{"id":129033,"date":"2024-04-19T01:52:31","date_gmt":"2024-04-19T01:52:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/?p=129033"},"modified":"2024-04-19T01:52:34","modified_gmt":"2024-04-19T01:52:34","slug":"forever-chemicals-religion-and-family-tragedy-in-tx","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/?p=129033","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Forever Chemicals,&#8217; Religion, and Family Tragedy in TX"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.texasobserver.org\/pfas-texas-memoir-forever-chemicals\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TX Observer<\/a>: &#8220;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\u00a0<em>Forrestal<\/em>. The aircraft carrier was stalking Vietnam\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 CO<sub>2<\/sub>\u00a0did 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Never again. The Navy joined forces with the company 3M to develop a new aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF) that could stop petroleum fires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The magic ingredients for the foam were a group of chemicals that had a carbon-fluorine bond\u2014the strongest bond in organic chemistry.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/sections\/health-shots\/2024\/04\/10\/1243775736\/epa-pfas-forever-chemicals-drinking-water-limits\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl chemicals (PFAS)<\/a>\u00a0had high electronegativity, low polarizability, and long carbon backbones. These properties made PFAS ideal ingredients for non-stick products. My grandmother didn\u2019t know about PFAS, but she did own Teflon pans and Scotchgard, some of the more famous household items in which PFAS were present&#8230;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Among PFAS, this group, called perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAAs), were a powerhouse substance. They were\u00a0<em>highly\u00a0<\/em>chemically and thermally stable. They would become some of the most environmentally persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic PFAS on the planet.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>TX Observer: &#8220;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\u00a0Forrestal. The aircraft carrier was stalking Vietnam\u2019s north shore, preparing to attack. Aboard the vessel, young Navy ensign John McCain readied&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newsstory"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=129033"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":129034,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129033\/revisions\/129034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=129033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=129033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yellowdogwire.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=129033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}