The Portland Fire Department will soon replace the firefighting foam used in its trucks at the Portland International Jetport with a new solution free of toxic “forever chemicals.” Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

The Portland Fire Department will soon replace the firefighting foam used in its trucks at the Portland International Jetport with a new solution free of toxic “forever chemicals.”

There are  two fire trucks at the jetport that currently carry AFFF, a firefighting foam that – while highly effective – contains perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl, also known as PFAS, which are toxic even in small doses, said Deputy Chief John Cenate, who is overseeing the transition to the new foam.

The PFAS-free foam should be fully implemented by mid-November, Cenate said during a phone call Tuesday afternoon. But he said that’s not a hard deadline.

The department recently acquired a third truck and needs to finish training its firefighters on the new equipment before beginning to change out the foam. Department staff did not want to fill the new truck with the old foam and wanted to avoid using two types of foam at same time, Cenate said.

“Once we have that truck in service, we can start working on the other ones,” he said. “The foam that’s in it has to come out, and then there’s a cleaning process that we have to do, and then the tank is going to dry.”

It will likely take around three days per truck to swap the foam, he said.

The use of AFFF has garnered increased scrutiny in Maine since more than 50,000 gallons of toxic foam were discharged at the Brunswick Executive Airport in August.

Workers clean up firefighting foam containing forever chemicals that was discharged at Brunswick Executive Airport on Aug. 19. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer, file

While the Brunswick spill brought the foam into the limelight, Portland officials had planned to remove the foam months earlier, department spokesperson Sean Donaghue said.

“Everything kind of changed when the Brunswick thing happened,” Donaghue said during a phone call Tuesday. But “we’re ahead of this curve. We identified this a year ago.”

Cenate said the department began planning the swap in earnest roughly nine months ago.

In Brunswick, the foam was accidentally discharged from a fire suppression system inside a hangar.

But only one hangar at the jetport has such a foam system, and it already uses PFAS-free material, Cenate said. Once the trucks’ foam is replaced, there will be no more PFAs-laden foam at the jetport, he said.

Cenate is optimistic about the replacement foam’s firefighting capabilities, but he said it was so new to the market that there have been relatively few opportunities to test it outside of controlled environments.

“Nobody’s really had a chance to real-world use it,” Cenate said. “I think until it’s been out for a year or two, it’s going to be hard to determine if it’s going to be as good as AFFF was. Testing shows it does a lot of things just as good as AFFF does, but we’ll see.”