PHILADELPHIA, PA — At a time when cigarette smoke clouded press boxes and club boxes, the Broad Street Bullies played next door, and powder blues were donned by the Phils unironically, one of the most notorious ballparks in the world was in south Philadelphia. It was a different age indeed, but for more than the cigar chomping fanatics in Rose and Schmidt jerseys, holding golf pencils and scorecards as they prowled above the bowels of a stadium so violent and anarchic it had its own court and its own prison.
Veterans Stadium, for all its grit and guts and glory, harbored a dark secret: chemicals in the artificial turf, the AstroTurf once proclaimed as a futuristic technological wonder, known to cause cancer and other deletrious effects. And not just any chemicals, but the "forever" chemicals called per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known collectively as PFAS, already infamous in the Philadelphia area and sparking scandal in communities around the country.
That's according to a new investigative report from the Inquirer, run by reporters who purchased souvenir samples of the old Vet turf online and commissioned diagnostics through a local Eurofins Environmental Testing laboratory.
It's the first study of its kind definitively linking PFAS to the Vet's playing surface, which has already been under scrutiny and faded from style for a generation due to the number of joint injuries it caused players.
https://patch.com/pennsylvania/norristown/veterans-stadiums-artifical-turf-had-cancerous-pfas-new-report-finds
