Brace yourselves as we shed light on the unsettling truths behind PFAS exposure with our esteemed guest, Dr. Graham Peaslee. Not only is he a dedicated professor at the University of Notre Dame, but he has also been actively involved in the fire service for over four years. Together, we venture into his groundbreaking work on identifying PFAS exposure sources from AFFF usage and turnout gear, as well as the compelling documentary, Burned Protect the Protectors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VNM0V-P6pg
Brace yourselves as we shed light on the unsettling truths behind PFAS exposure with our esteemed guest, Dr. Graham Peaslee. Not only is he a dedicated professor at the University of Notre Dame, but he has also been actively involved in the fire service for over four years. Together, we venture into his groundbreaking work on identifying PFAS exposure sources from AFFF usage and turnout gear, as well as the compelling documentary, Burned Protect the Protectors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VNM0V-P6pg
As always, today's podcast is sponsored by Fire Facilities. Makers of reliable all-American steel fire training structures built the way you train Fire facilities, towers, burn rooms and mobile units help you prepare to respond and survive. Welcome back to 3-Point Firefighter. Today's guest is Dr Graham Peasley. Now, Dr Peasley is a professor at the University of Notre Dame who has worked with the fire service for over four years to help remove PFAS exposure sources from both AFFF usage and turnout gear, and you probably know Dr Graham Peasley from the documentary called Burned Protecting the Protectors. I'm going to have a link down in the description and with that, Dr Graham Peasley.
Speaker 2:So there you go. You have my email address too, in case I can't answer them right now, I'll think about it, but I'll get back to you, oh.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that. So see, I'm editing that. I'm going to edit that right there. I'll probably leave it in. So people know I'm an idiot. Pfas is so big right now and everybody's talking about it. I'm a training officer so I get a lot of questions about it and I'm hoping you can help us all tonight. Explain a few things. Now, if I understand correctly, you didn't get started helping us, the firefighters, until about four years ago, right?
Speaker 2:That's about right, maybe pre-pandemic, but about 2018, I'd say Diane Carter contacted me around the end of 2017, early 2018.
Speaker 1:And that leading right into the documentary short film Burned, protect the Protectors. And so I got my wife's making me say this part. By the way, she sent me an article about Burned Protect the Protectors way before it lodged in my head and I actually watched it. So I come home like a typical husband and I said, oh my God, I saw this documentary, dr Graham Peasley, and then Carter, and she just looked at me the whole time. I'm like why are you looking at me like this? She goes. I sent you that article like weeks ago. So when she realized that tonight is the thing she did, tell me. She's like okay, you got to let him know that I try to give you that information earlier than you found it on your own, you think. But whatever, but it's been so big now, and rightfully so, and you've been thrust into the world of the firefighter. Now, before you started with this helping us, did you have any firefighter friends or any reason to be in the fire service area around that what we do?
Speaker 2:Not in terms of academia. I have a distant cousin who was a fire chief back in in the 80s or 90s. I met him he's like a fifth cousin or sixth cousin and I was doing some genealogy and he was in genealogy and I ran into him. He was in Hingham Mass and he was a fire chief and so he talked to me all about the fire services. Then I didn't know much about it and it was very interesting, but that's the only personal connection I have outside of what we've done since. And now I have a million Facebook friends that are firefighters and if I ever, if I ever, met them, I'd probably be friends with most of them. But they're reasonable, reasonable people. But it's just a whole different world, a whole different set of priorities and I understand.
Speaker 2:As soon as I saw this, I said, oh, we got to do something about it, and that's what I've been doing since, and you know it's been remarkable how quickly things have changed. And so that's, I think, the take home messages that, oh, my God, is what we're all going to die.
Speaker 2:But secondly, not soon hopefully- and secondly, the idea is that we can do something about it and the fire services have moved very quickly and I think that's a testament to the people who understood why they needed to and did. And you know the companies are trying to catch up a little bit, but they're, they're getting there. And they are also capable of moving quickly when asked to, and I think that's the, that's the best thing that's come out of this. So go ahead with the questions and we'll start there, and I can talk forever, so let me know.
Speaker 1:No, no, good good. The less talking I have to do, the better. People trust me are not tuning in to hear me, tuning in to hear you. But let's start at the very beginning. Let's start with PFOS. Okay, I'm not even going to attempt to say the name, I'll let you do that. But can you tell me about PFOS and where it, where it is in, in all over, and then kind of bring it down to where it is for us as firefighters?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And first thing I'm going to do is start with a name and we're going to call it PFAS, not PFOS. That's not, that's not my funny, that's not my funny accent, that's just the idea that we're going to talk about more than one of them. There are 12,000 of these blessed things and they are different structurally. That will have numbers and identities. I only know about 200. So I'm I'm I'm light, but there's about 12,000 have been identified and we call the whole category of the whole class of family of chemicals called PFAS, per and polyfluorinated alcohol substances, pfas. And now there is a specific one, just one of those 12,000 is called PFOS, which is what you were saying.
Speaker 2:Pfos, and that's the one that strikes the fire surface as the most because it's in our AFFF, it's in the class B foams and that's now being phased out. And most states, if not all, and those, those are the primary exposure routes we thought firefighters had before I got this study done with textiles, and so that's a very specific one. Pfos. It's a nasty one. It's shown to cause several types of cancer and all sorts of other diseases, but it also is primarily very bio cumulative, so it builds up in bodies. So if you eat food that have been watered with this PFOS in it. It will go into the plants. You'll eat the plants and you'll absorb it from the plants or the fish or whatever you eat that have also been exposed to it. So it bio accumulates and it's persistent, and that's what means it lasts forever.
Speaker 2:So these chemicals as a class have persistence, bio accumulation and toxicity, which is so the triple whammy of bad. They last forever once you make them. They call the forever chemicals. Forever means hundreds, if not thousands of years in the environment. These PFOS, pfoa and then the whole category of PFAS are generally in that category. Several of them are plastics, and you know how long plastics last. They'll last. Out of anything you throw in the trash, the plastic will still be there, and so those are thought to be less dangerous, except that they always are made with all the PFAS. The short chain stuff that we can absorb readily or drink in our drinking water are always there, made with them, and so these polymers that we put into textiles turned out to be oh, they're safe, they're long chain molecules.
Speaker 2:Well, yes and no, if you ate a roll of Teflon tape, it would pass through you. No great LFX, except that all the material that helped make it is still along, this on, attached to these, these foils and other types of materials, these textiles and the textiles were made not of pure fluoromer, fluoroprolimer. They're made of a mixture, and that means they degrade and they do shed a short chain PFAS off them, ones we can measure, and so we're getting into a lot of details, or right away. But the idea is that these chemicals are all manmade. They're all discovered in World War Two or shortly before, and they were used widely ever since the 1960s, when 3M and Dupont, who manufactured them, first discovered that these could be put into all sorts of products, and they went around and tried them, and the very first one that scored a hit was firefighting foam, and that was due to the Navy's need to aircraft carriers caught on fire. A 1967 incident in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Speaker 2:Well it was off the Vietnam War.
Speaker 2:It was not the Gulf of Tonkin, sorry, it was the Vietnam War. It was a John McCain ship that caught fire with somebody dropped live ordinance on the deck and it caught fire and the fire crews responded, but before they could successfully put it out it spread and it hit seven other thousand pound bombs and it took out 124 sailors including the entire fire crew. It's a disaster. The ship didn't sink but it burned for three days till they get enough replacement crews on there to put it out. And it was a big embarrassment, a billion dollar damage to the aircraft carrier not alone, let alone the seven or eight planes they lost. And so that was the same month that the 3M had just developed this new thing called a firefighting foam and they thought this would be better and they responded to the call, and by the end of the year, within three months, the Navy had then articulated that everybody should be using a triple F and the certified three, three percent, six percent, so that would actually put out a fire in a short amount of time.
Speaker 2:And that was the standard for the until 2019, 2020. And the Navy kept on buying it, the Air Force kept on buying it, and they used it every day around the world for that many years. And suddenly we noticed that everybody's blood had this material in it, the PFAS in particular, but also all the PFAS, and so everybody in North America has about five parts per billion in their blood Everybody, everybody, not just firefighters everybody. So this is the tricky part when did that come from? They don't all use AFF, right? A million firefighters do. What is the rest of the 300 million people in the US getting it from?
Speaker 2:Well, they're drinking the water in which the AFF and other products have been washed off into, and so a big study back in the 2000s was they looked at polar bear blood. Polar bears don't use firefighting foam, yet they have the highest amount of their blood. The polar bear was discovered to have 88 parts per billion of PFAS in its blood, and North Americans, the top predator of the mid-latitude, has only got about five. So where the polar bear is getting from it? It's a long-lived chemical. It has a global circulation pattern, so over 30, 40 years it goes towards the poles. That's where the winds blow it and the currents blow it effectively, and so it piles up in the ocean, the oceans where the aircraft carriers have dumped all the foam for years. They just washed off the deck Because they were told it was safe as soap you may have heard that before and so when it went into the ocean it sucked up by little critters, it was eaten by fish, which are eaten by larger fish, which are eaten by seals, which are eaten by polar bears, and that's called bioaccumulation. So we often look at the North and South Pole to see the sentinels as to what sort of persistent chemicals as polluting our planet.
Speaker 2:And these things showed up brightest it can be in the 1990s and 2000s when people started looking and then they said where are they all coming from? And we also noticed at that time that it's in everybody's blood all North Americans. So they started looking through blood banks. They could find without it, and all the blood banks had it in every single blood we have. So the last sample we found without PFAS in it was a Korean War blood bank sample. That's how old it is.
Speaker 2:And so it has spread around the world and it's not just firefighting foam but every other use we have, for it is used on ski waxes, it's used on misuppression systems and machine shops, it's used as a scotch guard on our carpets, it's used in textiles, it's used in cosmetics and it's used everywhere. And so this was the company trying to get it used widely. They succeeded. It's a lot of industries over 200 industries use this chemical. The firefighters were just one that used the most of it in terms of the firefighting foam, and often it was the military firefighters. First they had this. As you know, the military firefighters train more or less once a day if they're on aircraft carrying and even on the bases there's 2,300 bases in the United States, I found out either active or a BRACT, or on reserve bases and joint bases between reserves and active sources. So 2,300 of these things all had PFAS on the side and most of them trained with it.
Speaker 2:So where did all that PFAS end up?
Speaker 2:Well, it ends up getting washed into the groundwater, which then circulates into our irrigation water, circulates into our drinking water and we all end up with it.
Speaker 2:Surprise, it's a little present that we got from these man-made chemicals, and that's why you want to be really careful with forever chemicals, these things that last, the other chemicals that would get out there, like lead, doesn't travel far.
Speaker 2:Well, ones, like rocket fuel, that did travel far. They break down with time and so in a couple of years it sort of microbes eat it and it goes away. Nothing is eating this stuff and it lasts and it gets everywhere. It's soluble, it gets into water. So in many respects this is the largest environmental poisoning that the US has ever faced and it's much larger than the fire services it's. We're going to have studies come out this July and again for the next two years that show is the EPA is doing these studies that some fraction of the country is already drinking this in their water at very high levels or levels that shouldn't be there, and that fraction is not going to be what we thought a couple years ago of 3%. It's going to be more like 20% or 30% or maybe 40% of the country is drinking this stuff and that's very dangerous. I mean, that's just you know.
Speaker 2:We know that this has adverse health effects. We know that if you have it in your blood you are more likely to have immune deficiencies, you're more likely to have certain types of cancer and certain types of endocrine disruption, all that sort of bad stuff. And so we want to. You know, as a nation we want to get away from this and we are finally realizing that this is one that the first rule the EPA has ever proposed in 23 years new rule in water has been the PFAS one. They did a revision 12 years ago on the lead levels, but they haven't done a new rule in 23 years. And so this is the seriousness with which they're taking it. They're actually going to regulate it, which they've almost never done. They never regulated PFO or PFAS when it was a chemical, because that was just voluntarily removed by the company, rather than trying to take them to court or anything like that. They just, you know, voluntarily removed it because they had 12,000 others to switch to. So it wasn't a big deal for the company, but for the, for the, for the, those of us that live in the environment, which includes all the firefighters. We're getting it from our drinking water. We're getting it from our textiles, from our carpets at home. Oh and yeah, by the way, you guys work with foam, so that's what people were worried about.
Speaker 2:So several people have gone on and done firefighter studies of blood levels of PFAS and firefighters the blood levels are elevated over five, which was what we have normally. But there's it. It's more like 10 average firefighters have a bit more, and that includes some military ones, some civilian ones, people that they got in this survey and that survey, but no comprehensive study being done is sort of, and it was a very expensive test. Up until a few months ago it was $800 a test, so there weren't a lot of people doing the test. There's a group done in Australia that did a test of 700 of them, 700 South Australian firefighters, and their average was about 12, the average population that was about five. So it was a little higher than average.
Speaker 2:But how bad is that? Well, it makes your immune system about half as good as those people at average, which could be significant, especially if you're exposed to toxic fumes and other hazards, which firefighters often are. And so does that make any opportunistic disease more likely? Yep, and that means, could it explain all the cancers the fire services are seeing. I hope not, but it could. It could contribute to it and that's the fear.
Speaker 2:And so country has done pretty much about face. We are now going away from Florian based. We've gone to Florian free foams FFF as opposed to the AFFF and those class B foams are hopefully fading. There's a bunch of them sitting on a shelf waiting to be used, which in several states are buying them back so that they don't accidentally get used. I know it's a. It's a hazmat incident in some states. To use the foam anymore you have to fill out the forms because you know the loss of life in loom is really the balance to what you're going to have when this stuff, you know, take a single can, a single five gallon gallon container of HREP-F, that will poison in the old days 400 olympic sized swimming pools.
Speaker 2:In the new days that they've lowered that by another thousand, that's a 400,000 swimming pools you'd poison.
Speaker 1:With one, five gallon bucket.
Speaker 2:Yep. And you guys are sloshing that stuff around right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so if let's use that one example used of a carpet with the coating on there, how are we getting that into our bodies at home If we're not a firefighter but just anybody? Is it just? Is it absorption, is it inhalation? I mean, what do we get?
Speaker 2:All of the above, there'll be some inhalation for those that are volatile. Those are those. Those things get in the air. Pfas aren't terribly volatile. There are some which are, but most of them are not, so we don't think that's a major source for most people. If you were in a fire in and didn't have a self-contained breathing apparatus, then, yes, you could get it in the fumes because this thing would volatilize, but you'd have a lot worse things to you to get all the dioxins, and then you know the killers that are in the smoke, and so we think that the self-contained breathing apparatus should prevent most of that. So then there's a question of dermal absorption. Can it go through the skin?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah it can.
Speaker 2:It will do it less often than many things. Hopefully, the skin is a pretty good protector in most cases, but we don't know how much goes through. We know we have a couple of papers now published where an equal one individual tested it on himself and yet went through the skin about 1% in six hours or 12 hours I think it was, and so that means if you were exposed, about 1% of what was on your skin would get into your blood. That could be significant if you had, if you took a bath and a triple FI accident you know, a canister broke on you or you covered with foam one time.
Speaker 2:If that got in your skin and you didn't wash it off in an appropriate amount of time, could that get through? Presumably. But there's also accidental ingestion and basically accidental ingestion. This is where I don't know if you ever saw it, but the San Francisco Fire Department did this wonderful commercial about how to decon after a fire and they covered some poor rookie with shaving cream and then she went around and didn't decon and they watched where the shaving cream went, as she took off the gear and sat down and had dinner or was eating a plate of food, and you see a lump of foam off the edge. And it was just a dramatization because the foam was not toxic with shaving cream, right, and. But when she touched her hair, once it got in the hair it got on the plate of the food and so it was very easy to see contamination spread.
Speaker 2:So if you don't do proper decon, well imagine that you have to decon now for these A triple F as well. And you don't see those, you don't smell them. They don't smell like anything, they don't look like anything. They're just invisible particles that are there from contact, from carpet, from contact with textiles, from contact of cosmetics, from contact I know you guys wear a lot of cosmetics, but you know, more importantly, it's on the food we eat.
Speaker 2:The fish have high levels of it, now the some vegetables grab it out of the soil. But also from the watery drink, particularly, and you know it's a forever chemical. It's not really filtered out by anything. So here's what. Here's one that'll hit home. It's in the beer you drink too, because nobody's water before they drink it there you go, damn it. Damn. I'm not invited to many of these podcasts anymore. After I sell that, you just go away peacefully now.
Speaker 1:I'm in a bed shit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you just don't want to scare everybody, but I mean it's, it's unfortunately can get everywhere. If they're using distilled water, yeah, you're safe, but most beers don't. Most soda does not right, they use just the water out of the tap and carbonate it. So if it's in the tap water, all of us our kids especially are getting it. And so you know you don't want to, you don't want to sound too doomed saying things like that, but there's a toxic chemical is out there, it's widespread. The first thing we can do is cut off the source. We got to stop using the A triple F. We got to recall it. We had one post station that, yeah, I said a bunch of pallets on fire and they just up the rest of foam, it's all gone. Magic I like?
Speaker 2:uh, no, because now it's uh, it's all in the field that they put it in and so we don't want to do that. We don't want to clean the barbecue with a triple F anymore. Bad news, um all the sorts of stories we hear that people had actually used it.
Speaker 2:It shines the chrome up nicely on the engine, but you don't want to use a triple F on that Um, and we just want to go to the replacement foams. The replacement foams are flooring free, they won't have this issue. Do they work as well? Some people say yes, some people say oh, it'll never work as well. And it depends if you're in a jet, a fuel fire short, I you will in the bed. There's some differences, but you know he throws us stuff for three or four years now without and they're happy with it. Um, so I think that there is a satisfactory uh substitution in most cases. Uh, you know, the the Navy has yet to remove the aircraft carrier one because they still are worried about those fires, but the all the other Navy bases announced getting rid of the, the, the, the triple F.
Speaker 1:And that was a.
Speaker 2:That was the story as of five years ago and you know it was terrible exposure. But now we're not going to stop using it and as soon as all the fire departments figure out what to do with the old stuff, Depose of it as toxic waste and who's going to pay for that, Well, the legislation should pick it up and pay for it. These days and some of the states are, some of them aren't Um, and then, uh, every one to do studies on firefighters, and so several studies were done. They have slightly elevated uh PFAS levels, but not Not, you know. Not, you know, not so significantly, though there's a range, right, Um, and I gotta tell this anecdote because I tell it every time the South Australian studies did this and they found one for firefighter who had, instead of five or instead of 12, as the average, he had 1600. 1600.
Speaker 1:Think about what.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we uh, and he was more than double the next time. The next time was 700, right, so there was. There's a range of people with hundreds and 200 and five, seven. There's one guy, seven hundred, one guy at 1600. And so the author of the paper went out to visit him and said I want to interview you and I want to know are you drinking the, the H or PLEF? He says no, I haven't even used it, man, uh, that we don't train with it.
Speaker 2:It was a suburban, he was a professional firefighter, he was a suburban in that part of Australia. They had, um, uh, you had to be on the station for a week at a time and they took a week or two off and then they come back for a week because it was a um, they lived two hours away. So you know, it was a, it's a big suburban area and in Australia the distance is a large. So you have a, you have all the fire services 24 hours on shift, and then they respond quickly to the fire and then they, they swap off and, as they were discovering many years ago that the firefighters, if they lived away from home for a week, they tend to eat improperly- Um and the the BMI was going up and all sorts of bad things.
Speaker 2:So they did two things all the fire stations, they put in a world-class gym and they put in a uh, top grade, um uh, kitchen and they taught them all how to cook organic good stuff. And so they ate better and they exercised and guess what? They got the BMI under control and firefighters are generally happier. They had good food Um, they still have pizza, but it's not all the time Uh and and so this was a big improvement in the lives of firefighters. And the guy they went to interview was in one of these stations. He had been in the services for several years, but not for long. Uh, he was in the. He's a bodybuilder. He was trying to build up his body because he had his athletic equipment and he was eating all organic and he was eating a high protein diet. So he ate five chicken eggs a day, or chicken egg yolks a day. He put them in a drink and drank it up and they were organic chicken eggs, cause they were grown at the station.
Speaker 2:The chickens were laying eggs at the station and they were eating the wheat that they raised for their own bread makers in the station and that wheat was grown right about where the old test fire training bit was. So the PFAS got into the soil, it got sucked up by the, the wheat. The wheat was given to the chickens. The chickens ate it. It goes preferentially the egg yolk, and he was eating five eggs a day and had been doing that for a few months just to build up as he'd gotten his, his protein mass up. And he was, you know, happily, had no, no ill effects yet.
Speaker 2:Um, but with that much in his blood, they they suggested he go and try to get some medicine and see what they could do. They put on some statins or something to try and reduce his level of, basically bleed him out of some of the, of some of the high, high levels he had in his blood. But that was. Is that due to firefighting foam? Well, indirectly yes, but it was sort of an exposure that nobody expected, because, um, and I've got to tell the second half of the story, which the Australians tell much better than I do, but they said that. You know what did the fire surfaces do when they found this out? They sent a memo to all stations. Chickens will no longer be allowed to be kept on the station.
Speaker 1:That's what I'm trying to say that's a fire service thing. That is exactly how it is.
Speaker 2:And I thought that was pretty good. But you know that's the story of telling it how insidious these chemicals are. They can go through a route to get to you you never thought of. It might be coming from other things, it might be coming from new foam. If you have trained with foam and you have used it and you know it. The suds get everywhere. I mean there are examples of them using them as slip-in slides for the kids when they had the family day. I mean people put the foam on everything and your exposure will go up when these chemicals get in your blood.
Speaker 2:The half-life of the chemical is about five years. The PFOS in particular is five and a half years. So that means if you get a dose one time and you got it in your blood and it went up to ten, it will take you five and a half years until it comes back down to five. Just because of how often you change your blood. It doesn't change that quickly and there's a lot of it in you. So that's really remarkable for a chemical, and it's not true in mice. If you put it in a mouse, it all comes out in three weeks, which is relatively short. So guess what? Human blood is a little different and this chemical is really attached to human blood for some reason.
Speaker 2:So fast forward now and I get sent a nice letter from Diane Carter who said my husband's sick and we think it might be his gear. Can you do no PFASs in there? And I said I don't know but I'd be happy to test it. So she sent me some pieces and I called her back and said okay, these are really high in fluorine, so that suggests there's a lot of PFAS in them. I said is this just your husband's gear or does somebody not like him? Or is this?
Speaker 2:everybody's gear and it was actually the gear from a mannequin they had kept in the station and it was never used and she said it was ten years old. It wasn't sure that it was ever going to have any fluorine left in it and there was percent levels of in there. There's a ton of it. So then we did a study with about 40, 40, 50 sets of gear that people had sent us, or swatches, and we were able to identify yes, it was in all the gear because it's an FPA 1971 compliant. They're all made the same way. The reflective stripes are a little different, but everything about the structural material is the same. It's put in there to make it waterproof, not to make it fire resistant. It's a waterproofing agent. It's a very good waterproofing agent. It keeps you very dry, so you keep the water on the outside and it beads off the suit, which is the idea.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, the way they put it on, they put it on the outside shell but they also put a moisture barrier on the inside layer. So you had two parts of the gear and you often had a thermal liner in between and that was never treated. For most of them that was never treated, so that was free of fluorine, except for where it rubbed off the other two parts, that rubbed off the outside, or it rubbed off the moisture barrier. And so we saw, the older the gear, the more PFAS got into that thermal liner that had none. And we're like so it's passing from layer to layer. And then we did a test.
Speaker 2:Unintentionally, my students actually noticed that they had garment to hand transfer. And once the student did this, he wore a pair of gloves which had no fluorine on it. Then he handled the gear for a few minutes. Then he took the glove off and put it in the measurement device and we saw fluorine. So a parpramilion levels of fluorine transfer the glove in a few minutes. And we're like, okay, nobody's allowed to handle this stuff in the lab anymore unless they have gloves on. And that image when we had the students holding the gear up with their gloves on the purple nitrile gloves. They were no longer wearing it for fun. They thought it was pretty cool to have a fire suit in the house and they wanted to wear it for.
Speaker 2:Halloween and like no, it's a sample, you can't wear it. But more importantly, they discovered it has PFAS. They suited up and they were like they're touching it with gloves. They don't want to touch this because they know that the PFAS is a toxic chemical. And the fire services had not known this at the time we did this.
Speaker 1:I'm just astounded. So it doesn't have to be heated up, it doesn't have to off gas. It's just by touching anything with PFAS will it get in your body.
Speaker 2:Anything is a wide word. If you had firefighting foam, yeah, and you slathered that on, that could go through the skin that could be inhaled accidentally. There are several examples where the accidental discharge in the cab or something like that People inhaled it or swallowed it. You're wiping it all off your body. You can get foam exposure, ingestion or inhalation. This is a. When we touched the gear, we got dust off it. So basically, if you rub any fabric together for a while, you'll start getting dust right.
Speaker 2:And if it's a fire service gear it'll have a little black dust for the black suits and the tan dust for the tan suits, but you'll get some dust off it. That dust was loaded with PFAS. In fact we did a dust study in a second paper. We did a dust study in 15 different fire stations in Massachusetts and the fire station dust that had the most PFAS in it was the one in the gear that can handle the gear container, not the atripleft container that was out in the station bay.
Speaker 2:Really there's a trip of cans out there, there was not much, because that's sealed in a can and generally, unless somebody's slopping it around, there's not a lot of it in the dust, whereas the dust in the fire station under the gear container or in the living quarters were where the highest fluorine concentrations were. And so that, together with our study that said hey, there's not only PFAS in here, we identified which type it was. We said there's a lot of it and it comes off. We had this garment to hand transfer and we know it's in the dust. And we followed up with a dust study saying hey, we measure the dust, it's there. So that means that I went to the local fire department.
Speaker 2:I gave them a nice routine there. They have a meeting once a month. It's called tactics on tap. They talk about things that they can talk about to improve their fire services and they do it over beer, and so free beer, I'll go, sure.
Speaker 2:I went and I told them about PFAS and the gear and one of the guys raised his hand in the back and said well, they had already done this thing where, if it isn't an actual active fire call, they respond as a paramedic as well. So they go out to the scene and they don't wear their gear unless it's something that looks like it's going to turn into a fire. And then they don it there, which is a really difficult policy decision. Right, you have fire services to eat that differently in metropolitan areas versus less metropolitan areas. But if it isn't called in as a fire, it's just called in as an accident or called in as a paramedical. Then they went with their gear in the truck and then they because in the hot day you can respond quicker and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 2:And the guy was asking that we've never cleaned out the truck. There's a little container in the truck where they held all the gear. It says there's about an inch of dust in the bottom of that container. He said should we be cleaning that out? And I never knew that A the container existed. Well, that was the policy in this particular station. But I said well, yeah, you should not be inhaling that dust and although you're not eating it deliberately, some of it always transfers and gets around. And if you just like, they talk about decon these days when you're exposed to the toxic chemicals from the smoke if you don't decon before you get back in the cab and you drive.
Speaker 2:What's that off-gassing do? It's now starting to. It's rubbing against the seats and so then you can get the toxic chemicals transferred to the seat cushion and things like that. Same thing with this dust coming off the suit.
Speaker 1:Listen, brothers and sisters. I hope you enjoy the podcast. Please do me a favor like, share and subscribe my podcast and my YouTube channel. Be sure to follow me in the private group 3-point firefighter on Facebook. I'm also on Twitter and TikTok. So that's part one with Dr Peasley. Next week we'll be part two and it gets better. We have to listen to this. Please like, share and subscribe so people can understand what we are dealing with. Our podcast today was sponsored by Fire Facilities. This Made in America company is dedicated to constructing top quality custom training structures to meet your needs. Make your training count with all steel structures that are made to last. Visit FireFacilitiescom for more details. The f4pک Air Force. 3 July 2018.