TX Observer: “Not everything came up rosy. The war in Vietnam threw its shadow over those early years in Texas. In 1967, a year after they moved to Universal City, a fire consumed the USS Forrestal. The aircraft carrier was stalking Vietnam’s north shore, preparing to attack. Aboard the vessel, young Navy ensign John McCain readied for combat in an A-4 Skyhawk fighter jet. Then a parked F-4 Phantom launched an errant Zuni rocket that struck the Skyhawk’s 400-gallon fuel tank. Petroleum slapped the deck a few feet away from where the future US senator stood. The leaked fuel lit up a path of fire that, in ninety seconds, reached parked jets with pilots strapped inside. Officers on foot scrambled for hand-held extinguishers. The CO2 did little more to stop the fire than their own breath would have done. Inferno trapped the pilots inside their planes. Then the flames detonated at least one 1,000-pound bomb, killing the men who were chasing them. The explosion set off a chain of combustions that blew through the length of the 1,091-foot flight deck and sent half the supercarrier to hell. The conflagration burned for at least seventeen hours, killing 134 sailors and injuring hundreds more.
Never again. The Navy joined forces with the company 3M to develop a new aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF) that could stop petroleum fires.
The magic ingredients for the foam were a group of chemicals that had a carbon-fluorine bond—the strongest bond in organic chemistry. Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl chemicals (PFAS) had high electronegativity, low polarizability, and long carbon backbones. These properties made PFAS ideal ingredients for non-stick products. My grandmother didn’t know about PFAS, but she did own Teflon pans and Scotchgard, some of the more famous household items in which PFAS were present….
Among PFAS, this group, called perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAAs), were a powerhouse substance. They were highly chemically and thermally stable. They would become some of the most environmentally persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic PFAS on the planet.”