BRUNSWICK, Maine — Thousands of gallons of foam mixed with water were collected on and around the Brunswick Executive Airport after a major spill of toxic firefighting foam over the summer.
After more than 1,400 gallons of toxic firefighting foam containing “forever chemicals” spilled from a fire suppression system at the Brunswick Executive Airport, there was little concern about where the foam would eventually end up as long as it was out of state.
“I don’t know off hand exactly where it’s going, but we’re collecting it, I’m sorry,” said Chris Hopper, with the Maine DEP.
“It’s going to a burn facility in Texas,” said Kristine Logan, the former director for the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority.
Newly released receipts from Clean Harbor, the Massachusetts-based company that cleaned up that foam, show it was shipped off to two facilities: one in Corunna, Ontario and the other in El Dorado, Arkansas.
The Ontario facility received 12,000 thousand gallons of the foam and water mix to burn and the center in Arkansas got more than 11,000.
The company claims online its incinerators destroy 99.9 percent of “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, though the EPS says “… uncertainties remain about the effectiveness of thermal treatment.”
And shipping off Maine’s PFAS problem is costly. Clean Harbor has billed the MRRA for more than $550,000 for their work in Brunswick as of Dec. 10.
This isn’t the first time it’s happened. For several months in 2023, Maine was shipping thousands of tons of PFAS-riddled wastewater sludge to New Brunswick, Canada, when the state’s landfill was overwhelmed.
A solution that locals at the time said they weren’t thrilled about.
“When I realized it was being brought in from Maine, my thought was, ‘Why are we taking a problem that Maine has and making it our problem?’” said Ted Wiggans, a New Brunswick sheep farmer.
Shipping sludge to Canada stopped in July of 2023 thanks to emergency legislation signed by Governor Janet Mills.
But that law only covered sludge, not foam.
The commissioner of Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection has voiced interest in a “collection and destruction program” for Maine’s PFAS so that the state doesn’t ship it off to other states, though it would likely be very expensive.
In the meantime, there are still more than 2,000 gallons of foam in other fire suppression systems at the Brunswick Executive Airport inside hangars 5 and 6.
Previous inspection reports did find failures in those fire suppression systems.
The town manager says an additional inspection and testing were finished on Dec. 6.
Brunswick’s deputy fire chief spoke at a meeting earlier this month and said the risk of a spill in hangars 5 and 6 is smaller since the suppression systems are newer.
“The systems that are in hangar 5 and hangar 6 have a few more redundant systems that are in place so the chances of having a spill such as we had in hangar 4, in hangar 6 are much less just because of the progress that has been made in the application of those systems,” Brunswick Deputy Fire Chief Josh Shean said.
Brunswick’s town manager says there are some batteries that need to be ordered but otherwise the systems in both hangars are functioning.
