Local, Under-The-Radar, Independent Journalists Are Providing Some Of The Best West Plains PFAS Coverage

Water Watch #2 

The West Plains PFAS mess is finally hitting the news. Major articles have appeared in the Seattle Times, the Spokane Spokesman-Review, in The Inlander and on KXLY TV. 

Yet some of the most incisive reporting has come from an unexpected new quarter: local online investigative news outlets Range and Rhubarb Skies.

If you haven’t heard of these, perhaps you should. They are doing some of the deepest digging into the West Plains issue, particularly on Spokane International Airport’s apparent concealment of its longstanding PFAS problem.

Range’s Aaron Hedge recently broke news of the Airport’s cover-up of its 2017 well-test data showing PFAS contamination there, connecting this to Airport leadership’s lobbying to keep using PFAS firefighting foam that happens to be cheaper that the non-PFAS alternative. Hedge writes further about the fight that has since erupted between Airport CEO Larry Krauter and the Washington State Department of Ecology, which began an official investigation after an area citizen obtained Airport records of those 2017 tests through a Freedom of Information Act request. The Airport recently hired a New York law firm that is now stonewalling Ecology while threatening lawsuits, and the drama builds.

This comes after independent journalist Timothy Connor, in his Rhubarb SkiesSubstack, published last month a remarkable account of Spokane County Commissioner and Airport Board member Al French’s years-long cover-up of the airport mess. Connor dates this to French’s 2020 refusal to claim $450,000 offered by Ecology to research what was by then a very obvious West Plains PFAS pollution problem, brought to French’s attention by County health workers. After French ignored this grant, it was then taken up by concerned citizens and by Eastern Washington University geology professor Chad Pritchard, finding firm evidence that there is indeed very severe PFAS pollution of many West Plains wells. Pritchard found evidence that these contaminated wells appear to be linked via underground channels to runoff from Fairchild Air Force Base and Spokane International Airport, where PFAS-laden firefighting foams have been used in trainings and incidents over several decades.

These stories by scrappy, independent reporters is classic journalistic muckraking, exposing actions by the powerful who run some of Spokane’s most valuable institutions. It’s part of a worldwide trend in journalism. As daily newspapers and magazines shrink or vanish, reporters have gone into business for themselves with subscription-based publications on platforms like Substack. 

It’s said that a reporter’s job is to comfort the afflicted, and to afflict the comfortable. Spokane’s independent journalists are doing a stellar job at both, telling the stories of long-ignored West Plains residents grappling with the health harms of long exposure to PFAS in well water, while also holding powerful County Commissioners, Airport and Air Force leaders accountable. 

We may never know how much of this pain and loss may have been avoided if citizens had learned the truth of PFAS pollution seven years ago, when these institutions did. 

However, independent, online journalists are helping us learn who in power knew of this, and when they knew it.