Don't Drink the Water!!!

Sometimes, the headline and the lead paragraph don't jive:

Kirtland water deemed safe despite fuel leak

By Michael Hoffman - Staff writer Posted : Wednesday Jul 16, 2008 11:01:31 EDT

Between six to 18 inches of jet fuel floats on top of the water table beneath Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M, and has spread to nearby Albuquerque due to leakage from a corroded underground fuel pipe (continued).

Now I am a gambling man, and that's one sentence that's going to make me walk past the water fountain and become a Poland Spring man, especially when I read this:

If ingested, a blend of water and jet fuel would be toxic and even trace amounts could cause cancer, said Michael Jess, a professor at the University of Nebraska’s Water Center.

Admittedly Dr. Jess is from Nebraska. You know what the 'N' on their helmet stands for? 'Nowledge. LOL, give me those ribs...

I must give credit to Col. Robert "Junior" Suminsby, who actually did a heck of a job communicating the facts. He's got some strong crisis communications chops:

“We knew the first question was going to be: What are you going to do about it?” Suminsby said. “Until we secured the funding for the additional wells and the remediation effort we didn’t have an answer for that question.”

That's the 100 percent correct answer, which was much better said than the initial base message:

"We decided it was better not to scare people right away."

Not to give him a free pass, Junior did provide one cringeworthy line:

“There’s an old saying out here that whiskey's for drinking and water is for fighting so we expected a certain amount of controversy on this,” Suminsby said.

As an expert on being an Air Force wiseass, take it from me, Junior, there's a time and a place for humor: and a potentially tainted water supply is not the time to break out the cowboy diplomacy.

In conclusion, I bet you can guess who I would love blame this all on...if I could only make the facts fit the case. Rest assured, I'll remain vigilant as I pursue the smoking gun...DEVELOPING...