A sought-after
speaker on the effects of PFAS contamination, attorney Tony Spaniola is
pictured at a town hall event in Oscoda on May 31 that he co-hosted with
U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin, who has been a strong advocate for environmental cleanup efforts.
By Tom Kirvan
Legal News
For decades, attorney Tony Spaniola’s family has owned a vacation home on Van Etten Lake, not far from the wind-swept shores of Lake Huron near the northern Michigan town of Oscoda.
The lakeside cottage has served as a year-round get-away for the Spaniola family, offering a scenic and peaceful place where they can express their love for the water, the forests, and the nearby Sunrise Coast of Michigan.
And then, in 2016, their experience took a decidedly wrong turn when the Spaniolas received a troubling letter from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, advising them to stop drinking their well-water because the aquifer had been contaminated. Hundreds of other residents along Van Etten Lake received the same letter from the state, immediately sparking concern that before long would turn to disgust, outrage, and action.
Legal News
For decades, attorney Tony Spaniola’s family has owned a vacation home on Van Etten Lake, not far from the wind-swept shores of Lake Huron near the northern Michigan town of Oscoda.
The lakeside cottage has served as a year-round get-away for the Spaniola family, offering a scenic and peaceful place where they can express their love for the water, the forests, and the nearby Sunrise Coast of Michigan.
And then, in 2016, their experience took a decidedly wrong turn when the Spaniolas received a troubling letter from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, advising them to stop drinking their well-water because the aquifer had been contaminated. Hundreds of other residents along Van Etten Lake received the same letter from the state, immediately sparking concern that before long would turn to disgust, outrage, and action.
The source of the contamination, residents soon learned, was traced to the decommissioned Wurtsmith Air Force Base that operated for 70 years before closing in 1993. There, at the base where scores of B-52 bombers were stationed during the height of the Cold War, resided a domestic-born enemy that for years had been leaching into nearby waters and aquifers at alarming levels.
PFAS.
In abbreviated form, PFAS stands for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances, a group of man-made chemicals that have been used in various industries and consumer products since the 1940s. The synthetic chemicals are known for their ability to repel water, grease, and stains, and are found in a range of items that includes non-stick cookware, firefighting foam, and water-resistant fabrics.
“At Wurtsmith, which is an absolutely massive base on the other side of the lake from us, the Air Force had a special site where they practiced extinguishing jet fuel fires, spraying the planes with a foam that is made of PFAS, otherwise known as ‘forever chemicals’ because of their persistence in the environment,” said Spaniola, one of the founders of the Ufer, Spaniola & Frost law firm in Troy. “This fire-fighting practice went on for years at Wurtsmith without any regard as to what the consequences would be to the environment.”
The fallout from the use of PFAS at Wurtsmith has spread far beyond its Up North environs, developing into an ongoing state and national health crisis that has been linked to assorted medical problems related to cancer, liver disease, and immune system disorders.
“There are more than 300 confirmed PFAS sites in Michigan alone, and more than 11,000 potential sites in the state that remain to be tested,” Spaniola indicated. “The numbers are staggering, and while Wurtsmith was the first site in Michigan to be identified back in 2010, it was also the first identified U.S. military PFAS site in the world. Today, there are approximately 1,500 U.S. military PFAS sites world-wide, including more than 700 in the U.S. It’s a coast-to-coast problem in the U.S., and the U.S. military is the largest PFAS polluter in the country.”
An honors graduate of Harvard University, Spaniola over the past decade has become a leading national voice for PFAS-impacted families and communities, helping spearhead action on the local, state, and federal levels to address the use of harmful “forever chemicals.”
In 2017, Spaniola and Oscoda resident Cathy Wusterbarth co-founded Need Our Water (NOW), a community action group formed to take up the fight against PFAS contamination in the northern Michigan community.
PFAS.
In abbreviated form, PFAS stands for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances, a group of man-made chemicals that have been used in various industries and consumer products since the 1940s. The synthetic chemicals are known for their ability to repel water, grease, and stains, and are found in a range of items that includes non-stick cookware, firefighting foam, and water-resistant fabrics.
“At Wurtsmith, which is an absolutely massive base on the other side of the lake from us, the Air Force had a special site where they practiced extinguishing jet fuel fires, spraying the planes with a foam that is made of PFAS, otherwise known as ‘forever chemicals’ because of their persistence in the environment,” said Spaniola, one of the founders of the Ufer, Spaniola & Frost law firm in Troy. “This fire-fighting practice went on for years at Wurtsmith without any regard as to what the consequences would be to the environment.”
The fallout from the use of PFAS at Wurtsmith has spread far beyond its Up North environs, developing into an ongoing state and national health crisis that has been linked to assorted medical problems related to cancer, liver disease, and immune system disorders.
“There are more than 300 confirmed PFAS sites in Michigan alone, and more than 11,000 potential sites in the state that remain to be tested,” Spaniola indicated. “The numbers are staggering, and while Wurtsmith was the first site in Michigan to be identified back in 2010, it was also the first identified U.S. military PFAS site in the world. Today, there are approximately 1,500 U.S. military PFAS sites world-wide, including more than 700 in the U.S. It’s a coast-to-coast problem in the U.S., and the U.S. military is the largest PFAS polluter in the country.”
An honors graduate of Harvard University, Spaniola over the past decade has become a leading national voice for PFAS-impacted families and communities, helping spearhead action on the local, state, and federal levels to address the use of harmful “forever chemicals.”
In 2017, Spaniola and Oscoda resident Cathy Wusterbarth co-founded Need Our Water (NOW), a community action group formed to take up the fight against PFAS contamination in the northern Michigan community.
A toxic foam coated the shores of Van Etten Lake in Oscoda on December 6, 2017, alarming the 280 members of the Van Etten Lake Association of property owners who called upon the U.S. Air Force to remediate the water contamination in the lake and nearby Au Sable River region.
“In 2016, it felt like a PFAS bomb was dropped by our own military and we were in shock,” said Wusterbarth, a registered dietician who suddenly was thrust into the role of an “accidental activist” in the environmental battle. “We then desperately looked around to others for help. We saw how some people and organizations took swift action, and others like our polluter, the U.S. Air Force, and the regulator, the state of Michigan, sat on their hands, unable or unwilling to take action.”
The NOW group then gave rise to the Great Lakes PFAS Action Network (GLPAN) to “provide a voice for PFAS-impacted communities and people across the Great Lakes region,” according to Spaniola, co-founder of the organization that has a mission to prevent and clean up toxic PFAS contamination.
“It is absolutely essential to have impacted communities at the table when decisions are being made to address our water contamination issues,” Spaniola insisted, noting the importance of educating and informing decision-makers on the need for urgent action on the crisis.
“Do whatever you can to protect your family from PFAS contamination and exposures,” said Spaniola. “Ask questions, and don’t stop until you’ve gotten satisfactory answers. You are your own best advocate, but always remember that you’re not alone. Reach out to GLPAN. Take advantage of GLPAN’s written resources, and talk with others in your community and the GLPAN family of communities. We are all in this together.”
The message is one that Spaniola heard conveyed long ago when Michigan was in the midst of an epic health disaster tied to another little-known chemical – PBB.
Spaniola was just a teen when the PBB (short for polybrominated biphenyl) crisis rocked Michigan in the 1970s, but thanks to his father he quickly became engulfed in legislative efforts to address one of the most catastrophic contamination disasters in American history.
His now 90-year-old father, Francis “Bus” Spaniola, was a high school history and government teacher who with his wife Carol raised their family of four children in Corunna, the county seat of Shiawassee County. The mid-Michigan community was among the rural regions that were on edge due to the unfolding PBB crisis that was triggered in 1973 when a toxic flame retardant was mistakenly sent to Michigan farmers in their livestock feed.
When the toxin – which accidentally took the place of a nutritional supplement due to a shipping error – was mixed into livestock feed, the results proved deadly, costing the lives of more than 30,000 cows and an estimated 1.5 million chickens, along with thousands of pigs, sheep, and rabbits, according to state agricultural officials. The contamination impacted the food chain across the entire state, and nearly all of Michigan’s more than 9 million residents ingested PBB-tainted meat, poultry, and dairy products.
“To say it was an unmitigated disaster, would be a gross understatement,” Spaniola said of the PBB crisis that has rippled through generations of families who ate PBB-contaminated foods or somehow ingested tainted water. “Many people felt that such a thing would never happen again, but here we are in the midst of another contamination crisis, with PFAS, that is even more widespread.”
In 1974, Spaniola’s father decided to run for state office.
“He ran as a Democrat in a solidly Republican district for a seat in the state House of Representatives,” Spaniola said of his father. “I ran his campaign as a teen-ager, as he flipped the seat, campaigning door-to-door and farm-to-farm on issues that hit home for people in our area. After he was elected, the PBB crisis erupted, and he took up the cause of farmers across the state who were encountering health and livestock problems and were not getting any answers from state agricultural or health officials.”
“Sadly, those state officials were very much in denial about what was going wrong,” Spaniola indicated. “They kept saying, ‘We don’t see any connection,’ and labeled those who were pushing for answers as ‘glory seekers.’”
Their perception lost out, as enraged farmers and consumers across the state increasingly demanded action in Lansing. As public pressure mounted, renowned researcher Dr. Irving Selikoff of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York became involved at the urging of a legislative staffer working with the elder Spaniola. Selikoff gained medical fame in the 1960s when he established a link between the inhalation of asbestos particles and lung-related ailments such as mesothelioma and cancer.
“My dad sponsored critical PBB legislation that became stalled in the Senate Agriculture Committee due to claims that there was not sufficient scientific evidence linking PBB to cancer. In response, Selikoff insisted that the Committee and my dad come to his lab in New York City to see the evidence for themselves,” Spaniola said. “I drove out there with my dad and was one of a small handful of people to witness an important piece of Michigan history.
“I remember it vividly,” Spaniola recalled. “Dr. Selikoff’s team methodically outlined their evidence and then presented the compelling conclusion that PBB was linked to cancers. At that moment, the whole room went eerily silent, as people came to grips with the profound realization that an entire state had, beyond a doubt, been poisoned – with impacts that would last for decades.”
As a result of Selikoff’s findings, the elder Spaniola’s PBB legislation was swiftly passed and signed into law. It included measures to set PBB safety standards in food and agricultural products; to compensate farmers who suffered losses due to the contamination; and to establish a longitudinal health study of PBB impacted families that is still ongoing today.
The elder Spaniola also sponsored legislation that was subsequently signed into law, establishing the Michigan Cancer Registry to promote health research in the state, an idea brought to him by his son, who by this time was a student at Harvard where he continued his first-hand interest in real world politics.
“After a stint in radio news here in Michigan, I worked in college as a news writer for WBZ Radio in Boston under a special Nieman Foundation/Harvard project that was designed for me,” Spaniola related. “It was great training for working under deadline pressure and, down the road, for my work with the media on PFAS issues.”
The work proved beneficial during his four years at Harvard, where he obtained a degree in government in 1981 shortly after getting married to his high school sweetheart, Kim, an honors student at Boston University. Married housing came at a premium on the Harvard campus, but the newlyweds were fortunate to snag an apartment in an historic Cambridge neighborhood, near the Harvard campus.
“We ended up living on the same street as Julia Child and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and a street over from John Kenneth Galbraith,” Spaniola said in amazement, noting that he had previously lived on-campus in the same dorm as famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
Spaniola, who had been accepted at the University of Chicago Law School, took his academic talents to the University of Michigan Law School instead, earning his juris doctor with honors while serving on the editorial board of the Michigan Law Review. Upon graduation from U-M, he had job offers from major firms across the country but elected to take a job with the Detroit-based firm of Dickinson Wright.
It was at Dickinson that Spaniola met a Yale grad, Robert P. Ufer, who earned his law degree from Harvard.
“Bob is a brilliant business attorney and after working together, we both left Dickinson in the mid-‘80s before forming our own firm in 1987,” Spaniola said of their joint legal journey that resulted in the creation of Ufer, Spaniola & Frost, a Troy law firm that handles commercial transactions, M & A work, real estate matters, and corporate counseling.
“For a time, Bob served as commissioner of the International Hockey League before he became involved in forming a number of service companies that offered franchise opportunities,” Spaniola indicated. “He has an entrepreneurial spirit and also has positively impacted the educational and charitable worlds.”
As Ufer transitioned into an Of Counsel role with the firm, Spaniola and long-time partner Adam Frost assumed more and more legal duties practicing commercial law and managing and growing the firm. With strong support from Ufer and Frost, Spaniola has deftly handled his “day job,” while “working closely with officials in Michigan, in Congress, at the Pentagon, and at the White House to champion PFAS policies helping ordinary people across the state and throughout the nation.”
For his efforts to protect the environment, Spaniola has been honored by organizations and political leaders far and wide. In 2021, the Michigan League of Conservation Voters presented Spaniola with its Equity and the Environment Leadership Award, saluting him for helping “bring the PFAS crisis to the attention of candidates and elected officials in Michigan” and in helping to draft “the first PFAS legislation introduced in the Michigan Legislature.”
In 2024, then Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin (now a U.S. Senator) recognized Spaniola in a special Congressional Record tribute.
“Because of his relentless advocacy and uncanny ability to bring stakeholders together, Tony has earned the respect and the ear of senior Pentagon leadership . . . and has played a major role in pushing the Department of Defense to act more urgently on PFAS,” Slotkin said. After presenting the tribute, Slotkin noted that “there's not a single activist in the country who has [Tony’s] pick up the phone level of intimacy with… an Under Secretary of Defense [Bill LaPlante, the then-third in command at the Pentagon]. And that relationship changed Bill LaPlante and changed the world in my mind.”
That same year, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist offered Spaniola special praise as well.
“Tony ... has championed projects to test water in areas throughout Michigan for PFAS in hopes of protecting surrounding communities before contamination progresses,” the Governor and Lt. Governor said. “Tony has dedicated his time and energy to reducing the negative effects of PFAS contamination and the impact he has created is inspiring to all of us.”
In his book, “The Big Water,” author Thomas Buhr lauded both Spaniola and his father, stating, “Tony…and Bus Spaniola have played significant roles … addressing both the PBB and PFAS [crises] over the past 45 years. No two people have done more to clean up the stain of legacy pollutants in Michigan.”
While such praise is “greatly appreciated” and “humbling,” Spaniola knows his work has become even more challenging in light of the current political climate in Washington.
“Our efforts to hold polluters accountable is a bipartisan matter that will take a collective determination to be successful,” said Spaniola. “This should not be framed as a partisan political issue. It is a health issue that crosses all political lines.”
His now 90-year-old father, Francis “Bus” Spaniola, was a high school history and government teacher who with his wife Carol raised their family of four children in Corunna, the county seat of Shiawassee County. The mid-Michigan community was among the rural regions that were on edge due to the unfolding PBB crisis that was triggered in 1973 when a toxic flame retardant was mistakenly sent to Michigan farmers in their livestock feed.
When the toxin – which accidentally took the place of a nutritional supplement due to a shipping error – was mixed into livestock feed, the results proved deadly, costing the lives of more than 30,000 cows and an estimated 1.5 million chickens, along with thousands of pigs, sheep, and rabbits, according to state agricultural officials. The contamination impacted the food chain across the entire state, and nearly all of Michigan’s more than 9 million residents ingested PBB-tainted meat, poultry, and dairy products.
“To say it was an unmitigated disaster, would be a gross understatement,” Spaniola said of the PBB crisis that has rippled through generations of families who ate PBB-contaminated foods or somehow ingested tainted water. “Many people felt that such a thing would never happen again, but here we are in the midst of another contamination crisis, with PFAS, that is even more widespread.”
In 1974, Spaniola’s father decided to run for state office.
“He ran as a Democrat in a solidly Republican district for a seat in the state House of Representatives,” Spaniola said of his father. “I ran his campaign as a teen-ager, as he flipped the seat, campaigning door-to-door and farm-to-farm on issues that hit home for people in our area. After he was elected, the PBB crisis erupted, and he took up the cause of farmers across the state who were encountering health and livestock problems and were not getting any answers from state agricultural or health officials.”
“Sadly, those state officials were very much in denial about what was going wrong,” Spaniola indicated. “They kept saying, ‘We don’t see any connection,’ and labeled those who were pushing for answers as ‘glory seekers.’”
Their perception lost out, as enraged farmers and consumers across the state increasingly demanded action in Lansing. As public pressure mounted, renowned researcher Dr. Irving Selikoff of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York became involved at the urging of a legislative staffer working with the elder Spaniola. Selikoff gained medical fame in the 1960s when he established a link between the inhalation of asbestos particles and lung-related ailments such as mesothelioma and cancer.
“My dad sponsored critical PBB legislation that became stalled in the Senate Agriculture Committee due to claims that there was not sufficient scientific evidence linking PBB to cancer. In response, Selikoff insisted that the Committee and my dad come to his lab in New York City to see the evidence for themselves,” Spaniola said. “I drove out there with my dad and was one of a small handful of people to witness an important piece of Michigan history.
“I remember it vividly,” Spaniola recalled. “Dr. Selikoff’s team methodically outlined their evidence and then presented the compelling conclusion that PBB was linked to cancers. At that moment, the whole room went eerily silent, as people came to grips with the profound realization that an entire state had, beyond a doubt, been poisoned – with impacts that would last for decades.”
As a result of Selikoff’s findings, the elder Spaniola’s PBB legislation was swiftly passed and signed into law. It included measures to set PBB safety standards in food and agricultural products; to compensate farmers who suffered losses due to the contamination; and to establish a longitudinal health study of PBB impacted families that is still ongoing today.
The elder Spaniola also sponsored legislation that was subsequently signed into law, establishing the Michigan Cancer Registry to promote health research in the state, an idea brought to him by his son, who by this time was a student at Harvard where he continued his first-hand interest in real world politics.
“After a stint in radio news here in Michigan, I worked in college as a news writer for WBZ Radio in Boston under a special Nieman Foundation/Harvard project that was designed for me,” Spaniola related. “It was great training for working under deadline pressure and, down the road, for my work with the media on PFAS issues.”
The work proved beneficial during his four years at Harvard, where he obtained a degree in government in 1981 shortly after getting married to his high school sweetheart, Kim, an honors student at Boston University. Married housing came at a premium on the Harvard campus, but the newlyweds were fortunate to snag an apartment in an historic Cambridge neighborhood, near the Harvard campus.
“We ended up living on the same street as Julia Child and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and a street over from John Kenneth Galbraith,” Spaniola said in amazement, noting that he had previously lived on-campus in the same dorm as famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
Spaniola, who had been accepted at the University of Chicago Law School, took his academic talents to the University of Michigan Law School instead, earning his juris doctor with honors while serving on the editorial board of the Michigan Law Review. Upon graduation from U-M, he had job offers from major firms across the country but elected to take a job with the Detroit-based firm of Dickinson Wright.
It was at Dickinson that Spaniola met a Yale grad, Robert P. Ufer, who earned his law degree from Harvard.
“Bob is a brilliant business attorney and after working together, we both left Dickinson in the mid-‘80s before forming our own firm in 1987,” Spaniola said of their joint legal journey that resulted in the creation of Ufer, Spaniola & Frost, a Troy law firm that handles commercial transactions, M & A work, real estate matters, and corporate counseling.
“For a time, Bob served as commissioner of the International Hockey League before he became involved in forming a number of service companies that offered franchise opportunities,” Spaniola indicated. “He has an entrepreneurial spirit and also has positively impacted the educational and charitable worlds.”
As Ufer transitioned into an Of Counsel role with the firm, Spaniola and long-time partner Adam Frost assumed more and more legal duties practicing commercial law and managing and growing the firm. With strong support from Ufer and Frost, Spaniola has deftly handled his “day job,” while “working closely with officials in Michigan, in Congress, at the Pentagon, and at the White House to champion PFAS policies helping ordinary people across the state and throughout the nation.”
For his efforts to protect the environment, Spaniola has been honored by organizations and political leaders far and wide. In 2021, the Michigan League of Conservation Voters presented Spaniola with its Equity and the Environment Leadership Award, saluting him for helping “bring the PFAS crisis to the attention of candidates and elected officials in Michigan” and in helping to draft “the first PFAS legislation introduced in the Michigan Legislature.”
In 2024, then Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin (now a U.S. Senator) recognized Spaniola in a special Congressional Record tribute.
“Because of his relentless advocacy and uncanny ability to bring stakeholders together, Tony has earned the respect and the ear of senior Pentagon leadership . . . and has played a major role in pushing the Department of Defense to act more urgently on PFAS,” Slotkin said. After presenting the tribute, Slotkin noted that “there's not a single activist in the country who has [Tony’s] pick up the phone level of intimacy with… an Under Secretary of Defense [Bill LaPlante, the then-third in command at the Pentagon]. And that relationship changed Bill LaPlante and changed the world in my mind.”
That same year, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist offered Spaniola special praise as well.
“Tony ... has championed projects to test water in areas throughout Michigan for PFAS in hopes of protecting surrounding communities before contamination progresses,” the Governor and Lt. Governor said. “Tony has dedicated his time and energy to reducing the negative effects of PFAS contamination and the impact he has created is inspiring to all of us.”
In his book, “The Big Water,” author Thomas Buhr lauded both Spaniola and his father, stating, “Tony…and Bus Spaniola have played significant roles … addressing both the PBB and PFAS [crises] over the past 45 years. No two people have done more to clean up the stain of legacy pollutants in Michigan.”
While such praise is “greatly appreciated” and “humbling,” Spaniola knows his work has become even more challenging in light of the current political climate in Washington.
“Our efforts to hold polluters accountable is a bipartisan matter that will take a collective determination to be successful,” said Spaniola. “This should not be framed as a partisan political issue. It is a health issue that crosses all political lines.”
________________________________________________________
Attorney turned activist has made the
rounds in political, media circles
By Tom Kirvan
Legal News
When he became engulfed in a nearly decade-long battle to curb the spread of PFAS contamination in 2016, attorney Tony Spaniola could have hardly imagined where that journey would take him.
After all, he had spent most of his life in the world of commercial law, dealing with high-stakes legal matters involving mergers and acquisitions, real estate purchases, and corporate governance matters and strategies.
Legal News
When he became engulfed in a nearly decade-long battle to curb the spread of PFAS contamination in 2016, attorney Tony Spaniola could have hardly imagined where that journey would take him.
After all, he had spent most of his life in the world of commercial law, dealing with high-stakes legal matters involving mergers and acquisitions, real estate purchases, and corporate governance matters and strategies.
Suddenly, he was thrust into an altogether different role as an environmental activist, meeting with political leaders in Lansing and Washington, D.C., and with military officials at the Pentagon.
Before long, he was appearing on various radio and television outlets, “including in-depth, special reports on ABC News, PBS News, and CNBC” as his national profile as an articulate and knowledgeable environmental advocate took shape.
“I even was invited to speak before the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine at their inaugural PFAS symposium in Washington,” Spaniola said with a sense of incredulity.
“There I was, a non-scientist, talking to an august group of some of the most respected scientists in the country. In my mind, it was an important opportunity to speak truth to power – to remind them that the scientific community had overlooked PFAS for decades and that the most seminal PFAS scientific discoveries had come in response to ordinary people demanding answers to real-life problems.
“I was not sure how they’d respond,” Spaniola noted, “but in the end, my message, urging them to partner with PFAS-impacted communities in their research, was very well-received.”
In 2024, Spaniola was in the rarefied air of the White House for his pivotal role in bringing about the first-ever national PFAS drinking water standards that were established that year.
By that time, Spaniola had been involved in crafting an “expedited PFAS cleanup strategy that was adopted by the Pentagon as a national policy directive at more than 700 military installations around the country.” His efforts also led to the “reorganization of the U.S. Air Force’s environmental cleanup program at 39 inactive Air Force installations nationwide – and to the establishment of the Bipartisan Congressional PFAS Task Force, which currently numbers more than 50 members of the U.S. House of Representatives.”
In 2019, Spaniola’s work attracted the attention of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sara Ganim, who at age 24 broke the story that uncovered the sexual abuse of young boys by Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.
“Sara originally approached me about being part of a chapter in a book she was writing, but once she got a sense of how involved and widespread this PFAS problem is, she decided to turn it into a documentary film instead,” Spaniola explained.
The result was the critically acclaimed “No Defense: The U.S. Military’s War on Water,” a 75-minute documentary that highlights the poisonous impact on the Oscoda community, as ground zero for PFAS-impacted military communities across the nation. The film premiered at a sold-out Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor in February 2020, just weeks before the COVID lockdown began.
“It’s a powerful documentary that brings to light the devastating impacts that PFAS can have on families, on a community, and on our country,” said Spaniola, who served as a consultant to Ganim in the production of the film. “In many respects, it is another true story of the likes of ‘Erin Brockovich’ and ‘Dark Waters.’ It’s a movie that should be seen by all.”
Before long, he was appearing on various radio and television outlets, “including in-depth, special reports on ABC News, PBS News, and CNBC” as his national profile as an articulate and knowledgeable environmental advocate took shape.
“I even was invited to speak before the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine at their inaugural PFAS symposium in Washington,” Spaniola said with a sense of incredulity.
“There I was, a non-scientist, talking to an august group of some of the most respected scientists in the country. In my mind, it was an important opportunity to speak truth to power – to remind them that the scientific community had overlooked PFAS for decades and that the most seminal PFAS scientific discoveries had come in response to ordinary people demanding answers to real-life problems.
“I was not sure how they’d respond,” Spaniola noted, “but in the end, my message, urging them to partner with PFAS-impacted communities in their research, was very well-received.”
In 2024, Spaniola was in the rarefied air of the White House for his pivotal role in bringing about the first-ever national PFAS drinking water standards that were established that year.
By that time, Spaniola had been involved in crafting an “expedited PFAS cleanup strategy that was adopted by the Pentagon as a national policy directive at more than 700 military installations around the country.” His efforts also led to the “reorganization of the U.S. Air Force’s environmental cleanup program at 39 inactive Air Force installations nationwide – and to the establishment of the Bipartisan Congressional PFAS Task Force, which currently numbers more than 50 members of the U.S. House of Representatives.”
In 2019, Spaniola’s work attracted the attention of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sara Ganim, who at age 24 broke the story that uncovered the sexual abuse of young boys by Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky.
“Sara originally approached me about being part of a chapter in a book she was writing, but once she got a sense of how involved and widespread this PFAS problem is, she decided to turn it into a documentary film instead,” Spaniola explained.
The result was the critically acclaimed “No Defense: The U.S. Military’s War on Water,” a 75-minute documentary that highlights the poisonous impact on the Oscoda community, as ground zero for PFAS-impacted military communities across the nation. The film premiered at a sold-out Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor in February 2020, just weeks before the COVID lockdown began.
“It’s a powerful documentary that brings to light the devastating impacts that PFAS can have on families, on a community, and on our country,” said Spaniola, who served as a consultant to Ganim in the production of the film. “In many respects, it is another true story of the likes of ‘Erin Brockovich’ and ‘Dark Waters.’ It’s a movie that should be seen by all.”
Tony Spaniola is pictured with documentary filmmaker Sara Ganim (center), a former CNN investigative journalist, at the 2020 premiere of “No Defense.” Also pictured at right is Lisa Wozniak, executive director of the Michigan League of Conservation Voters, a non-partisan organization dedicated to protecting our air, land, and water.
––––––––––––––––––––
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