Fire-fighting foams containing PFAS chemicals continued to be used at Bandiana for another six years after the Australian Defence Force first began phasing the foams out in 2004.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Defence personnel told the consultants who were testing soil and water on and off-base that the Army School of Ordance continued to use PFAS-based foams until “approximately 2010, when the current training foam products were phased in”.
The detailed site investigation, published on Monday, also shows a former fire training ground that operated at South Bandiana in the 1980s and 1990s hosted training activities on a monthly basis.
“The facility operated by filling the pressure vessel with fuels (typically petrol), pressurising the vessel using a fire pump, and then igniting the pressurised fuel released through the header unit,” the report reads.
One drum of foam was allocated per person, per month for training purposes, and based on a unit of 28 personnel, approximately 560 litres of aqueous fire forming foams (AFFF) were used there per annum.
The current fire training area was constructed in the central-western portion of South Bandiana in 1993, and testing done at both the former and current training areas revealed levels of PFAS higher than the adopted guidelines.
All three surface water samples from the current fire training area, and a number of soil and sediment samples, contained elevated levels of PFAS.
A sediment pond at the site returned a surface water concentration of PFOS of 48 micrograms per litre, well above the adopted guideline of 2 micrograms per litre.
First Assistant Secretary Infrastructure Chris Birrer said Defence was committed to having good environmental management on the base.
“The key issue is there’s no exposure pathways for our personnel; we know the key exposure pathway to PFAS is through contaminated ground water,” he said.
Further investigation will be done into the exposure risk to people and the environment particularly in areas tested that recorded a high reading.
Included in a list of groundwater sources likely to be discharging to surface water off-base was groundwater taken from a well located 20 metres from the bank of the Kiewa River, that was three times higher than the ecological guideline.
A groundwater sample taken on the bank of Jack in the Box Creek, more than five kilometres from the base in an area near Kendall Street, was more than 200 times the adopted guideline (0.0488 micrograms of PFOS per litre, compared to the ecological guideline of 0.00023 micrograms per litre).
