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The East Valley Tribune (Serving Mesa, Scottsdale, and Gilbert/Chandler, Arizona) reports that “State officials are preparing to clean contaminated groundwater near Guadalupe and Cooper roads in Gilbert in an effort to prevent future drinking water hazards.”
They also provide a handy link to the Arizona DEQ website where you can run a search for Gilbert facts and news. There you’ll find all sorts of neat stuff — like the Cooper and Commerce Water Quality Assurance Revolving Fund Site fact sheet (PDF, 212K) for instance.
Update: We reviewed the Gilbert site fact sheet above. It does not specify contamination levels in Gilbert. Why would they omit this fact?? The sheet just says contaminants (TCE and PCE included) are known to be present in the groundwater above regulatory levels. Perhaps the contamination levels are available elsewhere, but what good is a fact sheet if it’s missing such an important fact?
Here’s another important piece on TCE From the LA Times (CA) with national scope/importance. This was on Thursday’s front page:
Cancer Stalks a ‘Toxic Triangle’
Scientists disagree about the risks of TCE. But residents near a former air base are dead certain.
By Ralph Vartabedian
Times Staff Writer
March 30, 2006
SAN ANTONIO — On nearly every block surrounding the former Kelly Air Force Base, small purple crosses sprout from front lawns, marking the homes where cancer has struck.
The residents call their neighborhood the “toxic triangle,” alleging that the Air Force poisoned it with an industrial solvent, trichloroethylene, or TCE. It was casually dumped at the base for decades and spread for miles through a shallow aquifer under 22,000 nearby houses.
Texas health authorities have found elevated rates of liver cancer among residents, as well as higher-than-normal rates of birth defects. Though state health officials say it is impossible to prove that TCE causes the sickness here, this blue-collar community has little doubt about the connection.
“We are dying day by day,” said Robert Alvarado Sr., who has lived in a small clapboard home for 36 years that sits about 14 feet over the TCE plume. “I have kidney failure, my wife has thyroid cancer, my neighbor just died of breast cancer.”
What’s happening in this neighborhood of modest low-slung homes, crisscrossed by railroad tracks and dominated by aircraft hangars on the horizon, has been playing out for years at other cities that are home to military bases, industrial plants, nuclear weapons laboratories and NASA centers.
Hundreds of communities with major TCE contamination have waited more than a decade for scientists to explain the cancer risks created by exposure to TCE. The clear solvent used to take grease off metal parts is officially branded as a probable carcinogen by half a dozen state, federal and international agencies. It is most often linked to liver and kidney cancer, as well as birth defects and childhood leukemia.
But scientists representing major polluters, particularly the Department of Defense, have successfully delayed action on scientific assessments that TCE is a far graver threat to public health than recognized by federal standards. When the Environmental Protection Agency drafted a TCE assessment in 2001, finding that it was far more toxic than originally believed, the issue was wrested from the EPA’s control.
A panel of elite scientists organized by the National Academy of Sciences will issue a report this summer that is supposed to shape government policy on TCE. The report is all but certain to intensify the battle — no matter what it says.
If the academy endorses the view that TCE is a big risk, it would lay the groundwork for stricter cleanup standards across the nation and probably lower permissible levels of TCE in the environment. If it rejects the EPA’s earlier research, it will trigger a political rebellion by exposed communities.
“If the national academy comes out with some kind of a weaker standard, it is going to ignite this all over again,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who has fought regulatory delays along with other Democrats and Republicans in Congress. “We are headed for a battle.”
The national academy has been working on its report for more than a year and is now as much as six months behind schedule. One member of the group, Harvard University professor Thomas J. Smith, said the group was dealing with many missing pieces of a difficult puzzle and many bits of data that don’t seem to fit anywhere. “It is a complicated picture,” Smith said.
Even after the national academy issues its report, the matter will go back to the EPA for another risk assessment that could take another two years. Any further regulatory action to reduce public exposure to TCE could take several more years. The EPA first began amassing scientific data in the mid-1990s and began assessing the risks in 1997.
It is a pace that has left TCE exposure victims disheartened and angry.
Anne Elizabeth Townsend died a month ago in Moscow, Idaho, the result of liver disease and TCE exposure, according to her death certificate and a liver biopsy.
She was married to Tom Townsend, a former major in the Marine Corps who was based at highly polluted Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, after returning seriously injured from combat duty in Vietnam in 1965.
The Townsends lived at the Paradise Point housing complex, which was served by a base water-supply system that carried 1,400 parts per billion of TCE, a later investigation by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry would disclose.
The current EPA limit on TCE in drinking water is 5 ppb. The standard might have dropped to 1 ppb had the risk assessment conducted by the EPA in 2001 been adopted, experts say.
In 1967, the Townsends had a son born with cardiovascular birth defects. He lived only three months.
“We had an autopsy done and there wasn’t a system in his body that wasn’t screwed up,” said Townsend, a retired college administrator and a former city councilman. “That autopsy report had 10 pages of findings. It was a mercy that he didn’t last.
“They wiped out two members of my family,” Townsend, 75, added. “I am proud that I served in the Marines, but there are some days I want to forget that I did.”
The Marine Corps was alerted to the TCE contamination in 1980, but did not disclose the pollution or make any changes to its water system until 1985. It was a five-year period in which thousands of Marines were exposed.
At the request of Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.), the Government Accountability Office is investigating whether the Marine Corps covered up the TCE problems at the base.
“Nearly 20 years have elapsed since the last contaminated well was closed at Camp Lejeune, and we are still unable to address the related concerns of former residents,” Dole wrote in 2004.
“We have an obligation to provide them with definitive answers to their questions regarding the circumstances and extent of the contamination as well as the likely adverse health effects.”
Among Dole’s concerns is the slow pace of a study by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A still-incomplete study of 12,598 children born at the base from 1968 to 1985 found 103 cases of cancer and birth defects, including 22 cases of leukemia, double the national average. No studies have been conducted of the adult men or women who drank the base water.
Jerry Ensminger, a former Marine drill sergeant, lived at the base in the 1970s and his wife gave birth to a daughter in 1976. Their daughter, Janey, died of leukemia at age 9.
He has been fighting to force the Marine Corps to notify tens of thousands of Marines, their families and civilian employees exposed to TCE. He formed a group, “The Few, The Proud, The Forgotten,” — along with a website (www.tftptf.com) — to reach out to Marine families.
“The Marine Corps has done everything in its power to not notify the people who were exposed,” Ensminger, 53, said. “There is something wrong with our government.”
TCE is the most widespread water contaminant in the nation, present at 1,400 Defense Department pollution sites, according to Air Force documents.
The Defense Department contends that scientific evidence that TCE causes cancer is weak and that the EPA needs to conduct more studies before tightening its standards or ordering tougher cleanups.
Certainly, not all TCE contamination was caused by government agencies. It is estimated that at least hundreds, perhaps thousands, of current and former industrial sites across the nation have TCE pollution.
When the National Academy of Sciences held a public hearing at UC Irvine last year, Amanda Evans showed up carrying an urn with her father’s ashes. Gary Evans died of liver cancer in 2002, after working as a vice president at a View-Master factory in Beaverton, Ore., owned by Mattel Inc. The company acquired the manufacturing plant in its 1997 merger with Tyco Toys and closed the factory in 2001.
The plant used TCE extensively to degrease metal parts for the stereoscopic viewers produced there, though TCE use had ceased long before Mattel acquired the plant. The TCE was released into the soil, where it contaminated an aquifer that supplied the plant’s drinking water. A later government investigation found the aquifer had TCE levels of 1,670 ppb.
As many as 25,000 workers were exposed to TCE at the plant since the mid-1960s, according to a 2004 report by the Oregon Department of Human Services. Based on a list of about half of those workers, the study found nearly triple the expected rate of kidney cancer and double the expected rate of pancreatic cancer.
Evans, who works in the entertainment industry, founded Victims of TCE Exposure and hopes to produce a documentary on TCE. When she showed up in Irvine with her father’s ashes and what she calls the “Wall of 300 Victims at View-Master,” national academy officials refused to allow her to set it up.
“I told them I don’t have a PowerPoint presentation, I have this wall,” Evans said. Campus police were called but declined to take any action.
Evans said she was suing Mattel, but the matter must first go through a workers compensation claim. Donald Stewart, a former U.S. senator from Alabama representing Evans, acknowledged that such toxics litigation was complex and not always successful. “But you have good people on juries who recognize that these substances do cause harm,” Stewart said.
Civil suits involving TCE have typically wilted because it is difficult to prove that illnesses result directly from exposure.
In “A Civil Action,” author Jonathan Harr recounted the prodigious efforts of an attorney from a small Boston law firm who tried — but largely failed — to prove two major U.S. corporations had caused health havoc in a New England town after releasing TCE into the water supply. The story was later made into a movie starring John Travolta as attorney Jan Schlichtmann.
In San Antonio, the former Kelly Air Force Base ranks among the nation’s largest TCE sites, with contamination that migrated several miles past the base boundary.
So far, the Air Force has spent more than $300 million on the cleanup and expects to spend another $155 million over the next 15 years. Residents want the cleanup completed much sooner, though Air Force officials say the plume is shrinking.
The community that lives over the contaminated water has about double the expected rate of liver cancers, said Melanie Williams, senior cancer epidemiologist at the Texas Department of State Health Services. A twofold rate of excess cancer is “not a huge margin,” Williams said, but she noted that the excessive cancers have continued for 10 years.
“The consistency is a concern,” she said.
Despite the huge petrochemical industry in Texas and all of the environmental health issues that go with it, Kelly is one of the highest-priority toxics sites in the state, Williams said.
In addition to cancer, the department has found excessive rates for three types of birth defects involving the heart, stomach and lungs, according to Peter Langlois, a birth defects epidemiologist at the department. The birth defect rates range from two to three times higher than expected.
But Williams and Langlois said they could not establish any definitive link to the TCE contamination in the community. Kelly was a major repair depot for the Air Force and used TCE to clean oil and grease from metal parts. Giant tanks of TCE were drained directly into the ground, former workers have said.
The TCE contaminated a shallow aquifer about 14 feet below the surface. The aquifer is not used by the city and little proof has surfaced that the TCE-tainted water ever penetrated down to the 1,000-foot-deep water drawn for the municipal drinking supply, said Dr. Fernando A. Guerra, director of the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District.
Mark A. Weegar, senior project manager at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said it was impossible for the contaminated water to migrate from the shallow aquifer into the city’s water supply.
But residents say Guerra and Weegar have consistently underestimated their exposure. Dozens of unauthorized shallow wells were sunk into the TCE-contaminated water and used for drinking, bathing and gardening, according to residents and federal officials. The Air Force has capped 75 such wells in the last decade.
“We know that people used the wells in the shallow aquifer for drinking water,” said George Rice, a hydrologist who has studied the neighborhood’s problems. “You have to assume that people used those wells to water their lawns, wash their cars and the children used those hoses the way kids use hoses.”
The Air Force also dumped TCE and other chemicals into open pits on the base for years, which periodically flooded during heavy Texas rainstorms and sent the overflow through surrounding neighborhoods that lacked storm drains, said Yolonda Johnson, a community activist who lives a few blocks from the base boundary. Johnson’s daughter and two of her granddaughters have kidney disease.
No air monitoring tests inside homes have been conducted for TCE, even though the contamination is in a shallow aquifer. Soil tests for vapors indicated there was no cause for concern, Texas authorities concluded.
Outside health experts say the shallow contamination alone should have prompted air monitoring tests long ago.
Adam G. Antwine, the civilian who manages the local cleanup for the Air Force, suggested that some “pathways” might have potentially exposed the community to TCE.
“I don’t know that we want to totally dismiss any potential pathways,” he said.
“This is a low-income minority population and that raises concerns of environmental justice.”
The base shut down in 2001 after 80 years of operation. Because the latency period for many cancers is 10 years or more, higher TCE levels long ago might only now be causing illness.
Former Kelly workers describe conditions inside the base during its heyday as an abysmal toxic nightmare.
Mary Lou Ornelias, a frail 59-year-old woman, worked in the Kelly plating shop for 18 years.
With her bare hands, she would dip cotton cloths into buckets of TCE and then wipe grease from aircraft parts. The air in the plating shop was a steamy, solvent-rich brew that turned the walls yellow and had a stench that made visitors wince, she said. The exposure made her dizzy and caused outbreaks of scaly rashes.
“I would scratch and scratch the sores,” recalled Ornelias, who has no claims or suits against the government.
The sores would not be her last or biggest problem. Ornelias tires easily, looks gaunt and sometimes falls down — all part of her life with liver cancer.
“In 2002, I started throwing up blood,” she said.
Outside the plant, community activists have pushed for a faster cleanup, but say progress has been slow and the problems have festered.
“Living in this contamination area is a miserable burden,” said Armondo Quintanilla, a former employee at Kelly who has spent most of his life in the neighborhood. “It is shameful. People deserve better.”
The following story appeared on the front page of Wednesday’s LA Times. While we normally just excerpt, this is such an important piece that it has been produced in its entirety (click on show full article for the rest of the article):
How Environmentalists Lost the Battle Over TCE
By Ralph Vartabedian
Times Staff Writer
March 29, 2006
After massive underground plumes of an industrial solvent were discovered in the nation’s water supplies, the Environmental Protection Agency mounted a major effort in the 1990s to assess how dangerous the chemical was to human health.
Following four years of study, senior EPA scientists came to an alarming conclusion: The solvent, trichloroethylene, or TCE, was as much as 40 times more likely to cause cancer than the EPA had previously believed.
The preliminary report in 2001 laid the groundwork for tough new standards to limit public exposure to TCE. Instead of triggering any action, however, the assessment set off a high-stakes battle between the EPA and Defense Department, which had more than 1,000 military properties nationwide polluted with TCE.
By 2003, after a prolonged challenge orchestrated by the Pentagon, the EPA lost control of the issue and its TCE assessment was cast aside. As a result, any conclusion about whether millions of Americans were being contaminated by TCE was delayed indefinitely.
What happened with TCE is a stark illustration of a power shift that has badly damaged the EPA’s ability to carry out one of its essential missions: assessing the health risks of toxic chemicals.
The agency’s authority and its scientific stature have been eroded under a withering attack on its technical staff by the military and its contractors. Indeed, the Bush administration leadership at the EPA ultimately sided with the military.
After years on the defensive, the Pentagon — with help from NASA and the Energy Department — is taking a far tougher stand in challenging calls for environmental cleanups. It is using its formidable political leverage to demand greater proof that industrial substances cause cancer before ratcheting up costly cleanups at polluted bases.
The military says it is only striving to make smart decisions based on sound science and accuses the EPA of being unduly influenced by left-leaning scientists.
But critics say the defense establishment has manufactured unwarranted scientific doubt, used its powerful role in the executive branch to cause delays and forced a reduction in the margins of protection that traditionally guard public health.
If the EPA’s 2001 draft risk assessment was correct, then possibly thousands of the nation’s birth defects and cancers every year are due in part to TCE exposure, according to several academic experts.
“It is a World Trade Center in slow motion,” said Boston University epidemiologist David Ozonoff, a TCE expert. “You would never notice it.”
Senior officials in the Defense Department say much remains unknown about TCE.
“We are all forgetting the facts on the table,” said Alex A. Beehler, the Pentagon’s top environmental official. “Meanwhile, we have done everything we can to curtail use of TCE.”
But in the last four years, the Pentagon, with help from the Energy Department and NASA, derailed tough EPA action on such water contaminants as the rocket fuel ingredient perchlorate. In response, state regulators in California and elsewhere have moved to impose their own rules.
The stakes are even higher with TCE. Half a dozen state, federal and international agencies classify TCE as a probable carcinogen.
California EPA regulators consider TCE a known carcinogen and issued their own 1999 risk assessment that reached the same conclusion as federal EPA regulators: TCE was far more toxic than previous scientific studies indicated.
TCE is the most widespread water contaminant in the nation. Huge swaths of California, New York, Texas and Florida, among other states, lie over TCE plumes. The solvent has spread under much of the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys, as well as the shuttered El Toro Marine Corps base in Orange County.
Developed by chemists in the late 19th century, TCE was widely used to degrease metal parts and then dumped into nearby disposal pits at industrial plants and military bases, where it seeped into aquifers.
The public is exposed to TCE in several ways, including drinking or showering in contaminated water and breathing air in homes where TCE vapors have intruded from the soil. Limiting such exposures, even at current federal regulatory levels, requires elaborate treatment facilities that cost billions of dollars annually. In addition, some cities, notably Los Angeles, have high ambient levels of TCE in the air.
An internal Air Force report issued in 2003 warned that the Pentagon alone has 1,400 sites contaminated with TCE.
Among those, at least 46 have involved large-scale contamination or significant exposure to humans at military bases, according to a list compiled by the Natural Resources New Service, an environmental group based in Washington.
The Air Force was convinced that the EPA would toughen its allowable limit of TCE in drinking water of 5 parts per billion by at least fivefold. The service was already spending $5 billion a year to clean up TCE at its bases and tougher standards would drive that up by another $1.5 billion, according to an Air Force document. Some outside experts said that estimate was probably low.
After the EPA issued the draft assessment, the Pentagon, Energy Department and NASA appealed their case directly to the White House. TCE has also contaminated 23 sites in the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons complex — including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Bay Area, and NASA centers, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.
The agencies argued that the EPA had produced junk science, its assumptions were badly flawed and that evidence exonerating TCE was ignored. They argued that the EPA could not be trusted to move ahead on its own and that top leaders in the agency did not have control of their own bureaucracy.
Bush administration appointees in the EPA — notably research director Paul Gilman — sided with the Pentagon and agreed to pull back the risk assessment. The matter was referred for a lengthy study by the National Academy of Sciences, which is due to issue a new report this summer. Any resolution of the cancer risk TCE poses will take years and any new regulation could take even longer.
The delay tactics have angered Republicans and Democrats who represent contaminated communities, where residents in some cases have elevated rates of cancer and birth defects but no direct proof that their illness is tied to TCE.
Half a dozen members of Congress last year wrote to the EPA, demanding that it issue interim standards for TCE, instead of waiting years while scientific battles are waged between competing federal agencies. EPA leaders have rejected those demands.
“The evidence on TCE is overwhelming,” said Dr. Gina Solomon, an environmental medicine expert at UC San Francisco and a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We have 80 epidemiological studies and hundreds of toxicology studies. They are fairly consistent in finding cancer risks that cover a range of tumors. It is hard to make all that human health risk go away.”
But Raymond F. DuBois, former deputy undersecretary of Defense for installations and environment in the Bush administration, said the Pentagon had not been willing to accept whatever came out of the EPA, though it cared a great deal about base contamination.
“If you go down two or three levels in EPA, you have an awful lot of people that came onboard during the Clinton administration, to be perfectly blunt about it, and have a different approach than I do at Defense,” DuBois said. “It doesn’t mean I don’t respect their opinions or judgments, but I have an obligation where our scientists question their scientists to bring it to the surface.”
The military has virtually eliminated its use of TCE, purchasing only 11 gallons last year, said Beehler, an attorney who used to head environmental affairs for Koch Industries Inc., a large industrial conglomerate in Wichita, Kan.
In its fight against the 2001 risk assessment, the Pentagon has gone to the very fundamentals of cancer research: toxicology, the study of poisons; and epidemiology, the science of how diseases are distributed in the population. This scientific approach has worked better than past arguments that cleanups are a costly diversion from the Pentagon’s mission to defend U.S. security.
A few months after the 2001 draft risk assessment came out, an Air Force rebuttal charged that the EPA had “misrepresented” data from animal and human health studies.
It said “there is no convincing evidence” that some groups of people, like children and diabetics, are more susceptible to TCE, a key part of the EPA’s report. And it said the EPA had failed to consider viewpoints from “scientists who believe that TCE does not represent a human cancer risk at levels reasonably expected in the environment.”
But comments such as these are outside the scientific mainstream. Other federal agencies have also expressed grave concern about TCE and some experts say it is only a matter of time before the chemical is universally recognized as a known carcinogen.
“Do I think TCE causes cancer? Yes,” said Ozonoff, the Boston University TCE expert. “There is lots of evidence. Is there a dispute about it? Yes. Whenever the stakes are high, that’s when there will be disputes about the science.”
The 2001 risk assessment found TCE was two to 40 times more likely to cause cancer than was found in an assessment conducted in 1986, a wide range that reflected many scientific uncertainties. Because cancer risk assessments are not an exact science, federal regulators have historically exercised great caution in protecting public health.
The California EPA, the nation’s largest and best-funded state environment agency, assessed TCE in 1999 and also found reason for concern. Its risk assessment fell in the middle of the EPA risk range, according to the study’s author, Joseph Brown.
Rodents fed TCE develop liver and kidney cancer, and humans exposed to TCE show elevated rates of many types of cancer and birth defects. But industry experts fire back that evidence on TCE is still weak. Just because rats and mice get cancer from high levels of TCE doesn’t prove that humans will get cancer from low levels of TCE, they say. And the epidemiological research is less convincing than animal studies, they say.
The U.S. still uses about 100 tons of TCE annually, a fraction of the consumption before the mid-1980s, when it was first classified as a probable carcinogen. It was once widely used in consumer products, such as correction fluid for typewriters and spot cleaners.
“If TCE is a human carcinogen, it isn’t much of one,” said Paul Dugard, a toxicologist at the Halogenated Solvents Industry Alliance Inc., which represents TCE manufacturers. “People exposed at low levels shouldn’t be concerned.
“EPA’s philosophy is still one of being super conservative and that is being pushed back against.”
EPA officials were braced for such a controversy when the TCE assessment was issued and quickly convened a scientific advisory board to review the work. The board included public health officials at state agencies, academics and chemical industry scientists.
About one year later, the board issued its findings, praising the risk assessment and urging the EPA to implement it as quickly as possible. But the board also suggested some changes, including stronger support for its calculations of TCE’s health risks and a clearer disclosure of its underlying assumptions.
The report, particularly the request for additional work, was interpreted as a serious problem by Gilman, the EPA research director.
He said the board’s findings represented a “red flag” and “raised very troubling issues,” all of which were key arguments by Gilman and others for stopping the assessment.
But members of the scientific advisory team dispute Gilman’s interpretation, saying they felt the 2001 risk assessment was good science and their recommended changes amounted to normal commentary for such a complex matter.
“I thought by and large we supported the EPA and that its risk assessment could be modified to move forward,” said Dr. Henry Anderson, the chairman of the scientific advisory board and a physician with the Wisconsin Division of Public Health. “That movement to shuttle the issue to the National Academy of Sciences was nothing like what we had in mind.”
By 2004, the matter was out of the EPA’s hands. The National Academy of Sciences received a $680,00 contract from the Energy Department to study TCE — a decision dictated by a working group at the White House. The briefings to the national academy on how to evaluate TCE were given by White House staff as well as the EPA.
The White House originally formed the working group — made up of officials from the Pentagon, Energy Department and NASA — in 2002 to combat the EPA’s assessment of another pollutant, perchlorate. That group stayed in business to fight the TCE risk assessment. The group was co-chaired by officials in the Office of Management and Budget and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The officials declined requests for interviews.
Given the controversy and stakes involved, the issue was bound to end up with National Academy of Sciences, said Peter Preuss, director of the National Center for Environmental Analysis, the EPA organization that produced the 2001 risk assessment. “It got very difficult to proceed,” Preuss said.
The lead author of the 2001 health risk assessment, V. James Cogliano, agreed that the findings ran into trouble when Defense Department officials went to the White House. “Most of it was behind the scenes,” said Cogliano, now a senior official at the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France.
He added: “The degree of opposition was not surprising given the degree of economic interests involved.”
The political maneuvering marked a significant change, Cogliano said. In the 1980s, Defense Department officials accepted every possible safeguard recommended by the EPA for incinerators to burn nerve gas and other chemical weapons, he recalled.
At that time, Defense Department officials said, “You put in every margin of safety, because we want to be sure it will be safe,” he said. “There was no argument. There is a different spirit today.”
Every health risk assessment is also getting more technically complex and more bureaucratically difficult, Preuss said.
When the EPA issued its first health risk assessment in 1976, it ran four pages and it was based in large part on studies that counted “bumps and lumps” on animals subjected to possible carcinogens. By contrast, EPA scientists now must show not only that a substance causes tumors, but the internal biological processes that are responsible. And the work is subject to greater scrutiny.
“It is true that there is more interagency review now of our work,” Preuss said. “We have a couple steps where we send our assessments to the White House and they distribute them to other agencies. Each year, additional steps are taken.”
All of the EPA’s travails — the toughened scientific demands, the loss of authority, the interagency battles — have clearly taken a heavy toll and diminished the agency’s stature.
“Inside the Beltway, it is an accepted fact that the science of EPA is not good,” said Gilman, now director of the Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies in Tennessee, which conducts broad research on energy, the environment and other areas of science. Gilman said an entire consulting industry has sprung up in Washington to attack the EPA and sow seeds of doubt about its capabilities.
The delays in assessing TCE have also left many contaminated communities with few answers.
“My constituents who live at a recently named Superfund site … are forced to live everyday with contaminated groundwater, soil and air and can’t afford to wait the years it would take for the results of your outsourced re-review,” Rep. Sue W. Kelly (R-N.Y.) told EPA officials at a hearing last year.
“I have talked to a lot of sick people,” said Rep. Maurice D. Hinchey (D-N.Y.), whose district includes hundreds of homes contaminated by TCE vapors, traced to an IBM Corp. factory. IBM has paid for air filtration systems for 400 homes, but has balked at more funding based on uncertainty over the health risk. “These people are deeply frustrated and increasingly angry,” Hinchey said.
Meanwhile, many environmentalists are discouraged by what they view as a virtual emasculation of the EPA in this battle.
“The general public has no idea this is happening,” said Erik Olson, a lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The Defense Department has succeeded in undermining the basic scientific process at EPA. The DoD is the biggest polluter in the United States and they have made major investments to undercut the EPA.”
Steve Owens, director of the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, said Motorola is continuing cleanup efforts to remove TCE, a cancer-causing solvent, from the groundwater. He said there is no threat to public health because the groundwater is not being used as a drinking-water source.
Construction on the first phase is scheduled to start within a couple of weeks, said Todd Starkovich, a project superintendent with Hardison/Downey Construction.
Read the full story in the Arizona Republic.
Thanks to CPEO for the tip:
June 24, 2005
The Honorable Stephen L. Johnson
Administrator
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Ariel Rios Building (1101A)
1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20460
Dear Administrator Johnson:
Millions of Americans are exposed to trichloroethylene (TCE) every day
in their water and air. Many scientists believe TCE to be carcinogenic,
immunotoxic, and neurotoxic. As you know, EPA drafted a Human Health
Risk Assessment in 2001 that determined TCE is 5 to 65 times more toxic
than previously believed. The Assessment received a positive review
from EPA’s Science Advisory Board, which commended EPA for its
“groundbreaking” work. Based upon the Assessment, EPA regions developed
new, more protective provisional screening levels, and some even began
using these provisional standards in the field.
However, other federal agencies considered the new levels overly
conservative, and EPA agreed to send the scientific issues raised by the
Assessment to the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research
Council for re-review. Gradually, EPA’s regions de-emphasized the more
protective screening levels. When Members of Congress wrote letters to
EPA asking that the protective standards be used, Henry L. Longest, II,
Acting Assistant Administrator for EPA’s Office of Research and
Development, responded, “EPA is current evaluating a number of interim
approaches for screening levels while awaiting a final TCE risk
assessment.” Acting Assistant Administrator for the Office of Solid
Waste and Emergency Response, Thomas Dunne, wrote, “For vapor intrusion
issues … EPA has not developed national guidance.”
It is expected that it will be years before EPA finalizes its TCE risk
assessment, and Americans are constantly being exposed to this and
similar toxic substances. We therefore strongly urge EPA to adopt a
protective “interim approach.” EPA should use provisional screening
levels based upon the 2001 Human Health Risk Assessment until a new risk
assessment is completed. For example, based upon work done by several
EPA regions, the screening level for TCE in air would be about .02
micrograms per cubic meter.
EPA personnel developing or overseeing the development of remediation
and mitigation strategies should consider those levels. Most
immediately, vapor exposure investigations should use sampling
technologies designed to detect TCE down to those provisional levels.
We appreciate your attention in this matter, and we look forward to
hearing your response.
Sincerely,
Susan Kelly (R-NY)
Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ)
Raul M. Grijalva (D-AZ)
Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX)
Jerrold Nadler (D-NY)
Major R. Owens (D-NY)
Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD)
Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA)
Katherine Harris (R-FL)
Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio)
Maurice Hinchey (D-NY)
Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY)
Howard L. Berman (D-CA)
Update: NY press covers the story here and here
…to keep people safer from TCE, please encourage them to contact:
Jody Milanese (millaneese) in Congresswoman Sue Kelly’s office at 202-225-5441
The news about Arizona’s continuing study struck us, especially the casual mention of the heart defects finding late in the story (the line we so blatantly bolded in the post). We’re not sure we’d seen the background on this study before. So we dug it up.
Here’s what the U of A website says:
“In 1980, researchers noticed an abnormally high number of children being born with congenital heart defects. Many of the children were born to mothers who lived in Southern Arizona, in just one zip code. In 1981 after drinking water wells contaminated with Trichloroethylene (TCE) were closed, the rate of heart defects decreased.
Epidemiological studies confirmed an association between women in their first trimester who were exposed to drinking water contaminated by TCE and an increased prevalence of heart defects in their children. Once the contaminated wells were closed, the rate of heart defects decreased…”
Read more. Or you can check out all of Google’s references to it.
Water quality a major focus of $14 million grant to the University of Arizona
The detection, remediation and prevention of water contamination in the Southwest and its human health effects will be a major thrust of The University of Arizona’s Superfund Basic Research Program (SBRP) in the next five years. Another aspect of the program will investigate ways to reduce airborne contamination from abandoned mine tailings.
Nine research projects will focus on two major types of contaminants: arsenic, a naturally occurring contaminant in surface and ground waters throughout the West, and halogenated organic solvents such as TCE, or trichloroethylene. Five of the projects will examine the human health effects of the contaminants and four will develop better ways to detect and clean up contaminated sites.
“We are recognized nationally for our research on both TCE and arsenic contamination and their associated health effects,” said A. Jay Gandolfi, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at The University of Arizona in Tucson and director of UA’s SBRP. The program involves about 70 researchers and spans five UA colleges and 10 departments.
Previous environmental studies done by UA’s SBRP, which began in 1989, developed technology to detect and clean up contaminants. It’s time for the next step, Gandolfi said. “Now we’re ready to take the technology from the lab and hone it so it can be applied to these problems.”
The earlier research is also starting to pay off in term of treating the health effects of contaminants, he said. “Now our work is aimed at applying biomarkers to identify susceptible people and propose potential treatments.”
[...]
Because contaminant removal can’t happen overnight, half the SBRP research projects are dedicated to elucidating the health effects of TCE and arsenic. SBRP scientists have already shown that exposure to TCE may cause heart defects in newborn children. Now the researchers are determining exactly how TCE causes such damage, with the hope of preventing the damage to future generations.
Read the full story in Medical News Today
We don’t find it surprising that the Air Force is clashing with the EPA over clean-up issues. We find surprising that a chairman of the Air Force’s own clean-up advisory board would so blatantly cite limited budgets as their driver when the EPA is declaring a risk to human health and environment right now.
The Arizona Republic (Mesa, AZ) reports:
After at least 15 years of cooperation on a toxic waste cleanup at Williams Gateway Airport, two federal agencies are butting heads about the Air Force’s decision to drop plans to remove millions of gallons of fuel in the groundwater at the former Air Force base.
The airport was shuttered as an Air Force facility in 1993. It now is considered a key component for future economic development in the southeast Valley. It was ranked in a May 12 report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as one of the 10 dirtiest among 34 former bases that need cleanup because of poor environmental practices decades ago.
[...]
Michael Wolfram, the EPA site manager for the William cleanup, said he was shocked when the Air Force spent $3 million to design and build a remedy for removing the jet fuel but decided in February not to fund the program as the EPA and the military had agreed in 1999. The Air Force says it scrapped the plans for a complicated fuel extraction program – thermally enhanced extraction – because it’s expensive and doesn’t work.
“We’re unwilling to pump money into an inefficient use of science. The taxpayers deserve a sure deal for their money,” said Lisa Geissinger, an Air Force spokeswoman at McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento.
[...]
“Both sides are right, but there has to be a compromise. There’s only so much money in our defense budget,” said Len Fuchs of Gilbert.
Fuchs is a retired Marine Corps colonel and co-chairman of the Williams Air Force Base Restoration Advisory Board, a civilian advisory panel that has oversight of cleanup efforts.
[...]
“We consider it a risk to human health and the environment right now,” [Wolfram] said. “Right now, no one is directly exposed. We don’t want them to get contaminated in the future.”
[...]
Wolfram said tests show the contamination is flowing off the airport’s grounds and that levels of trichloroethylene, a cancer-causing solvent, are rising.
Read the full story. Or you can check out the EPA’s website for the Williams AFB Superfund site. Or Air Force’s web page devoted to the Williams clean-up. Or download the Arizona DEQ fact sheet (15KB PDF).
Update: Just about a week ago, papers were reporting that standards for the clean-up have changed (thanks to CPEO for the tip):
The U.S. Air Force scrapped an innovative plan to clean up toxic chemicals at Williams Gateway Airport because Bush administration officials decided the contamination isn’t likely enough to give residents cancer, an Air Force representative said.
The Air Force was planning to use new technology to extract pollutants from a 20-acre jet fuel spill at the Mesa airport in late 2004 when top military advisers handed down a revised policy, said Anthony Wong, environmental coordinator for base realignment and closures at the Air Force Real Property Agency.
The policy change places restrictions on the amount of money that can be spent decontaminating former military installations if the risk of causing cancer in humans is less than 1 in 10,000.
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