Wildfires keep showing up in the news these days, and they’re getting scarier and scarier. As we continue to burn more fossil fuels, we’re accelerating global heating, which is in turn making broad swaths of land hotter and dryer than they’ve been in our lifetimes – and with that change is coming more and more fire.
The names of recent fire catastrophes pass in front of our collective consciences like ghosts: the Texas Smokehouse Creek Fire which burned 1.1 million acres; the Palisades fire which ripped through Los Angeles; the Lahaina fire that leveled a priceless and historic Hawaiian community; and the Canadian fires that turned the NYC sky orange for days.
Wildfires are destroying human communities, killing people, shredding natural habitat, and turning large swaths of beautiful land into apocalyptic nightmares.
With this threat growing every day, we are so grateful to our firefighters for putting their lives on the line again and again to confront, contain, and extinguish these beasts. But as they put themselves in harms way, there is, sadly, a company that is capitalizing on all of our suffering in order to make a buck. Actually 1.12 billion bucks.
Perimeter Solutions holds a near-monopoly on the fire retardant that is dropped from planes that contract with the U.S. Forest Service, and their primary product is called Phos-Chek. This month, they just entered into a five-year contract with the USDA. In their press release about the deal, the company said that “This multi-year contract brings unprecedented stability to the nation’s aerial firefighting infrastructure, while expanding Perimeter’s role in aerial firefighting operations. It includes a full conversion to Perimeter’s powder retardant technology…”
All of that sounds great, except for the fact that Phos-Check is extremely poisonous to human and non-human life. Earlier this year, researchers and investigative journalists from LAist got a hold of a sample and confirmed the presence of toxic heavy metals like lead and arsenic. They had to do this study without the help of Perimeter Solutions because, as you might imagine, they did not want to share with the public what was in their special brew.
Phos-Check is very harmful to the living systems it is poured on. Aquatic ecosystems are particularly vulnerable. When retardant seeps into streams, it can kill fish and other wildlife almost instantly. It then continues on into bigger streams and ultimately into human drinking water. An organization called National Forest Advocates actually brought a lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service, alleging that using Phos-Check constitutes a violation of the Clean Water Act. Even retired fire chiefs are sounding the alarm about the threat Phos-Check poses to our drinking water and human health.
So why, when facing one ecological catastrophe, are we trying to solve it by pouring another ecological catastrophe on top of it? It turns out there’s another really effective technology for putting out fires – one that is not toxic to life but actually essential to it. People have been using it for years – and they still do.
It’s called water.
Firefighting aircraft can and should be dropping water as much as humanly possible – instead of toxic pink ooze. Water doesn’t poison the watershed, doesn’t accumulate in the soil, and doesn’t get into your child’s cup. In fact, aerial water drops are actually more effective in the initial attack against forest fires, especially when speed, volume, and placement matter most.
So again, why is our government using our tax dollars to pour poison on our country? Well, it’s because most people don’t know about any of this. And that’s just the way Perimeter Solutions likes it. They’ve worked hard to hide the truth about their poisonous product, convince those in power that they need their poison, and sell as much of their poison as they possibly can, so that they can make more money. To hell with ecosystems, human health, or your child’s morning glass of water.
This should be no surprise to anyone who is honest about the world we live in. The tobacco industry did this for years, hiring “doctors” to lie about the link between their product and cancer. And the oil and gas industry continues to do it to this day, hiring “scientists,” politicians, and influencers to lie for them to sow ignorance about what their product is doing to our world (like increasing wildfires, for example).
Perimeter Solutions just wants their money.
But let’s not give it to them. Our land deserves better solutions than this – and we know what they are. When faced with the threat of wildfires, let’s stick with a tool that works better than Phos-Check and doesn’t poison our environment and our drinking water while making a few cynical fat cats rich. Let’s stick with water.
Allen Drew is the Northeast Regional Organizer for the Climate Witness Project.
