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Comment by hu3 | Hacker News Reader

This is really bad. Most bad things in life are reversible but this degree of health damage isn't.

May everyone responsible for this be exemplarily punished to deter this kind of disregard for human life from happening again.

> Since then, the Defense Department has admitted that it allowed a firefighting foam to slip into at least 55 drinking water systems at military bases around the globe, sometimes for generations. This exposed tens of thousands of Americans, possibly many more, to per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a group of man-made chemicals known as PFAS that have been linked to cancers, immune suppression and other serious health problems.

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They will not be punished. They never are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Flats_Plant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_...

The "problems" kill people. From the governments perspective this soft, civilian side, collateral damage is a required cost of our military machine. Inside of the military you have no real chance unless it is egregious beyond comprehension to ever get any kind of remedy.

The government will poison you and your family and then look at you with dead eyes and pat your survivors on the head and tell you to move on. EVERY one of those sites have a history of medical issues in the nearby community. A little "light" water table poisoning is nothing to the government if people can't pursue the vast history and documented scope of nuclear weapons production poisoning people.

Unfortunately we have an issue where we don't learn until the effects become unbearable. The sad part is that the effects that we're inducing on the environment are largely undoable. When we finally learn our lesson and decide that money and power shouldn't be able to override not just local health, but global health, it'll be too late and we'll just need to learn to live with the shitty world we've left for ourselves.

This isn't just the military. Corporations rarely are held 100% accountable for the damage they do. The only person who cares about individuals are individuals.

It's important to note that 'the government' you mention, is doing the poisoning, is actually through private companies.

True. But they gained tremendous protection via the govt. There is at least a small chance a company is fined if they do something egregious. (Exxon Valdez). It is rare though.

One of my favorite things about NYC are the quarterly water resevoir updates. They test constantly (more than bottled water is required to) and release detailed reports about the state of things [0]

Not only that but they'll send you water bottles to fill up and then test your water for lead and give you results which is neat too.

The United States as a whole has done some incredible things in regards to air quality, and water quality. We should keep it up. Travesties like these and Flint are not okay.

[0]-https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/drinking_water/wsstate.sh...

How do you know that this testing isn't anything other than a facade?

Where I live, they do the same thing. You get a water quality report in the mail a couple of times a year. However the level of the one thing that's most likely to be a problem here (PCBs) is not included.

The curious thing is, it takes a lot of money to train military personnel. You’d think the military would hesitate to inflict an injury on itself such as this. If a terrorist organization did this then the USA would go to war.

Personnel doesn't last long, no more than ~10 years for infantry. So if the damage doesn't impede combat function over the expected useful lifetime of the person...

+1, I actually had a Lt. Col. use the same math on me when one of my Marines was worried about chemical exposure.

What year was this?

When I was a kid, every year the firefighting department would flush a meadow full of that foam, for all the kids to play in.

Oh well.

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