The U.S. military is poisoning Okinawa | Hacker News Reader

The U.S. military is poisoning Okinawa

militarypoisons.org

258 pointsVagueMag97 comments

It’s also a big problem in communities surrounding domestic USA bases. I live in a community with an Air Force base. They tested the groundwater after a cluster of cancer cases appeared in graduates of the local high school. The PFAS levels were off the charts

I’ve been hearing a lot of those “If you or a loved one have been affected…” style of commercials lately talking about Camp Lejeune some decades ago.

Likewise, but spam email. Am currently getting even more spam about Camp Lejeune than even the "you've been awarded $10 million" messages.

What do military bases do specifically causing this contamination?

They would do firefighting training using foams that contained carcinogenic PFAS compounds. PFAS are extremely persistent, both in the environment and in the body. Apart from the risk from direct contact with the foams, it also would accumulate in the ground and then leech into groundwater, rivers, streams, oceans etc. so gets into local water and food supply. These foams were a problem in civilian airports too but not to the same extent as military.

Also in a lot of ways the military just seems to have safety standards a few decades behind everyone else. Various fuels, solvents and lubricants they use for aircraft etc. also contain carcinogenic compounds, and they just seem to have a history of never disposing of them properly (an example is the burn pits in Afghanistan where they would just dig big holes and burn toxic solvents along with plastic waste etc. in the air, causing huge health problems and many deaths for a lot of veterans).

Isn't ironic that we can clone, copy and made a cheaper replacement of any real product in the planet in a couple of weeks, except those who really would benefit of that treatment?

Why is not the government making a lower quality, cheaper foam to use in those training seasons that does not cause cancer? That would save a lot of money.

Or just buying their training foam from Amazon...

> military just seems to have safety standards a few decades behind everyone else

I suspect they have the same standards as most industry. They just have a ton of exceptions and other get-out clauses in the form of national safety arguements.

These arguements will fall off steadily as new materials/techniques become commonplace, it becomes shown that the risks don't justify the supposed national safety benefits, or (in the case of bases on foreign soil) relevant treatises come into effect, so safety procedures will be seen to "catch up".

Though sometimes on top of "national security" reasons there is also the "who will know until far too late if ever" thinking to contend with…

As a veteran, I can confirm they have the same or standards as industry, or better. However, they also waive a lot of those standards.

So the problem is lack of enforcement, rather than lack of standards? What good does having a standard do if it's not consistently applied?

> So the problem is lack of enforcement, rather than lack of standards?

Essentially, yes.

> What good does having a standard do if it's not consistently applied?

They are quiet standards than the military, having the standard generally is a good thing. A military base in, local it in foreign soil, being able to exempt themselves from the standard doesn't make it a bad standard for everyone else to follow. "If captain Billy put his head in a fire, would you?" and all that.

Also if the standards are eventually applied as the exemptions stop working for one reason or another, they do their job eventually which is more often than not better than never.

If you don't give a shit about some "standards" it doesn't really make sense that you "have these standards".

I'm not saying they are right to do things that way, just that it would appear that they do do things that way.

My first job in 1987 was with the Australian Department of Defence and as I recall in this country, they are explicitly exempted from environmental laws governing everyone else. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this is true in most countries.

They didn't just burn plastic waste and solvents in the burn pits; they burned everything: even hundreds of brand new iPads and other electronics.

They did burn all their rubbish yes (though I hadn’t heard of them burning new electronics! That’s crazy!). I was just highlighting the particularly nasty stuff, but there was also organic and even human waste burned.

Yes, there were so many unnecessary electronics that defense contractors convinced the Army they needed to bring to Afghanistan. Commanders never tied them in to their operating procedures so they went unused. When it came time to close the outpost shipping was not an option so EVERYTHING had to be burned.

source?

Search for "military burn pits" and you'll learn a lot about them. Wikipedia is also a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_pit

People I talked to that did the burning

I was wondering the same thing. I found this in a guardian article

> The military’s firefighters use aqueous film-forming foam, or AFFF, which contains extremely high levels of PFAS, in training exercises and emergencies. Though AFFF is effective, it has led to widespread contamination around bases and airports, and Congress just mandated the military check for PFAS pollution at 700 facilities while earmarking $571m for cleanup, though observers say the cost will likely be much higher.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/06/military-bas...

I used to live on Treasure Island, a former naval base in San Francisco. It turns out my former house contained radioactive from atomic weapons testing in the Pacific. That explains my third arm.

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/navy-finds-radiation-i...

How is Treasure Island? I wanted to live there, but everyone is SF said “don’t.”

Apparently it’s an ugly, post-industrial sewage pit populated by an extremist anti-male lesbian commune, and Coastguardsmen receiving hazard pay.

I figured it was just local prejudice, but there’s some truth to the myth?

I believe they routinely dump large quantities of PFAS based chemicals onto runways for whatever reason, then let it run down storm drains.

The article mentions that "health activists" have been denied access to the bases, I don't think it's too much to imagine that Japanese authorities could also be facing significant bureaucratic hurdles to gain access and actually determine the source of pollution.

They give an example of both military and civilian firefighters doing training that involve using a lot of fire-suppressing foam. These foams contain carcinogenic compounds that can be washed into the groundwater by rain.

In Denmark we have recently had just that happen to people living near firefighter training grounds [link]

link (machine translated since I couldn't find anything in english): https://www-dr-dk.translate.goog/nyheder/indland/store-maeng...

No idea specifically with PFAS, but in general, military installations are used for military training, which has many of the same pollution properties of an actual war. Spent rounds, links, casings for missiles, rockets, tank rounds, exploded C4, spilled fuel and lubricants. A great deal of effort goes into cleaning up after exercises, but you're never going to get it all. This is at least part of the reason training areas tend to be fairly isolated and remote and ideally nowhere near the water source for a human population. But also why the military has a pretty consistent history of settlement awards for raising cancer rates in at least the families of the personnel themselves who have no choice but to live there.

Fuels and other petroleum fluids, which military bases use a lot of. Munitions, munition byproducts, biowaste, various other fluids such as carcinogenic firefighter fluids, aircraft engines, tank engines, we would run internal combustion engines (generators, HVAC, misc) like there was no tomorrow because fuel was effectively free. Those are just the stuff I can think of off the top of my head, but I keep coming up with more so I’ll stop writing now.

Don’t ever live on or near a decommissioned military base.

I would hope that the Standard Operating Practise is adapted to local conditions, and that this sort of thing would not happen next to urban areas, but a good example of the typical mindset:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKNfFm0QDXQ

Btw, this is from a Youtube channel of an Emergency medic. It's sort of Doctor House, but with real cases. He makes his videos to attract attention to certain things, so that people don't end up in the emergency ward. Highly recommend.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/25/us-mil...

David Bond has a series of articles about things like this.

And moreover why does America have to poke its nose into other countries and establish military bases there?

It goes all the way back to WW2. Japan was playing for the wrong team and that team lost. Since then Japan is effectively a vassal of the US.

But don't Americans have any shame for wiping out so many innocent lives in the nuclear bombings, yet still have the audacity to make Japan their vassal state?

It was not particularly to empathize with Imperial Japan of all places. Saying they didn't treat people kindly was the understatement of the (20th) century.

Firefighting foams

What's wrong with water?

I though this was "common knowledge" but here goes.

There are different class fire extinguishers depending on what is on fire.

https://vanguard-fire.com/what-are-the-5-different-classes-o...

You cant use water on any sort of "gas" fire because the gas (airplane fuel, etc) will simply float on top of the water and remain on fire. Throwing water on it can actually help it spread as well.

In recent fire truck vs airplane crash on the airport they used water and it seem to worked well.

We're talking about open air fire treated with carcinogenic foam in large quantities where 1m+ large flakes land in somebody's private garden.

Water alone:

https://youtu.be/3ZKBBtwNaRI

Water with foaming agent:

https://youtu.be/WVOmm4Fw6hc

Same reason you're not supposed to extinguish an oil fire in your frying pan by splashing water on it.

it doesn't foam

Part of why the US now fully acknowledges Area 51 (more or less) is lawsuits by former workers over cancers and other conditions caused by exposure to toxic materials.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/area-51-secre...

How did the community respond? And did the base start cleaning up its operations?

Do you think only "USA" bases have problems?

Like why would only US air force bases have this problem? Do other countries use eco-friendly / biodegradable materials on their bases?

Edit: This is not to say I think it's "OK" that this is happening, I feel the USA should strive to be way better than this, I just doubt this happens on American bases only.

Edit 2: Little bit surprised and disappointed about the down votes, I'm not trying to discount this is an American base, but if the issue is these use of toxic chemicals used in things likefirefighting exercises, it's happening everywhere in the world and should be stopped?

It might be a common problem to all air forces around the world but how many other countries have so many air bases around the world? I guess that no Japanese ever complained about the environmental impact of an Italian or French air force base in Okinawa.

Don’t be surprised by the downvotes. There seems to be a little bit of the “USA BAD” vibe here right now ~ especially in terms of the military. The US does seem to emphasize training and preparedness over simply having equipment which could lead to higher relative levels of contamination when compared to other militaries. I’m not sure if that is the case, but I recall the training differences being considered a factor when evaluating operational challenges (for example Saddam’s iraqi troops vs Cold War Soviets in the same equipment and situation ~ the Soviets would be expected to present a significantly harder challenge just by virtue of better training ~ at least in theory)

I guess if what you're saying is true, they can replace the foam with water or similar for the majority of training.

But that is the point of training - water is not foam. You have never used foam before if you used water for your foam training. You have no experience.

Maybe a substance with similar foamy propertoes but no pfas? Idk the answer

For anyone else who didn't have a clue what PFAS were, an Australian Department of Defence website gives a nice 101: https://defence.gov.au/Environment/pfas/pfas.asp

Key points:

> PFAS stands for per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances

> Legacy firefighting foams containing perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) as active ingredients were once used extensively worldwide and within Australia, including at Defence bases, due to their effectiveness in fighting liquid fuel fires.

> In 2004 Defence commenced phasing out its use of legacy firefighting foam containing PFOS and PFOA as active ingredients and transitioned to a more environmentally safe product.

> The release of PFAS into the environment has become a concern, because we’ve learned these chemicals can persist in humans, animals and the environment.

The Okinawans vote against military bases are ignored:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Okinawan_referendum

I spent 4 years stationed at Camp Hansen, Okinawa and I'm not sure that represents the majority of Okinawans. Anecdotally, the rare protest was extremely tiny, like less than 20 people, and I've never had a negative interaction. I often yearn to return because the place was so lovely and friendly.

> I spent 4 years stationed at Camp Hansen, Okinawa and I'm not sure that represents the majority of Okinawans. Anecdotally, the rare protest was extremely tiny, like less than 20 people, and I've never had a negative interaction. I often yearn to return because the place was so lovely and friendly.

Huh? You're concluding that the vote was not representative because you didn't see a lot of protestors and Okinawans are friendly?

> I'm not sure that represents the majority of Okinawans.

Are you suggesting that the poll was rigged?

According to Wikipedia, 434k opposed, 115k supported, and 548k eligible voters haven't participated. Unless the poll was rigged, it's technically possible but highly unlikely that the majority of Okinawans actually supported building the US base at Henoko.

That's survivor's bias. You've interacted with people who wanted to interact with you and thus seemed (and probably were) friendly.

>I spent 4 years stationed at Camp Hansen, Okinawa and I'm not sure that represents the majority of Okinawans.

Were you allowed to leave the base or did you overlap with the period they raped too many people and were not allowed to leave after certain hours?

(I had someone think they could fight me and I'd have no recourse because I was a bald American when I visited, then rapidly make friends when I said hey, I don't like those jerks either, this isn't Saudi Arabia, let them sit in a Japanese prison for two weeks then be put on trial if they abuse the locals.)

Maybe you should listen when people repeatedly state a boundary.

(And I'm not saying you, personally, are a rapist... just that a small number of people are, combined with coworkers who excuse that behavior by refusing to deal with the pattern of behavior paired with refusing to honor the wishes of the democracy hosting their base.)

That was a response of the commands in Okinawa, not an ask from the Japanese government.

Much of the activism against Okinawa gets overruled at the national level by a Japanese government that wants the United States presence, and this is problematic,because Okinawa is much, much poorer than the rest of the country.

>That was a response of the commands in Okinawa, not an ask from the Japanese government. Much of the activism against Okinawa gets overruled at the national level by a Japanese government that wants the United States presence

Why does this small set of people want them there? I thought much of this was leftover from WWII -- but for whatever reason the Germans atoned and were given autonomy and the Japanese kept being weird about their war crimes and thus had some kind of constitutional obligation to only maintain a "self defense force"?

That's not the same as "wanting" an ally around the way folks up in Ontario might not mind if the PA national guard is willing to help out if the Russians start fucking around.

>Okinawa is much, much poorer than the rest of the country.

Maybe because they suffer discrimination in employment on the main island?

(That's what I was told happens, by multiple highly educated people who frankly had more skill than me in their respective fields compared to myself at their age.)

Ehh, the degree to which both the US and the Japanese government maintained the idea of "self defense force" is extremely fictional.

Their helicopter destroyers can and do launch jets.

A lot of realpolitik here that doesn't quite fit into the typical narratives people from a Western viewpoint want to use to drive their ideological point

Your post is dishonest the vote was against a specific landfill project.

That vote was about a specific project, there was an earlier more general one that is also discussed in the linked article. Or see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Okinawan_referendum

A specific landfill project to... what?

> The referendum asked whether voters approved or opposed the landfill work at Henoko Bay for the construction of a new United States Marine Corps base.

Can you explain how this is dishonest?

dishonest?

the US does know how to split communities, they weren't stupid when they chose Okinawa

i'm pretty sure in the future Okinawa will be the Taiwan of Japan

i'd bet all my savings

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

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/abe-ignores-cont...

> the US does know how to split communities, they weren't stupid when they chose Okinawa

> i'm pretty sure in the future Okinawa will be the Taiwan of Japan

> i'd bet all my savings

Let me get this straight. You think that the US occupied Okinawa until 1972 and then returned it to Japan, only to then decide to play 12 dimensional chess by intentionally antagonizing okinawans and making them hate the us by all the problems they've caused with their military presence, so that Okinawa will some day split from japan and... do what?

Because they sure as hell aren't going to want to have anything to do with the US. Maybe they'll become a vassal state of China again like under the Ryukyu kingdom? I'm not sure that outcome would show that the US wasn't stupid.

This is a PFAS issue more than a military issue. The people who manufactured PFAS and the regulators who approved the use of PFAS need to be held to account.

Not really. The dangers of PFAS have been known for quite a while. Most have stopped using it long ago.

I thought that too. There is a video by John Oliver talking about PFAS and the other hundred or so variants of these compounds. [1] There are other videos talking about how companies can still use these compounds because the EPA only outlawed about 3 of the 130 or so.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W74aeuqsiU [video]

> Most have stopped using it long ago.

This isn't really true.

This is strange logic, if you know something is bad, but you approve it's use anyway, you're in the wrong.

PFAS is not a single chemical. It's an entire family of chemicals and eliminating them destroys a lot of modern society as they're used for literally everything. There's basically no way they're all getting banned. Some of the worst are getting banned, but that's it.

PFAS have been used for almost a century, just long enough to figure out which ones need to be more regulated. Is certainly a trade off because they have superior safety properties in terms of fire mitigation.

Medical science has not figured out a way to rid these chemicals from our bodies... They can install municipal and private water filters. They can stop using nonstick pans and they can rid their homes of consumer items that contain the chemicals.

From: https://www.epa.gov/pfas/meaningful-and-achievable-steps-you...

If possible, consider using an alternate water source for drinking, preparing food, cooking, brushing teeth, preparing baby formula, and any other activity when your family might swallow water. Consider installing an in-home water treatment (e.g., filters) that are certified to lower the levels of PFAS in your water.

We've poisoned our entire planet. These things are everywhere, which is in no way intended to minimize or dismiss the complaints of people in Okinawa. But there is no one who shouldn't be wondering how to reduce their exposure to these persistent chemicals known to negatively impact health and which current medical science doesn't know how to get out of us once they get into us.

Every air field in the world that had fire drills in the last 50 years have PFAS in the surrounding environment.

It’s extremely hard to clean out, although not impossible. Using certain plants to collect the PFAS from water, then harvesting and incinerating them has been shown to work.

I’m assuming there is no current use of PFAS in these bases now. The economic responsibility for cleanup and compensation is of course with the US.

Unfortunately, Incinerating sounds like a way to release PFAS or some sort of breakdown of them into other (perhaps similar or worse) chemicals, into the air. At which point, they will float and disperse and likely fall back onto/into the land or water.

I imagine they're a colloid in water. And so perhaps they precipitate out of air (vapor?) and into land/water.

The article states that the US even denies it and interfers when the local government wants to investigate.

Absolutely despicable, well on form for the US.

Isn't the U.S. military also poisoning the citizens of Puerto Rico?

Don't you mean the citizens of the United States? They might be residents of Puerto Rico, but according to law they are citizens of the US.

> All persons born in Puerto Rico on or after April 11, 1899, and prior to January 13, 1941, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, residing on January 13, 1941, in Puerto Rico or other territory over which the United States exercises rights of sovereignty and not citizens of the United States under any other Act, are declared to be citizens of the United States as of January 13, 1941. All persons born in Puerto Rico on or after January 13, 1941, and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, are citizens of the United States at birth.

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...

Edit: Sorry, I realized now that "citizen" has two meanings, one of legal status and one meaning just "residing in". I'm assuming you meant the latter while I only knew of the first one before.

I'm sorry, I should have phrased my comment more carefully. I never meant to insinuate that Puerto Ricans aren't United States citizens. I was only pointing out that the U.S. military has been poisoning Puerto Ricans by way of unregulated hazardous waste burns and the widespread use of depleted uranium during wargames for decades, generations.

. . . and the residents near Pearl Harbour, Hawaii thanks to the Navy’s massive fuel tank facility sunk into the mountains there.

On the up side it is finally being closed, on the down side it's been leaking for decades.

It's basically poisoning anywhere where it has presence (see camp lejeune lawsuits for a recently litigated example)

What I find most disturbing is not the mistakes we make as humans, but the mental gymnastics we use to avoid actually dealing with problems.

An article posted yesterday on the "Impotence of cleverness" (by Alexander Stern: I was very impressed by it) got me thinking about the curse intelligence really is. Many smart people I know are masters of self-deception, rationalisation, avoidance, whataboutism, oh-dearism...

For each shameful act and horror we have quick clever answers, by appeal to "reasons"; process, policy, necessity, authority, security, tradition... and we use those to construct a tolerance of misbehaviour. We feel prouder of that tolerance, - a shield against hopelessness - and our ability to explain-away problems, than of our willingness to challenge them. If only people could apply this intellectual force to radical scepticism and freethinking needed to break out of destructive cycles.

I'm wondering if they are also poisoning the area around the German bases.

It's interesting looking at the contrast between the comments on this thread and the one about Iran abolishing morality police.

Other thread : "yeaaah it's an empty gesture"

This thread: "yeaaah we know"

Okinawa is roughly 100 km long and 10 km wide with a surface area of 1.200 km², so not sure I'd call it "tiny".

Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake is 651,739 acres. Military land use is large.

To reference China Lake's land use as if it were anything remotely close to the median military installation is outright absurd and disingenuous at best.

Fort Bragg is 163,000 acres.

Military bases and ranges are big.

...which is atypically large even for the Army because of the sheer number of tenants it now supports after 2005 BRAC consolidation, including Pope AFB, and yet still relatively small land-wise compared to China Lake supporting ~10% the personnel.

I'm not denying that military bases aren't large---although I'd be willing to argue that the land is used quite inefficiently---but trying to pass the Navy's single largest weapons test range, or the Army's consolidation of 3 bases into 1 as somehow representative of the median is absurd.

The land use is efficient for military purposes.

Firing ranging as defensive depth and simply space to keep people, eyes and ears away from training and equipment.

There are military installations in urban areas that use space effectively but a big spread out base is effective for its intended purpose of preparing to wage war.

It's not atypically large, it's not even up to the mean army base size, which is 189,000 acres: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56231

It's happening not only Okinawa but anywhere around the U.S. military bases in Japan.

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20221124/k10013899691000.ht...

I heard a rumor the true source of the weirdness around Area 51 was if they admitted folks had been there, they'd be admitting they'd been exposed to certain chemicals rather than the weirdness around UFOs.

(There are other places to test aircraft that Alex Jones won't wander into with a video camera.)

At least they’ll get clean water when they visit Hawai’i. Oh wait https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hawaii-water-navy-investigati...

same here in Italy, especially in Sardinia

Which base is near Sardinia?

(I believe you, I just want to read more.)

La Maddalena.

Thanks, I'll look into it, but my member of Congress is useless, so forgive me if I don't send them an email based on what I find :-)

Edit: I only found the island so far -- looks like they didn't renew the lease? That's on stripes, not Wikipedia, which only has an entry for the local area and says:

>In 1943, during World War II, Benito Mussolini was briefly held prisoner here.

What a wonderful piece of history, you're so blessed to live in a place that did such wonderful things -- sorry the US military may have literally shit it up. (For lack of better phrasing.)

[1] https://www.stripes.com/news/la-maddalena-says-goodbye-to-ba...

The "snowflake"... how did it get there?

I've been to Okinawa, they have legitimate complaints about a variety of behaviors emanating from the base.

Sadly, those complaints are often selectively boosted when it benefits others, rather than out of sincere concern for fellow man.

(Sorry I walked into your booth and bummed a cigarette, if you can read this. That was rude.)

PS: The site was failing to load, so I am including a Wayback link in case anyone else encounters a similar issue:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221202225620/https://www.milit...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com