Guernsey has announced that it plans to spend up to £16.5m on sending more than 15,000 tonnes of PFAS-contaminated soil currently stored at its airport to the UK for treatment and disposal.
The heavily contaminated soil was excavated from various locations around the island’s airport in 2012, and the site of a freight plane crash in a nearby field.
Because solutions to remove PFAS from soil were not readily available then, the soil was stored in specially designed containment cells created within raised grass areas at the entrance to the airport.
This was always seen as a temporary measure while a permanent solution was investigated. The membrane lining the cells is now reaching the end of its life.
Like Guernsey, Jersey Airport also has soil contaminated with PFAS – a groups of manmade chemicals found in firefighting foam that was sprayed there.
That family of hard-to-break-down ‘forever chemicals’ – developed to repel heat, water and oil – has since been linked to various health conditions, including cancer, kidney disease and high cholesterol.
When its dangers became widely known, Jersey took a different approach to Guernsey – building a new airport fire training area sealed off from the ground beneath by a concrete case.
However, this did not remove the contaminated soil underneath, and Ports of Jersey is currently liaising with the government, and a group of scientific experts the latter has employed to advise it, to determine the level of risk and therefore remediation required at what Environment Minister Steve Luce recently described as a ‘PFAS hotspot’.
Talking about the Guernsey decision, Deputy Mark Helyar, who is president of its States’ Trading Supervisory Board, said: “The containment of this soil has been effective in preventing this historic pollution from entering the environment.
“However, it was only ever a temporary answer, to allow time for permanent solutions to be explored.
“We have been through a thorough evaluation of all currently available options, and identified the most appropriate solution.
“We now need to progress that, given the evidence that the membrane containing the soil has reached its end-of-life and is beginning to fail.”