Internal Fiskville firefighter most cancers cluster and the folks that exposed toxic foam | Australian Fable

I go to a lot of firefighters’ funerals,and the only people who were there at the funerals are the firefighters and the familyof firefighters burying their mates. You never see a government official there. You neversee a chemical company official there or the salesmen selling their products. But whenone of your colleagues gets crook or passes on, it hurts you and you want to stop thathappening again.   One night, I was finding it difficult to sleepbecause I had a million things going on in my mind. So, I went down to the shed to changethe oil on my wife's car and that's when I sort of had this light bulb moment. We knowthat our job is really dangerous. We're exposed to toxins, known carcinogens every job wego into. So maybe we could work out how to.

Get this stuff out of our bodies. I don'thave university degrees. I'm just an idiot firefighter. But I trusted my gut, I kepttrusting my gut and we're kicking goals.   The World Health Organisation has officiallydeclared firefighting as a cancer-causing profession. The declaration has major implicationsfor the way cancer is managed for firefighters. As a journalist you actually come across alot of different people over your career. Firefighters face a toxic trilogy. After 30 years in the game, this story stayedwith me, because of the work of a firefighter called Mick Tisbury. Normal people don't run in the in the buildingswith temperatures of about 1,000 degrees Celsius.

If you've got half a brain, you'd be runningout. But we don't, we go in. Now, we've got gear that protects us from the heat, andwe wear breathing apparatus, but we’re still vulnerable to all these toxins.  Right around Australia firefighters were beingexposed to things they shouldn't have been exposed to, and families were losing peopleto cancers and various other diseases. A lot of those exposures are unavoidable.There's nothing we can do about that. But one of them was completely 100 per cent avoidable. Mick told me about a particularly nastychemical which was in the foams that firefighters used to put out chemical fires. And this chemicalwas called PFAS.

So perfluorinated chemicals are industrialchemicals, they're really fantastic because they've got really good heat resistant properties.They've got a long life, they're very effective at what they do. But it turns out that theseproducts may well have an adverse effect on human health. There are safe, viable alternatives. So, forthe life of me, I couldn't work out why anybody would be advocating the continueduse of these toxic products that harm not only firefighters, but also the public andthe environment. Mick has been behind the fight to get thesechemicals banned, not just in Australia but around the world. And it has been an almightybattle.

Me and Michael, we joined the Fire Service,the Metropolitan Fire Service in 1989, October, I vividly remember it. His father was adistrict officer or equivalent to a commander at these days. So, Michael, he had pedigreein the fire service. He always had an opinion and if he saw something wrong, he'd challengeit or at least question it. But that's what he's done for his 32 years.   Melbourne’s emergency authorities consider the Coode Island chemical dump their number-oneproblem spot. 1991, that's when Coode Island lit up andthat was Australia's largest chemical fire. Tanks storing millions of litres of chemicalswere blown apart like tin cans….

Oh, it was chaos, just a big ball of flamewhich won't go out. You've got hundreds of firefighters, multiple appliances. The smoke contained chemicals of various compoundsused to make plastic. Because of the nature of the chemicals forwater, wouldn't put them out. So we had to use foam. What that does is it stops the oxygengetting to it and also takes out some of the heat. The foam used on major chemical fires backthen was made by the international manufacturer 3M. This foam was known as AFFF, which standsfor aqueous film forming foam. And at the time we thought it was fantastic.

We were told it was a detergent, like Palmolive,it was biodegradable. So we used to sue it wash the dishes. It was a really good degreaser.We used to have to scrub down the engine bay floors at the start of each shift. We’dused the foam concentrate to do that and we wash it down the drain. Okay, that’s it, protect the person. Goodwork. I was away for Coode Island, but several yearsafter that Mick and I become instructors. And we were exposed to that foam quite regularly,more than any other firefighters, because we had to teach the recruits on its use onvirtually a day-by-day basis. Pay attention… water off.  .

And over the years we used to go off-sitequite a bit to the Fiskville training facility down past Ballan there in country Victoria,and that was owned and operated by the CFA, the Country Fire Authority.  The CFA was a separate organisation that primarilyran on volunteers. Tony and I worked for the Melbourne Fire Brigade that’s made up ofpaid career firefighters. It was actually quite novel to go up in the middle of ruralVictoria and some of the biggest fires you've ever seen would be set and you'd be you bethere on the end of a hose, using foam to put them out because they were flammable liquidfires, but we thought training was safe.  Fiskville was considered to be the dumpingground of some of these places that had a.

Lot of waste to get rid of and they thought,that's great, these guys need to burn some fuel, we can take it there. And it's a cheapway of us getting rid of some pretty nasty chemicals like benzene and toluene and variousother carcinogenic chemicals. And tens of thousands of firefighters had actually gonethrough this facility.   The water we used for firefighting was reused,continually and there were manmade dams to contain that water, capture the water andthen, then reuse it. We did seen layers of foam that that we'duse that had gone down the drains and it was sitting on the on the top of the dam. Andthen it would go back into the mix to come back out as safe-for-use water. You'd gettotally wet all over. It wasn't uncommon at.

Night-time to have rashes ongoing, but I assumedit was just having that wet item of clothing rubbing against my skin for so long, that'sall it was. There used to be a bit of a running joke:if you went to Fiskville, you ended up with a Fiskville flu or you ended up crook. TheCountry Fire Authority was saying, ‘It's all good, the water's fine’. And. And webelieved them. And we trusted them. But, with the benefit of hindsight, I shouldn't havetrusted them. I should have asked more questions. It was about the middle of 2011, the newsdeskhad been informed of some fella, Brian Potter, who was saying he'd been quite high in theCFA and that was suffering from a number of cancers. And he believed there was a cancercluster up at a CFA training college. I thought,.

‘Yeah, look, I'll put a call in to BrianPotter and to his wife Di’. Brian wasn't in a really good way at all with a multiplicityof diseases that he was actually suffering from, and it turns out only a few years frompassing away. He just very hesitatingly and carefully told his story about how he'd actuallyran the Fiskville training facility.  In the time we lived at Fiskville between 1978 and ‘80, we counted up there were ninepeople who had died of cancers or were very sick, but they were always very rare cancers,which that's what really made us wonder, well what was going on? There had to be somethinginvolved with Fiskville. But unfortunately, Country Fire Authority wouldn't have a barof it.

PFAS wasn't used in training at Fiskvillewhen Brian Potter was running the training centre. But once he lifted the lid on thechemicals that were being used there, it cracked open a really big issue and were it not forMick following up, the PFAS scandal may never have been revealed. Late 2011, I was at work and saw the frontpage of the Herald Sun and it said ‘Fiskville Cancer Cluster’. And went ‘What's thisabout?’. At this stage I was an elected official withthe with the United Firefighters Union. So, I started getting phone calls from other peopleasking me questions, and I didn't have any of the answers. So, then we went through aprocess to try and get the documentation from.

The Country Fire Authority, to say, ‘You'vebeen telling us that the water is safe, give us the documentation to show that it is’.Straight away the shutters went up. The CFA wouldn't give us the documentation. Eventually we used the powers under the Occupational Health and Safety Act – and it’s a legalprocess – to get access to the documents. And that was about the water quality. Andwhat we found is report after report after report that talked about, ‘This isn't safe,you should change the way you're doing business, change your work practices. You need tostart remediating some of this contamination that you've been causing’. When Mick phoned it was pretty clear he wasquite passionate about what he'd discovered,.

And he was very hard to ignore.    So, actually, when you were talking aboutthose redacted letters or those emails. We established a fair bit of trust. And shewas she was dogged and determined.  These emails show that was at 2012, that theyknew that they were poisoning firefighters. They knew it was heavily contaminated. Without her, I'm tipping this – we never wouldhave got this far.  It actually brings back a lot of emotion,doesn't it? He felt responsible for some of the the damagedone to recruits that he'd actually been in charge of sending up to Fiskville, not knowingwhat he was sending them into. .

Remember these people in charge of an organisationthat is supposed to protect Victorian lives?   2012 was the last recruit course I took down to Fiskville. This is the green water coming out of thetruck that we'd filled with off their water supply.  A couple of recruits come to me to say theyhad skin rashes and whatever occurring on their body. And they said the water wasgreen and the aroma coming off it was, was equally as bad.  And once again, you could tell how wet therecruits are.

Tony's texted me some photos and that waswhen we said, ‘That's it. It's not way this water's right. Stop the training immediately’. And I went straight to the, I think the chief at the time of the Metropolitan FireBrigade, And said, ‘This is what our people are training in, it's just happening rightnow’. And he agreed at the time saying, ‘Until we can find out what's going on here,err on the side of safety and we're pulling out’. That changed later on when they triedto force our firefighters to go back in there because WorkSafe said the CFA said it's safeso it must be safe.    Just after we walked off the Fiskville siteI got an aneurysm bleed, as such, and had an operation on the head. And then 2013, theyear after, I was diagnosed with prostate.

Cancer and that certainly opened my eyes andgot my head running as well about what to do.  I finally got some unredacted water qualityrecords dating back to the year 2000. And that's when I first discovered about PFOS.There was like, monthly water testing. And then every six months or so, there would bea one line saying: PFOS. There was no mention about what it was or where it was coming from. Iwent to WorkSafe, and they knew nothing about PFOS. And that's when I started speaking tointernational actual experts who have been studying, been in this field for years. You were intimately involved with Fiskvilleas a firefighter, weren’t you?.

Yeah, moreso as an instructor. I had been working in that area since 2000,so when Mick contacted me, I was able to give him a lot of background information. PFOSis just one member of a huge class of compounds, the PFAS molecules. It's used in a huge numberof other products. If you had bought your sofa or your car or your clothing in say,1990, they would almost certainly have contained PFOS. It's probably fair to say due to trainingwith foam it's a problem at every single military airfield in the world and most civilian airfieldsWe all have PFOS in our bloodstreams. And it turns out that firefighters in particularhave far more PFOS in their bloodstreams than they should have given the general populationlevels.

G’day, it’s Mick Tisbury here. There are significant number of studies thatshow that there's some adverse outcomes – thyroid disease, elevated levels of cholesterol, lowfoetal weight, for example, testicular cancer, kidney cancer – which are associated withthe use of these chemicals. The jury's still out at the moment about the causal links betweenthese chemicals and adverse human health outcomes. But what I would say is that the history ofenvironmental toxicology has showed that early concerns typically are borne out as furtherresearch and clinical studies are undertaken. The big change came in May 2000 when threeM announced it was withdrawing from PFOS-based manufacture based in principle on toxicologicalconcern. Testing had shown there were effects.

In laboratory animals. My employer, the Metropolitan Fire Brigade,started moving away from the 3M foam and then we went to another aqueous film forming foam.It wasn’t until 2010 that we got rid of these kinds of foams altogether. The problem is these are the forever chemicals.PFAS doesn't degrade very easily, it's easily transported, it's toxic and it's biocumulative.So if it gets into groundwater, it's easily remobilised and it's transported into waterways,gets into animals, gets remobilised, accumulates through the food chain, gets into the ocean,etcetera. And so, so much so that we can see perfluorinated chemicals in animals in theArctic, for example, because it's so readily.

Transported. It became clear that the contamination hadn'tjust stayed inside the Fiskville training facility’s boundaries, but had actuallyleached into neighbouring properties. A long-term study has confirmed there’sa cancer cluster at Victoria’s Fiskville firefighter training centre. A Monash Universitystudy of 600 people identified 69 cancers resulting in 16 deaths.    We had 92 acres and our property sort of likebacked onto the CFA boundary line. There'd just be this black smoke that would just comeout of nowhere. And there were times where I was on the horse and I'd nearly have anasthma attack because it was just so thick.  .

Charmaine’s dad Ned got in touch with me,and he talked about some of his livestock and the calves. So really healthy cattle wouldgive birth and they’d be stillborn, or they would have really weird deformities. Charmaineand her dad ended up having to leave the house they’d built. (Conversation between Mick and Charmaine)MICK: Every time you get a sniffle or a cough or something you think well what have I gotbecause I’ve been exposed to at this joint.   CHARMAINE: People just don’t understandthat. There are these mental health issues in regardto what's going to happen to me? Do I have a ticking time bomb in me, has it adverselyaffected the value of my property? All of.

Those things collectively add to people’sconcerns.  The new state government has announced a parliamentary inquiry into the operation of the firefightertraining site at Fiskville. In late 2014 when the Andrews Labor governmentis elected, one of the commitments that was made was that we would investigate Fiskville.Being on the committee, one of the frustrations I felt was the unwillingness to accept thatmaybe something had gone wrong. Tests have detected potentially dangeroustoxins in Fiskville’s water supply, and the government has ordered the closure ofthe centre, possibly for good. These toxins are in the potable, the drinkingwater.

In early 2015, Fiskville, is shut down andthis provokes a huge reaction amongst the community in Victoria. There are a lot ofvolunteer firefighters who are deeply, deeply upset. Mick Tisbury told the inquiry the CFA wasdeliberately contaminating the water with a fire-retarding organism. And it does seem that Mick cops a fair bitof that anger because he's the catalyst for all of this to happen. Don’t cover this up, which is what I’msaying the CFA have deliberately done. If you ever speak out against the countryfire authority, because they're a volunteer.

Organisation and the volunteers do a fantasticjob. If you ever speak out against this beloved institution, then it's like shooting Bambi.I’d do a press conference and the next day or night me letterbox would be destroyed orblown up on a couple of occasions. Then there'll be nothing. And then I'd do another pressconference and the rubbish bins would be destroyed. And then it started getting really nasty.I come home one day, and the dog was dead, but I thought it must have been hit by a car,or something. The kids also had a miniature pet pig, and that died. And then a coupleof weeks after that then I got photos of me and my child in the mail with some prettynasty comments on it and. And then there's a number of death threats on the phone.  .

The more Mick went public, the more his familysuffered. And they’re scarred from the whole ordeal. A bittersweet moment for families in Victoriatoday with a report finding authorities did not keep firefighters safe from contamination.There’s evidence that chemical contamination there is likely to have caused cancer andother illnesses. When the report comes out, we learn that theCFA could have done things better. That there was what I would consider to be a degree ofcover up around unsafe practices. This has been a long battle and it’s….sorry … the truth had to come out. We still don't know exactly what PFAS willdo, but I think we can safely say that the.

Levels of which firefighters have got in theirbodies is unacceptable. As the Chief Officer of the Country Fire Authoritytoday, I'm incredibly sorry for the experiences that anyone has had associated with Fiskvilleand exposures to firefighting foams and PFAS. The site behind me is the remediated trainingsite. All the contaminated soil has been encasedin a water, watertight casing. It is clear that in hindsight, CFA managementcould have done better. CFA now advocates for a culture around having people speak upwhen they have concerns. And certainly, as a result of the lessons learnt from Fiskville,you wouldn't see a repeat of what we did back then.

Just doing a site inspection here at the CorioFire Station. As we know this area was drenched with foams. I was sick to death of arguing. I was sickto death of fight. And all I wanted to do was focus on the solutions. The contractors are taking a scrape of thedirt. We know this stuff there. What I want to dois eliminate as many exposures as humanly possible from our firefighters and the Victoriancommunity. We're examining the water in here for PFAScontent after a rainfall event. Mick had done so much work establishing wherethe contaminations were and he had even gone.

Through a process of working out best practiceto clean out tankers where PFAS was, you know, there was still residue there. But that wasn'tenough. He's decided at some point he needs to work out how to get it out of the peoplethat it's already in.  Mick and the union fought hard to enable allfirefighters to have a free blood test if they chose to do so, to see what levels ofPFAS they had inside them. Tony, I figured that he would have high levelsthan I did because he spent more time at Fiskville than I did.  Anything over two, we were considered high.I was nine at the time. That was lower than Mick's, but surprisingly lower because I'dbeen at Fiskville so many times and taken.

So many courses down there been submergedin foam so often. I thought I would have had very high PFASlevels through my exposure. But when I tested to to go in to include it into the blood study,my levels were low. David was at Coode Island as I was, whichgot me thinking even more well why are my levels through the roof and he's really, reallylow. I did some research and found that females tended to have lower blood PFAS levels thanthe blokes did and I just sort of thought, well, maybe the menstrual cycle has somethingto do with it. I thought, David was a regular blood donor.Tony had lost a lot of blood because of the brain aneurysm. Tony was also a regular blooddonor and I was banned from giving blood because.

I was in the UK when they had that Mad CowDisease. And then I was down changing the oil in mywife's car and that's when it hit me. The reason you change the oil in your car is soyou don’t blow the engine up. Maybe you could do the same with us, with our blood.If we donate blood or plasma, then maybe that could be a way of getting this stuff out ofour body. I discussed it with Mick, and it seemed tome on its face seemed reasonable. I knew that PFAS was attached to proteins. There's a tonof proteins in blood. So if you're donating blood, you're also discharging proteins; thesame thing with plasma. You had plenty to drink and something to eatthis morning?.

Yes, feeling well. So we started on that long journey of tryingto set up this clinical trial to remove PFAS and we decided we would work with the firefighterswho would provide the cohort for us to do that work with. I got the funding for the study. Went throughall the ethics committees. It's been three years in the running, but the results showthat absolutely it works and it works beyond belief. It showed very clearly that the giving ofblood reduces PFAS levels by about 10 per cent over the year and the giving of plasmareduced PFAS by about 30 per cent over the.

Year. We’ve done it, so this is a world first,everybody said it couldn’t be done and we’ve been able to get these toxic chemicals outof our bodies. And Mick's initial idea was borne out by thefacts. The evidence was robust. It was very clear. It's a fantastic outcome. I'm very proud ofyou. So the firefighters who wanted the chemicalsout of their body now have a possibility of removing those chemicals from their body bydonating plasma or blood.  Some of the solutions and the strategies we'vebeen able to come up with. I'm sharing that.

With not just firefighters in Victoria, butall across the country and all across the world Passport?Got passport, most important. So then I was invited to present to the UNwith David Hamilton by my side. Here we are at Tullamarine airport. We're about to headoff to Geneva, to the United Nations Stockholm Convention. I'm a pretty pumped up. It'sso often you get to be on the world stage and fight for something worthwhile. It's a pretty big thing. You know, you gotgovernments, agencies, advocacy groups all in this one place at one time to get one shotat making change about the removal of these.

PFAS chemicals from our industry and otherindustries – banning this chemical. For 33 years I’ve attended far too manyfunerals of fellow firefighters. MICK TISBURY, ASSISTANT CHIEF FIRE OFFICER:It was the first time that a firefighter- an end user of this product – had ever beenasked to present and put our side of the story across.  Fire Rescue Victoria transitioned to flourinefree foam in 2010. In spite of this, our firefighters are still suffering the effects of legacyPFAS exposure. There was a fair bit of pushback from a numberof countries and they were saying there was nothing wrong with this stuff, that it wasokay. Finally, it went to a vote end of May,.

In the main auditorium with all the delegatesthere and all the resolutions were passed. So finally, after 20 years of struggles andarguments and kicking the can down the road, finally these nations, the United Nations,have decided to ban PFAS in our firefighting foam. That’s a pretty good outcome. Mick shows that you don't need to go off andearn letters after your name and spend 17 years studying. A passion for a cause andan ability to be able to just find solutions for a problem that affects people you careabout is all that's needed to do good. The Red Cross says there is no evidence thathigher PFAS levels in donated blood adversely affect recipients.Most Australian firefighting services have.

Now moved to PFAS-free foam.Australia is yet to ratify the United Nations’ ban on three PFAS chemicals.The Victorian Government has unveiled a new redress scheme for those affect by contaminationat Fiskville. This isn’t about compensation – this wasnever a money grab. This is about acknowledging what firefighters and those affected in thecommunity experienced. This will be closure for a lot of people and just for me personally,I just felt this 12-year burden lifted off my shoulder. And this is a really, reallygood thing.

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