NFPA Journal - Fall 2022 - 26

" BACK IN THE DAY AT THE AIRPORT,
WE USED THIS STUFF FOR JUST
ABOUT EVERYTHING SHORT
OF BRUSHING OUR TEETH. "
O
N THE MANTLE in his home
office, beside antique fire alarm
boxes, model fire trucks, and
old fire helmets, Jeremy Souza once
kept a collection of slightly stranger
mementos: about a dozen jars filled
with various amber-colored liquids.
For years, as a firefighter and later
deputy fire chief at T. F. Green Airport
in Providence, Rhode Island, Souza
would lug the jars to trainings for new
firefighters. He'd pass the jars around
and explain how the liquid inside, a
chemical substance called aqueous film
forming foam, or AFFF, worked to extinguish
liquid fuel fires and could even
perform other feats of magic around the
firehouse.
" Back in the day at the airport, we
used this stuff for just about everything
short of brushing our teeth, " said Souza,
who is now an engineer specializing in
foam suppression systems at Code Red
Consultants, a Massachusetts-based fire
safety company. " AFFF is a wonderful
degreaser. Take a half gallon of AFFF
concentrate, throw it on a garage floor
and hose it down, and the stain is gone.
I would say that is more of an airport
thing-municipal fire departments
would never have dealt with quantities
of foam like that. But we had loads of it. "
For a certain generation of specialized
firefighters tasked with protecting airfields,
oil and gas facilities, and military
installations, Souza's experience is probably
relatable. For nearly six decades,
AFFF has been as indispensable to their
jobs as water is for structural firefighters,
owing to its unique ability to quickly
snuff out even the nastiest liquid fuel
26 | NFPA JOURNAL * FALL 2022
fire under a blanket of chemical bubbles.
In the dangerous scenarios that can
play out when large stores of fuel are
threatened by fire, AFFF's qualities as a
fast and reliable suppression agent have
literally been a lifesaver.
And yet there is now near-universal
agreement among health officials, environmental
scientists, governments, and
even firefighters that AFFF must go,
preferably as soon as possible.
Citing mounting evidence that the
chemicals present in AFFF-known as
per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or
PFAS-are potentially damaging to the
planet and to human health (see " The
PFAS Problem " on the next spread),
there has been rapid movement around
the world to limit or ban their use. In
2021 alone, the number of US states
that banned or severely limited AFFF
went from just a handful to at least 15,
and legislation is pending in at least
five other states to do the same. The US
military, which helped develop AFFF
in the 1960s, has announced plans to
stop using it by October 2024, and the
Federal Aviation Administration intends
to follow suit at thousands of airports
across the country. Several European
countries have already stopped using
AFFF and, in February, the European
Chemicals Agency proposed an outright
ban on the manufacture, use, and export
of AFFF for the entirety of the European
Union.
" We can all allude to how good AFFF
has been for us, but AFFF is going away.
If you are still dwelling on that point,
then you are behind, " Casey Grant,
executive director of the research and
engineering firm DSRAE LLC, told a
room full of fire protection professionals
during a presentation in June at the
NFPA Conference & Expo in Boston.
" There is no doubt that this issue is full
of questions and complications for all of
us, but we have to face the fact that this
transition is happening. "
For Souza, the transition is happening
in more ways than one. Late last year,
he received a call from researchers who
were looking for old samples of AFFF to
study how its compounds break down
over time. Some of the specimens on
Souza's mantle dated back nearly two
decades, and he even had the original
lot numbers from the manufacturer.
" Apparently, I was the only fruit loop
who thought that somebody might
need these at some point, " he said. " So
I handed over my collection and all the
information I had. "
Others, however, may find the move
away from AFFF to be a bit more complicated.
For fire protection officials,
many of whom are stuck between
fast-approaching government bans on
AFFF and the continued need to quickly
extinguish dangerous liquid fuel fires,
the transition raises two major questions:
What will replace AFFF, and what
will the transition look like?
NEW FOAM, NEW QUESTIONS
For more than a decade, foam manufacturers
have been working on
possible replacements for AFFF. There
are now dozens of foam products on
the market that claim to be made
without fluorine, a key ingredient in
AFFF that is also a source of PFAS.
GETTY IMAGES; PREVIOUS SPREAD COURTESY JERRY BACK
NFPA Journal - Fall 2022

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