, shoes, but the turnout gear was new to me. I didn’t know much about it at the time., I knew very little about the fire services other than I had a distant cousin once who was a fire chief, ah, but it was a long time ago and I didn’t know him personally. So, I think that I had got a lesson Paul and Diane and they hold me a little about how it worked and their suspicions that their gear might have fluorinated chemicals in it, which proved true, they do.
The companies weren't very straight forward with admitting what they had in there so we just discovered it on our own. And it was pretty easy to take it apart and realize that there’s 3 components to every piece of turnout gear, at least the jackets and the pants, There’s an inner layer, there’s a moisture barrier. There’s a thermal layer that keeps the, the cloth that would keep you separated from it somewhat, and there’s the outer shell which will keep you dry. And all of it provides, good personal protection for going into a high, you know these things work in very high temperates now, you can survive for much longer which is good, ah but, the question I had was, “was it in all the gear, or just in Paul’s gear”? Um, and then, “does it come off”? If it stays on the gear you’re fine it will never come off. But Diane already had some suspicions that it was coming off. And if you think about it we use this stuff to Scotchguard our carpets, right? If you’ve got a carpet, where is it that it wears off, the stain resistance you need to spray on to keep it going? And that’s the high use areas — where it’s worn or abraded, or, if it’s in sunlight, that part of the house gets the sunlight, that’s the part where the stain resistance wears off first. And that means that sunlight can affect it, but the PFAS itself never breaks down. So, if you think about it that means that we’ve got a chemical reaction happening on the, where this PFAS chemicals adheres to the polymers, and the polymer itself breaks down but not the PFAS.
And this is what the concern is I have with turnout gear. Is that, you know, it’s made very well, it’s in good shape when it arrives, but with time it starts shedding its PFAS and it will come off into the environment, and that environment includes the firefighter. Especially if they’re wearing it, or using it, or rinsing it in water perhaps with a hose, or even you know, using AFFF on occasions that they do. Most municipal departments don’t use AFFF routinely. Ah, there are some larger cities that use it more, or if you’re in the petrochemical fields but, all firefighters have elevated PFAS in their blood, but only some of them use AFFF regularly, the military ones for sure, but the municipal ones don’t seem... I know South Bend has used foam in an actual accident twice in the last 7 years, and so it’s not widely used. I think they all train with it once a year. But you know, put the extruder in and practice, and they aren’t afraid to use it if they’re told to because they were told it was safe as soap.
So the foam is once source of exposure, and I’d wondered if there was a second one. We tested Paul and Diane’s gear and they had some friends that they thought they could accumulate some other samples. And we got 30 to 40 samples from around the country of firefighter gear both in service and retired firefighter who’d sent gear. And these are expensive pieces of gear too. It’s not easy to get. We took some out of service gear that was being cut up. We also took some new gear. We had somebody send us gear in a box still that hadn’t been unpacked. It was old gear, but it was in a box, it was never used. And that served to be very useful because we could look at the different vintages of the gears — we could look at the different parts of it, and it didn’t really matter which manufacture we looked at. I’m not trying to pick on a gear manufacturer here cause I think they’re kind of like the fire departments, they’re in between, the chemical company that told you it was safe as soap and now some bloke comes along who’s a scientist and says, ‘oh wait a second, this is poisoning all our fish and our children, oops’. And it’s somewhere in the middle there that people are stuck. And the gear itself, while serving a purpose, is treated with a chemical that I think is coming off.
We measured it and we see that it comes off. In a ten year period, we see that over a quarter of it on the outside. We just have a surface technique so I don’t know how deep it goes. Though waterproofing still didn’t come off at that level but there were burn holes at that point, or places where gear is taken out of services every five to ten years typically anyway. But there are wear areas when it was thinner, and more had already come off. We found it in the dust of the places where it fell. We had a guy who’s a PPE specialist and his office is coated with this dust and the dust was very high in fluorine. We did some test to see if we could get it and what was remarkable to me is that even just handling used gear, my students got PFAS on their fingers, and so, we started wearing, you know as soon as my students did that test in the evening they called me and said, “Doctor Peaslee we did the scotch tape test where we put a piece of scotch tape across our fingers and it’s not fluorinated but then if I handle the gear it is fluorinated afterwards”. And I said, “that’s not good!” “Everybody wears gloves from now on”. That’s just lab rule cause we don’t want to cross-contaminate samples. And so, we looked at it not, you know it’s not huge amounts — it’s part per millions, and part per millions sounds like a small amount ah but it really is an appreciable number of these chemicals out there. Especially if you’re gonna wear it every day. Or if you’re gonna work in it every day then you’re gonna have this dust gets into places.
What do we do about it? It would be nice to make gear without it. Could gear be made dry without PFAS? And the answer is unequivocally yes. Will it be as good? Depends on the gear, but I suspect for most situations it can be just as good and in fact now a commercial company, textile manufacturer, has made a fluorine-free textile and it passes NFPA 1971 . So it is fireproof, it has all the characteristics you’d like. It may not be as oil resistant, ah but, it is still a uniform tunic that could be made into a suit if people wanted to do that. And so I think you can impart water resistance with silicones, you can impart it with you know sheep's wool if you want. Some types of a more simple waterproofing instead of these PFAS.
If we could replace them all, then ah my concerns are both for the firefighters' exposure both directly but also indirectly ah, the dust that gets ingested, your hand-to-mouth contact, or, what happens, what do we do with our gear after five to ten years? It’s typically sent to some academy in Florida or mexico. Or you razor it and put it in a landfill and that means in New York City that’s all going to Staten Island isn’t it? I don’t know were they do it now, but it means that it’s gonna go into the landfill and decay for the next 30 years in there. And a hundred percent of that chemicals gonna come off, and it’s gonna get in the ground water, and then you’re going to drink it or use it to irrigate plants and you’re gonna be eating the stuff eventually. So just from an ecological perspective I’m concerned but knowing Paul and Diane are saying ‘can this be related to Paul’s cancer?’ There’s nobody who can say that and he knows that too. It’s just, it’s — could it be combustion products? Yeah. You guys work on burning buildings, that’s a concern. But he wears his SCBA, and you know most firefighters do these days, and that’s reduced, supposed to reduce cancer yet the cancer rates still go up. How does that play out?
ANDY: The cancer rates going up because of the building materials and because of this level of protection we have that you know, we’re able to go deeper into fires and everything of that nature so — ah, one of the questions I have with that substance the PFOA’s that’s being used, is this just being sprayed on the outside? Is it being — is it in the actual manufacturing and is it only on the outer level because our turnout gears is basically a shell. A non-breathable shell. So we’re encapsulated in this, kind of trapped in that, is there any ah, absorption? Or possibility of absorption of this directly into our skin and that contact with the skin as you were talking about?
GRAHAM: Yeah, that’s the third question. I mean, is it in all gear? And Yes, it is. Does it come off? Yes, it does. The question is, ‘does it get into the firefighter’? And as you said, you’re sort of encased in this and it is a pretty good protector, but you also have an even better proctor, it’s called your skin. And your skin should protect you from chemicals going into your bloodstream.
But ah, if you had to place a dollar bet on a chemical that could go in place that no other chemical could go, you would pick a fluorochemical because these things are remarkable surfactants. They can get interface between air and water, they can get in between water and oil and if your sweat pore was accessible, these things could get into it. And that’s the, that’s the concern that some of this would sorb in. What we did test, was, we tested the thermal liners, and for most of the manufactured turnout gear sets, the thermal liners of both pants and jackets are not treated with perfluorinated chemicals. It’s the moisture barrier that has the Teflon in it, and it’s the coat, that the outer shell has these side-chain fluoropolymers. And so the thermal barrier should also be protecting you. If you’ve got that between you and the coat you should be protected.
Except we saw part per million levels of PFAS in the thermal barriers. Especially the older ones. The older they got, it went up more. And so what happens is these things act as ‘catchers’ they catch the PFAS that come off the coat or come off the moisture barrier, and they are then against your skin and into which you sweat, and so there’s a cause of concern, though we haven't’ measured the rate —our cause of concern is that, would there be some dermal absorption? Ah, even if there weren’t, could there be dust in the environment that you could ingest accidentally? Or inhale? And that’s possible as well.
So, the question that still remains is, we don’t know how bad this is. We know that it’s a possibility, but we don’t know if that’s comparable or less than — or more than AFFF exposure. If you’re working with AFFF in a oil field every day, or a military base, you are probably getting it mostly from AFFF exposure, cause those guys take in 55-gallon buckets of this stuff all over the place and splash it on their hands — that’s gonna be a huge dose. If you are wearing the gear every day it’s probably a low dose, but’s there every day you put the gear on. And that’s my concern. And that sort of data is gonna require a much better study than I did. I just did presence-absence. We need some guys at NIOSH to take a look at this and let us know what the toxicological effects could be, how much exposure could come that route, and thankfully largely in part to Diane’s efforts, they’ve got somebody to do that study now, and they are actually undertaking that study which is important.
ANDY: And that’s the fantastic part of it, you mentioned levels of exposure. Before I get to that it sounds like you’re describing the cockroaches of toxins these things just don’t go away and get into anything and everything.
GRAHAM: You’re a true New Yorker, you got the analogy right (laughter).
ANDY: There you go. I want to ask you though what can immediately be done? I mean we’re talking about billions of dollars, we’re talking about a huge industry. Diane was mentioning, you know, the difference between what goes on in the United States as opposed to internationally, so we’ll touch on that in a moment as well. But, is there something that can immediately be done on, on a grassroots level from firefighters individually — themselves, something they can do to their gear that would aide them. I mean, I’ll give you an example. We’ve been told that the ah, the new ‘dri-fit’ shits, that we shouldn’t be wearing those because if we were to get burned that they would actually melt to our skin. We’re told not to wear those. Is there something we can do with the gear that we are currently being given and assigned to-to help better prepare and protect ourselves?
GRAHAM: Absolutely. And I think there’s a couple things we can do. One is education. Which isn’t just the gear. But we’ve got to let people know that they gotta wear their PPE. You’re not gonna go into a fire without turnout gear and please don’t consider anything against that. That’s clearly where your safety lies. You gotta the gear and functional gear to work. Ah, what I’m hoping is a long term change in the textiles of that gear. And people can do that. But it’s gonna be from market forces that say ‘hey, we really want our firefighters to be safe, even at home’. And that will come about from activities of firefighters like yourself who make it known that ‘you know if I had an option, I would choose, my chief would choose our firefighters not to have this chemical in the gear. So I, the way I try to say it is that, you should treat the gear with respect. I mean it’s keeping you safe in a fire, which is its important function, but it’s also treated with toxic chemicals to keep you safe. And that means that you want that gear segregated from you at all opportunities. So if you’re lounging around the firehouse waiting for the next call, a lot of firefighters won’t take the pants off, they just take their coat off and leave it nearby.
I’m urging people to you know, standard proper procedure might be to keep the pants and the gear out in the equipment bay and not in the housing area. It would be nice to separate the two. It would be nice to wash them separately. I’ve got firefighters in my local area that are working two jobs and they keep a set in their car, because they’re driving between downtown and the suburbs where they have two part-time jobs. And that’s just not a good place. The kids get into it, it’s washed with the other clothes, we should wash this stuff separately. We should treat it, even when it comes to you new, you might want to wash it first, at least the thermal layer, and so that you know it’s clean. It will fill up with this stuff, as long as you know, if you’re going on a ‘non-fire’ run, if you’re gonna do the photo opportunity with the library, maybe you can just wear the station wear. Ah, I wouldn’t put this gear on. There’s a procedure in place already in South Bend, I know that if it’s a non-fire call, just an accident, and the paramedics are rolling, they keep the gear in the truck and they don’t put it on. Ah, they suit up before they go to a fire, but they don’t suit up if it’s not a fire. They keep it with them in case it turns into a fire of course, but they’re going to roll without the gear on.
That would be a place.. you know it’s little things like that, that are standard operating procedures, if the firefighters could come up with their own. I’m not going to tell a firefighter what to do in a fire. That’s the fire safety’s situation, you and the chiefs have to work out. But in terms of keeping this gear segregated from other gear, treating it with respect and just saying, ‘ look if been worn, you know not to go in a fire if it’s got holes in it, ok, if it’s also starting to shed this PFAS, treat it with respect, put it through an extractor and have it washed professionally, have it cleaned and separated’. Unfortunately, that wash water at the moment is going down the drain, but it’s better than going into you. And that’s the thing that we work on first. If we can replace this with the textiles that are not fluorinated, I’m not out to get any company or gear companies in trouble. I’m trying to get them to just see the future which is — you can make the firefighter safe without this chemical in it. And this chemical is everywhere, we should do our best not to put it in the environment and into the firefighter.
ANDY: Yeah, and we have you know things that are provided to us. We have, you know, signs that say “no bunker gear past this point”. And you know, ‘not allowed here, not allowed there’ and travel bags to put our gear in if we’re taking details to another house, whatever. But I mean come on we’re salty. You know we want to look dirty, the dirtier the more experienced and the tougher you are and all that kind of stuff…. So you’re saying, as a nuclear physicist studying the effects of carcinogens on the environment and humans and everything like that, be more careful and consider yourself and your future more than looking good for a picture — is what you’re saying. And I’m with that. I do want to want to ask you this though, the gear on day one, is it as toxic as that same gear on day a-hundred? Is it basically, the components are there day one, but day a-hundred they’ve been agitated so much that they’re that much more potent? Or is it as deadly and potent on day one?
GRAHAM: That’s a great question Andy and it has ah two answers of course. There are two parts to the gear that contain PFAS. And they go in opposite directions. So the moisture barrier, the inside layer that keeps you — ah the liquids on one side and the other, that’s made out of a Teflon, Gore-Tex like material, and that since 2014 or so has been made PFOA free. What that means is that they swapped to a different solvent, ah that doesn’t involve PFOA and they’re using something called C4 — C4 sulfonate.
That, of course, is perfectly safe in their mind, cause if you drink a swallow of it, it will come out of your body in months, not years. And that’s true. So in that sense it’s safer, but if you wear the coat every day and the next morning you pee out PFBS, the C4, is it really safer? Because you’re getting exposed to it every day. And my question there is that I don’t know, I don’t have any toxicity to prove that it’s dangerous, but anything that you’re gonna get into you, that shouldn’t be there, I think, precautionary principle says ‘let’s not put it there’. Um, and that means if you wash the inside, the thermal layer touching the moisture barrier, you don’t generally wash the moisture barrier, but if you wash the thermal layer touching the moisture barrier, all that stuff that comes off, comes off at the beginning, and then after that it gets cleaner. Whereas the outer layer, is pretty much intact the day you get it, but the more sunlight, and the more water and the more use, abrasion that it gets, the more that sheds with time. And so, again that’s on the outside more than the inside, but, well, the pants are everywhere right? So I mean it gets out, and so I think that you want to keep an eye on that getting older. So it gets on both ways. And it’s probably different PFAS’s that will come out.
But I’m gonna take a sort of a precautionary saying all PFAS’s are dangerous. Ah, there might be some companies out there that will tell you, ‘oh no, these ones are perfectly safe’. And I, I think that the answer is that the ones that are called safe are the ones we don’t have toxicity for yet. All the preliminary tox data look worse on the replacement chemicals than on the ah, than the long chains that we had originally. That are now out of service. So the different types of PFAS’s, some people are gonna argue some are safer than others, to some extent that’s true, but, ah, in reality I think all these chemicals are a little bit, if we don’t need em — we should get away from me. And that’s, that’s what I’m going to get to.
ANDY: We’re in the process of switching over from Morning Pride to Lion as the manufacturer for our gear, and the main difference we were, told, or at least from what I recall, was it was just the way Lion cut the material. But it was the same exact material. Meaning there was a little bit more of an angle in the knees and in the elbows, where Morning Pride was just more straight. So it was more for comfort than anything else to do with the gear itself. With that being said, is there differences in manufacturing processes from company to company and the levels in the PFOA’s that are used in the processing?
GRAHAM: Yeah, so that’s a complicated question and a good one. What you have, we looked at about eight different manufacturers, some were pretty minor, but the — we looked at Globe and Morning Star- Morning Pride is it, and um Lion, all the big ones, and we had several sets of gear of each. We couldn’t distinguish them, honestly, they had the same — I don’t look at the tag I was just looking at what was on each fabric. And so we decided we didn’t have the statistics to study one versus the other. The thickness of the gear, they have different types of textiles and some are thicker textiles, some are thinner, some are a little more costly, some are a little cheaper. But they all had fluorine, ah, high levels of it and they’re all treated much the same way. So we, in our study assumed that they’re all equivalent.
What we have done since, is discovered there’s several layers, right, the gear manufacturers buy their textiles from a company, and there’s really only about four companies that sell it all, and those guys buy ah, the material, the weave, the thread that they sew the textile from, and then they treat it with the chemicals that impart PFAS protection and the PFAS themselves is sold by DuPont. So you got the company selling the chemical to a company that makes textile, and the textile manufacturers sell it to the company that sews it into gear that sell it to your departments. And so there’s several layers, and everybody said, DuPont said ‘it’s all safe as soap you’re good as gold’. And that’s you know, the companies might be a little short-sighted believing everything they’re told but there’s not a chemist among em. Ah, the only chemists are up at the top of the food chain.
And most chemical companies do the right thing, I think they got a little bit greedy on this one, and I don’t think that’s the right thing. I don’t think these chemicals are safe. And now there’s luckily 2000 of my fellow scientists who believe the same thing. And so it’s the right end to be on. We’ve got a bunch of people stuck in the middle. The first responders are just the first class, think about our armed services. There’s 1.2 million of those guys too and they’re wearing fatigues that are treated with all this stuff and more. They have insecticides put on theirs. They don’t want to have insects.
So I think this is just the tip of the iceberg, but the firefighters are right in the middle of it. And they’ve got very high cancer rates, and so you know, you’re looking for whatever you can do. I make one point earlier too, you had said, remember that the guys are deconning after an event nowadays. That’s new. That wasn’t there 10 years ago, your fathers certainly weren’t deconning — they took pride in not wearing masks, ‘ I can tough it out’. And now we’re wearing masks and not only that you keep the mask on while you decon, you take the mask off afterwards, you’re having people talk about deconning the cab because now you sit in the cab with your gear on, the whole cab smells.
And, so this decon process is very important to reduce combustion products. Imagine that the gear that you’re wearing is also shedding some of this PFAS as it goes, so it’s everywhere. You treat it the same way as — the more clean you can keep your cab, the more clean you can keep your working environment, the more clean you can keep your living environment, the less likely you are to run into, into occupational cancers and other diseases. And I think this is just one of many factors but ah, I’m taking an aim at the turnout gear because that one has a known toxin in it. A known carcinogen. I think that the reduced.. the statements against that are that, “ oh, we got rid of the most of it, it’s only a little bit left, trace amounts” well, there’s no such thing as a trace amount when it comes to cancer. I mean you either have it or you don’t and a little less of it, you’re wearing it ever day, that means it’s a concern. And I think, you know, does it get into the firefighter? There’s no proof that it gets into the firefighter. Well, we have firefighters with elevated levels of PFAS. Where did it come from, if they’re not using AFFF? Maybe they eat a lot of popcorn that has this stuff on it. But it’s not clear that it’s coming from food sources entirely. And so this is why we need to study it a bit more.
ANDY: Appreciate everything you guys are both saying and I have to ask the tough questions. I’m on your side but I have to play devil's advocate here. You’ve taken the fight to the International. The IAFF. Ah, you mentioned DuPont which this all seems to originate with, and is at the top of the hierarchy for this, ah there’s things that have come out from, from your findings and others that DuPont and the International, the IAFF, are very chummy with each other, for ah, to put it mildly. Um, if I'm the IAFF and I’m shutting you down, and saying ‘ah we’ve done our studies, this isn’t — this isn’t a big deal, these guys don’t know what they’re talking about’. Why am I wrong? Why, as the IAFF, why.. should this be, other than the billions of dollars that this will cost to change, and obviously that would incentive for them, why is this so important? And what’s your message to them?
GRAHAM: (to Diane) I’ll let you talk about the IAFF, I don’t want to get into a fight with them.
DIANE: No, no of course not.
GRAHAM: They are taking advice from a bunch of people that sit on the board and have a vested interest in what they sell. And I think that’s, for any organization, you want to be run by an independent board that knows exactly, you know they learn as they go, what they’re gonna do. Now these guys are fire safety experts and they should have PPE gear that does this and they’ve made the chemicals that firefighters use, ah, unfortunately we now know that the AFFF is a real concern, both environmentally and it’s the largest pollution problem the US has ever had. But I think occupationally the firefighters are also learning you know, that AFFF is a bad thing. They are very loathe to go into textiles because nobody’s pointed this out before. This is the first time that it’s been called attention to. And the studies will follow.
You don’t have to believe me. I’m not, I’m not suggesting anything that should change. The IAFF should certainly independently study this. I believe they are. And they should certainly have independent experts look at this. Ah, if they discover the same thing we discover then they’re going to have to turn that aircraft carrier. And they’re gonna have to make a change. And that’s going to be slow and expensive and it’s going to cost money that somebody doesn’t have and it’s gonna be on of those things your gonna have to phase in, it’s not all gonna disappear overnight. I think there can be a right thing to do, and I think any agency, IAFF included can make the right choice.
If they’re slow to do so, then it’s going to come at the sake, what happens to - if this is, as I say getting into firefighters — and it’s only one option, but it’s one of the ones thatI’m worried about, you should have the pressure to keep it up and look at it. Ah, but then when you get the results, and you’ll have all sorts of companies offer you contrary results, but look where they’re coming from, and then do an independent test yourselves. IAFF will do that, I know that they will do that, and the government agencies, the NIOSH and people like that, will do a thorough study and that result when it comes out…
So what I’m offering right now is the companies themselves to say, “ well, I wonder if”… and lo and behold, one of the companies has already gone ahead and made a textile that’s NFPA compliant that is available now. So that means the gear manufacturers could start using that textile and be ahead of the curve, and you know, I think that would be, I have a pretty good prediction in five years all the companies will be making it out of this stuff and they’ll be, “ oh yeah, we led the charge, we wanted to do that”.
At the moment it looks like a cost or a threat, when I think it really is an opportunity if you put it in business language, and if you parse it that way then we’re doing them a favor by warning them it’s coming. Unfortunately, I want to do it before we get more cancers out there. And if this is related to any of them then that’s my first responsibility, is back to the firefighters who told me about this. And that’s what I’m doing.
ANDY: Diane, you’ve been met with opposition with your approach to the IAFF in trying to point this out to them and bring.. and shine some more light on this. Ah so can you tell me a little about that experience?
DIANE: Sure, it was back in 2017 that our efforts brought this to light in Worcester, and one of our followers in our pages, Fall River, Local 1314 President Jason Burns, he was told by the Professional Firefighters of Massachusetts President to bring it the legislative week in DC, and it was met with shock and awe. And that was in 2017. It’s now 4 years later and the climate between the IAFF and myself has grown very cold. I am boxing regularly for recognition, for urgency in this issue, because this is a known carcinogen. Why would we not take immediate risks, what are we waiting for? This is something that you can’t see, but it’s right there at your fingertips, so why would we not mitigate this risk four years ago? Why are we still wringing our hands and you know, seeking new studies? I’m literally aghast at the lack of effort from our institutions to at least put out a safety alert for precautions. They’ve already done this in Europe four years ago.
In my findings, in my research, when I first began this I never in a million years thought that I would be looking at this with such cynicism. Because when I first looked into it, I thought I’ve gotta be wrong, and I did the research to prove myself wrong, but, that never happened, I kept opening up door after door, and I was finding what I call the ‘CEO circle dance’ where you got the vice president of Chemours, who you know sits on the board of directors of the NFPA, who you know happens to work his way up through DuPont’s PPE divisions. So these are people that know what firefighters are going through. And so many discoveries we’ve had discussions when we first learned about what Graham found which was a precursor, am I okay to talk about this Graham? (Graham nods) Graham found a precursor that forms PFOA in hours to days. So while we’re getting information you know from Lion Gear that’s saying that they no longer use PFOA or PFOS what they’re not saying is that they have been made aware just by the generosity of Graham, who has instructed them that he found a precursor that is forming PFOA — now that’s your know carcinogen, were’ not even talking about PFAS Soup, but this PFOA is forming the known carcinogen on your gear in hours to days. So you see what industry has done is they’re playing on our ignorance so to speak, to send out documents that say the um (holding Milliken White Paper) new C6 monomers are ten times less toxic than PFOA. Yay !!! You know, ten times less toxic! That’s wonderful. So these are the things that I combat daily with IAFF, NFPA, IAFC, National Volunteer Fire Council. I don’t want to drag Graham into this by any way shape or means, but we are, I’m adamant that you should of had safety alerts four years ago. For handling, for disposal, for hand to mouth, for your children, um, because we knew that it was there. And we’ve had to do our own study to find that truth for you, when these manufacturers know that it was there and I can’t tell you the lengths of discoveries that we’ve made about the manufacturers, but they have gone so far as to petition California to not put PFOA on the Prop 65 labels. You no longer have ‘warning labels’ on your turnout gear, you have ‘product labels’, and that’s because the manufacturers lobbied for and won the right to not put ‘warning labels’, specifically in PPE , those manufacturers then took that to NFPA and voted that in. (1996)
ANDY: It’s, it’s crazy. You mentioned California. If anybody’s gonna lead the charge to clean this up I would bet on California being the state. But outside of our country, ah you mentioned internationally, and I don’t mean the International, the IAFF, I mean internationally other countries, they are operating with turnout gear that does not include these toxins, from your research?
DIANE: No, they had um, the European Chemical Agency gave the manufacturers until 2020 to produce turnout gear with no more than 25 parts per billion PFOA. So the manufacturers can say to you that, just like here (holding Lion Gear Statement All You Need to know About PFOA), that they produced it with no PFOA, but I think our nuclear physicist would be wondering what else is in there then if it’s not PFOA.
You see we can’t be ignorant we have to understand that PFOA is not the only chemical that’s charming us. So when we have Lion and Milliken and Ten Cate telling us they not longer use PFOA, we, we should not feel safe about that. We should be asking, “what’s the PFAS soup you’re using?”. Cause these are endocrine disruptors, and that’s, you know, Paul and I have, our world has changed now, after prostate cancer. We’ve opened up many discussions with firefighters, male and female, who have endocrine-disrupting diseases, um, you know, relative to reproductive organs, this is a very real concern, and I’m telling you, it’s life-changing and you don’t want to get that message. So if I had known 25 years ago that my husband was going to be wearing turnout gear that had a known reproductive um harm to it, do you think I would of let him do that? Absolutely not, no way.
ANDY: Yup, and you mentioned the 25 parts per billion standard. That’s also part of this OEKO-Tex so OEKO Tex that you were telling me a little about before. Can you, can you briefly give a little bit more, and I’m gonna put a link in the description for this episode so others can go and see the article you linked to me.
DIANE: I’m so glad you asked that Andy, cause OEKO-Tex is what’s being touted by manufacturers, one of which is Lion, that their turnout gear adheres to the OEKO-Tex standard of 25 parts per billion, no more than 25 parts per billion PFOA. I want you to know, that is not a health standard. That came about from the European Chemical Agency demanding that the manufacturers prevision guidelines for limits of PFOA in turnout gear. Your manufacturers when to them (ECHA) and said, no we want to derogate turnout gear completely, we don’t even want them (FF PPE) to be on the list. So you know, the hell with the firefighters, you know we don’t want this turnout gear to be on your list of products that need to have limits. European Chemical Agency said ‘no way’ — ‘too dangerous’ — ‘you’re gonna have to set your limit at 2 parts per billion’. In 2014 the manufacturers were able to petition as stakeholders and write 200 pages of comments, which I’ve read them all, multiple times, about their reasons for why they can not make turnout gear with less than 25 parts per billion PFOA.
So it’s an industry compromise, it’s not a health standard, and we again — we have got to be smarter than this. I mean you know we’ve really got to understand that um we’re being fed a industry dialog and while recently in September of 2019, we had the House Oversight Hearing which was conducted by Rep Harley Rouda and he questioned the CEO’s of DuPont, Chemours, and 3M. Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz asked them, “what is your recourse for your firefighters and veterans that have been harmed by these PFAS chemicals. And none of them responded and she said, “how can you sleep at night?”.
Well, three weeks earlier they were at the IAFF safety summit, ah, cancer summit, as our silver sponsors. So something is very, very wrong here.
And Paul and I and Doctor Peaslee have been working with Participant Media. and they’re spotlighting the issue for firefighters PFAS exposure. If you know who Robert Bilott is, he’s the environmental attorney that found the PFOA. Because he’s from Ohio, and that’s where this was discovered. Rob Bilott discovered this chemical called PFOA after reading I think a hundred thousand pages of documents um, and he’s truly our hero. Because he’s now fighting for the fire service since 2017 he’s been demanding testing and studies for firefighters.
Paul and I were, were grateful enough to be asked by Participant Media to come to Washington DC and lobby with Mark Ruffalo and Doctor Peaslee is one of the ambassadors for the movie Dark Waters, and we were able to give our discussion.
And we urge everybody to go to fightforeverchemicals.com and sign up because very soon with the release of Graham’s paper we’re (fire service) going to be the spotlight again for Participant Media.
ANDY: It’s all crazy. You mention the movie Dark Waters and it’s all — this all feels like a movie, ah it feels like a giant cover-up, conspiracy, you know — people with care and compassion trying to just say, “listen stop being in denial, I don’t expect you to fix it by tomorrow, just acknowledge that you’re even doing this”, and they won't even do that….Ah so it’s really, it’s sad, it’s scary, um it certainly pertains to our profession but as you guys were both alluding to it extends way beyond that, it’s everyday people, it’s nature, in general, being affected by this. It’s crazy.
Is there a quick solution, we already have all this gear, is it something that can be scrubbed and cleaned and then just reapply with some other less toxic substance, or is the gear we have with this like, it’s too late, we have to send this out into, into Mars, this is ah, we can’t do anything with this anymore. Is there a quick fix to this?
GRAHAM: Yeah, there's’ no quick fix I’m afraid. The disposal, if we had a cheap shuttle to Mars that would be great, failing that it should be incinerated as toxic waste, but that’s not gonna happen because that costs money. So it’s gonna be hard to — hard to come up to a good solution to this. Putting it in a landfill isn’t a good one, it’s just transferring it to 30 years later, so your children will have it. And, so I think that some of the states are beginning to look at this in terms of AFFF. Wisconsin just passed a law, Michigan got a call back with it, where they’re bringing back old AFFF.
Nobody's talked about the gear yet, cause it’s much heavier it’s much more expensive to get rid of. And so who’s gonna bear that cost? I have my nominees of who should, but at the moment we don’t have anybody who’s gonna do that. And so I think the answer is to educate and to get everybody on board and ask the questions you're asking Andy.
Ask them of manufacturers, ask them of IAFF, and they’re gonna hear it. I hope that all these studies will show that there’s no risk to the firefighter but I already know from my own study that’s not true. So I think that we’re gonna see other people come up with it and then it’s just you know, what can firefighters do — operating procedures to help minimize their exposure. And you know it’s as simple as this coronavirus coming, washing your hands more often. That’s a good starting preventative, but it’s not the only one and it’s not gonna stop it.
I think we need to think long term, ‘how did we get into this situation and how did we manufacture these things in the first place?’ We didn’t have our eyes open. I think that’s the issue.
ANDY: Listen we make a lot of jokes in life, sarcastically like, ‘what are you a brain surgeon’ — ‘what are you a nuclear physicist’? I never thought I’d be interviewing a nuclear physicist, ah but here we are and you are from a prestigious — everybody knows Notre Dame, ah obviously mostly for football right! But this is one of the premier universities, and you are a nuclear physicist at one of these premier universities so I am eternally grateful for you giving me the time. I know Diane had something more she wanted to mention. But I want to keep this to right about where we are and hopefully brought this into the light. I’m gonna put some links into this episode as well — hopefully people will check out more on their own of your guys both work, is there anything you’d like to promote ah Doctor Peaslee?
GRAHAM: At this point I’d like to just thank you, Andy, for both your service to the community but also to this show and getting the word out. I think it’s an important job and you’re doing it. Thank You.
ANDY: No problem and thank you for your time. And Diane and Paul, I know you had a couple more things you wanted to get in, so, by all means, the floor is yours and I want to thank you guys for even, for making this as visible as it is. I know there’s a lot more work to be done for this but we wouldn’t even be to this stage without your efforts so I want to thank you and commend you for that. Please tell everybody what else…
DIANE: Thank you Andy, we just want to let everyone know Graham will be at FDIC and follow the chronology of events on our webpage called, www.yourturnoutgearandpfoa.com and we have a lot of fun on Twitter too.
ANDY: Yes, you go after IAFF a lot and that definitely appeals to some people listening to this episode. So keep going on with it. I will put links to all this like I said in the show notes. Listen, this is a very important topic for, not just firefighters for military, for the environment itself. You know Doctor Peaslee mentioned how this affects — how ignoring the problem is just gonna pass it on to the next generation so get more active in what you know with this and don’t be left in the dark. Great name for that movie Dark Waters.
And Paul you’ve been quiet this whole time but this really started because of you and the battle you had to go with fighting the prostate cancer and once again I’m happy that you’re in remission from that and seem to be recovered. Thank you for your service. You’d be one of my senior guys, and ah I appreciate your coming on. What’s been your whole experience with this?
PAUL: You know not being on the job anymore. That was a big kick in the pants, you know just .. watching this work progress. The work Diane’s done, its pretty eye-opening. Makes you think about what you thought was one way and it’s actually the other way. Um, We just want to make changes for the future generations of firefighters.
“Here’s a known carcinogen right in front of us You know, that we can something about, and we should do something about it.”
dc 3.16.2020