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☔Grab an umbrella. Showers likely, with highs in the 80s. Sunset is at 7:29 p.m.

Today we take a look at a promise around PFAS (the synthetic chemicals used in many products) that appears to have been broken. But first: there are plans to bring a massive data center campus to Westfield, a Pioneer Valley community of about 40,000 people just west of Springfield. That would mean about 10-14 buildings on 120 acres housing the servers that hold our cloud data, power the internet and drive AI.

“That would be a really big boon for our area,” Rep. Mike Finn, a Hampden County Democrat who sponsored a sales and use tax exemption for data centers, told the State House News Service. (Our NPR colleagues dug into job creation and energy impacts from data centers earlier this year.)

But with great, big data centers comes potentially great, big environmental impact. Tristan Thomas, director of policy for the nonprofit Alternatives for Community and Environment, said the state should consider that. 

“Absent new provisions around renewable energy requirements, demand response, environmental assessments and reporting, water use, air pollution and more, our economic strategies will directly contradict our climate goals and harm public health,” Thomas said.

Four Things to Know

1. Local immigration attorneys are concerned about a new US Citizenship and Immigration Services policy requiring officers to consider whether immigrants applying for anything, like obtaining or renewing status or seeking American citizenship, hold anti-American or antisemitic beliefs. 

“There’s no definition of antisemitism in the law. We’ve seen with Mahmoud Khalil [and] Rümeysa Öztürk that the definition of antisemitic has been expanded to really anyone who opposes what Israel is doing in Gaza,” immigration attorney Matt Cameron said. “There’s a footnote in this policy memo where they’re referring to INA 312, which was actually a McCarthy-era change to immigration law which allowed [the government] to exclude people who supported communism or totalitarianism.”

2. MassHealth, the state’s Medicaid program, will now cover postpartum depression screenings at every visit to primary care physicians, OB/GYNs and babies’ pediatricians in the year after birth.

“It just means people are going to be asked this question over and over again, and that in and of itself is really important because it normalizes it and it gets that conversation going,” Jessie Colbert, the leader of Massachusetts’ Mind the Gap Coalition, told GBH’s Hannah Reale.

3. After two years leading the state’s veterans services department, Dr. Jon Santiago is stepping down from his role to give more attention to his work as an emergency medicine physician at Boston Medical Center.

“We set out to restore trust in the veteran community, and today, Massachusetts has become a national model in how a state cares for its veterans,” he said in a statement. Deputy Secretary Andrea Gayle-Bennett will take over the department’s top job for now.

4. A group of ecologists with MassWildlife built a sort of “snake hotel” at the Muddy Brook Wildlife Management Area in Hardwick — a 20-by-20 foot hibernaculum made of cinder blocks, concrete and boulders that they hope snakes will slither into to find warmth as winter approaches.

They’re especially focused on the North American racer, a 4- to 6-foot long black snake that’s harmless to humans and helps keep small rodent populations in balance with the rest of the ecosystem. “A lot of these small rodents are not things we want around in numbers — they’re either tick vectors or farm pests,” state herpetologist Mike Jones said.

Quincy firefighter equipment tests positive for PFAS ‘forever chemicals’

This story starts with the city of Quincy trying to avoid chemicals in the PFAS family — which can provide some fire resistance but are known to cause cancer — in firefighters’ gear, GBH’s Craig LeMoult reports. In the last two years the city bought 30 protective gear sets from the company Safety Components in South Carolina.

But recently they sent one of those firefighter suits to a lab for independent testing.

“The new gear we bought — sold to us on the premise it had no PFAS in it, PFAS-free, that’s how it was advertised — was recently independently tested and came back highly positive with PFAS components in the gear,” Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch said.

Now the city is sending more suits in to be tested for the presence of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). The amount found on the first suit was less than that found in older firefighting gear, said Graham Peaslee, professor emeritus at Notre Dame who tested the gear. He called the chemicals’ presence “still obviously intentional.”

“We found something in there which is approaching a 10th of a percent,” Peaslee said. “Over a thousand parts per a million or 2,000 parts per million, or something like that. So that’s not trace. That actually has some function. It will provide some water repellency and things like that.”

A spokesperson for Safety Components said the company stopped using PFAS chemicals earlier this year and that they are looking into the allegations.

“Fluorine chemistry is not intentionally added in the manufacture of any Safety Components fabrics, including those used for firefighter turnout gear,” a spokesperson wrote in response to Craig’s request for comment. “The levels of fluorine detected by the testing performed by the City of Quincy were very low, and the source of the trace levels of fluorine detected has not been determined. Our latest testing of fabrics from our manufacturing facility, and used in firefighter turnout gear, showed no traces of fluorine.”

Peaslee said the amounts detected are far beyond what would be considered trace amounts.

Meanwhile Tom Bowes, president of Quincy’s Firefighters Local 792 union, said at Thursday’s press conference that two active firefighters and a few retired ones have what he called “occupational cancers.”

“We think about each of them every day, and the fights they’re going through,” Bowes said. “And after seeing what the hell just happened, we wonder if some of this sickness could have been avoided. These companies are paid to protect us — the protectors — and they have failed miserably.”

Read Craig LeMoult’s full story here. 

Dig deeper: 

-Soaring PFAS levels force a reckoning for worried Hyannis residents

-Should you toss your plastic kitchen tools for health reasons? Here’s the scoop

From PBS Newshour: Why firefighters face toxic smoke with little protection