The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with KUER.
The Salt Lake City airport covers more than 8,000 acres and serves tens of millions of passengers a year. Most of them come and go without thinking much about the airport itself or the land around it, including sensitive wetlands and a canal that feeds directly into the Great Salt Lake.
But Kevin Staples thinks about it a lot. As the environmental program manager for the airport, it’s his job.
He stands inside one of the airport’s last lines of defense. It’s a simple pump station. Within the nondescript brick building, a series of large pumps suck up stormwater from a nearby detention basin and pipe it into the canal that encircles much of the airport like a moat. If staff see pollutants like jet fuel, deicing liquid, oil or any other chemicals heading that way, the pump is shut off and the chemicals cleaned up before they reach the canal and eventually the Great Salt Lake.
“So I can call in to the control (center), control can call maintenance and maintenance can shut these off from anywhere,” Stapley said.
The airport employs countless other mechanisms to stop pollutants before they get near the pump station, from personnel watching for spills and pollution to a series of storm drains, some with locks.
The airport needs these defenses, and they almost always work. Almost.
Records obtained by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project show that since 2019, there have been seven different releases of a special firefighting chemical known as aqueous film foaming foam. The foam was designed to quickly extinguish jet fuel fires, but it is full of synthetic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as “forever chemicals.”
In four of those incidents, fire suppression systems malfunctioned in Delta and Skywest hangars and sprayed the toxic foam out on fires that weren’t there, as recently as June of this year. The other spills were accidental discharges from fire stations at the airport.
Records show the airport contained the chemicals from heading to the lake, except in 2019. That year, 10,000 gallons of foam mixed with water escaped to the storm drains, ran through the canal and made their way to the Great Salt Lake.
In a settlement, the airport paid more than $10,000 to the Utah Department of Environmental Quality for investigating, testing and cleaning up the spill.
But it’s unclear what damage the 2019 leak might have done.
Jacob Ridgway is an environmental toxicologist at the Utah Department of Environmental Quality. He says forever chemicals were engineered in the 1940s.
“Generally, in products that you need to resist something – heat, grease, water – they're very resistant,” he said.
But what made them great for non-stick cookware, water repellent clothing and firefighting foam also made them particularly harmful in a natural setting.
“So when they're in the environment, they don't really break down very well. They take many decades to break down.
Ridgway says PFAS are hazardous in large exposures or repeated exposure over a lifetime, with risks including liver inflammation, reduced immune system function and lower birth weight.
In September, DEQ scientists tested over a dozen waterfowl and released an advisory warning of elevated levels of PFAS in ducks and other birds on the south shore of the Great Salt Lake.
Ben Holcomb, a section manager at Utah’s DEQ, says the levels are comparable to other states and that Utahns just need to be cautious when eating wild-caught waterfowl. He also says it’s hard to know where the waterfowl were contaminated.
“They're not a great indicator of a local condition because they're migratory,” Holcomb said.
It’s impossible to draw a direct line between PFAS at the airport and PFAS in birds at the lake, but Utah Waterfowl Association president Jack Ray is concerned about possible contamination from the airport, and says his group needs to study the issue more. He also says that any contaminants to Utah ducks have a ripple effect throughout the state.
“There has been a mercury consumption advisory for quite a few years now that people have paid attention to and now we’re finding out there is an issue of PFAS contamination, it’s just one more area of concern,” Ray said.
He says there are more than 15,000 duck hunters in the state, bringing game home to their dinner tables.
“You are talking about tens of thousands of people eating waterfowl who may have been exposed to elevated PFAS levels in their food,” he says. “Food they had every reason to believe was nourishing, wild food.”
Airport officials stress they have lots of eyes on the lookout for spills. There are three fire stations on site. They have their own operations team constantly monitoring, as well as 37 spill kits spread across the airport for rapid response.
With the new airport construction, storm drains are located far from fueling areas to reduce the risk of jet fuel running into them. Most facility vehicles are now electric, including the baggage hauling “tugs” that swarm around aircraft.
But the airport can’t control all decisions made by its tenants, the airlines. Currently, Delta and Skywest still use aqueous film foaming foam in their hangars, but that may change soon.
“One thing to note right now is Delta, as they renew their lease, we are requiring them to upgrade their foam system,” said Brady Fredrickson, senior aviation planner for the airport.
The malfunctioning systems are not just a problem in Utah. Research from 2019 has shown that foam discharges at airport hangars were more than three times as likely to be accidental than to actually put out any fires.
Airport environmental program manager Staples says the 2019 release also happened during a major rain event.
“Rains, heat, everything, you know, just seems to be a little extreme sometimes now,” Staplesy said.
But the airport has learned to adapt.
“When you have something like that, you just take that as an opportunity to learn.”
