It was five years ago while kayaking with his wife on northeast Michigan’s Van Etten Lake adjacent to a former Air Force base, says attorney Anthony Spaniola, when he spotted a work crew testing a foam substance on the beach.
He says he’d heard that the state had found astronomically high levels of toxic per- and polyfluorinated substances, or PFAS, in the foam that formed a snowlike crest around the lake. The foam was said to contain 2,200 parts per trillion of PFOS, a type of PFAS. The Environmental Protection Agency has set the current safe level of PFOS at 0.02 parts per trillion.
Spaniola paddled over to the contractors testing the foam to see what results they were getting.
