For Immediate Release
June 9, 2005
Contact: Amanda Evans: (626) 399-1049 (cell)

PEOPLE DESERVE PROTECTION FROM TOXIN, TCE, SAY COMMUNITY MEMBERS & PHYSICIANS

Irvine, CA — June 9, 2005 — Citizen activists, physicians, exposure victims, and cancer survivors will testify before the National Academy of Sciences today about the groundwater contaminant, Trichloroethylene (TCE). Neil Fischbein, who runs the TCE Blog, explains “The NAS Committee will have a choice: protect people or save polluters money.” Representatives of an informal national community coalition are asking that the EPA be allowed to implement recommendations from its 2001 health risk assessment for TCE wherein EPA declared TCE was as much as 65 times more toxic than previously known and is highly likely to cause cancer in humans.

The Department of Defense and the Halogenated Solvents Industry Alliance (HSIA), a TCE manufacturers’ representative, have challenged the more protective regulations recommended by EPA. Their challenge led to a TCE health risk review project by NAS, of which today's meeting and citizen testimony are a part.

In 1997 the Air Force used its cost of clean-up as an excuse to recommend the EPA raise safety limits for TCE, potentially exposing people to levels of TCE deemed unsafe by federal law. “Because the current remediation level is extremely difficult to achieve,” it wrote, “remediation costs are very sensitive to even small changes in this level. Re-evaluation of TCE...can reasonably be assumed to result in a remediation level significantly greater than [the current safety standard].”

In 2003, after EPA proposed lower, more protective TCE safety levels, the Air Force calculated it would cost the Air Force $1.25 billion in extra clean-up costs and would cost DOD as a whole an extra $5 billion. This would raise DOD’s total cost for TCE clean-up to $10 billion.

Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist with the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), is not swayed by the DOD’s cost concerns. Sass told the Academy's Committee in April that TCE is likely to cause people neurological diseases, immune system problems and cancer. She emphasized that infants and children are at particular risk because of the potency of TCE in their small systems. “Leaving the public exposed to TCE at unacceptably high levels during this lengthy deliberative process is a failure of the regulatory agencies to carry out their mission to protect public health,” she said. “We continue to request that EPA implement its Draft 2001 Health Assessment immediately.”

Cheryl Buchanan, a former Cheshire, Connecticut resident whose hometown was exposed to high levels of TCE for two to three decades and now exhibits elevated cancer rates says, “TCE has had a devastating effect on my family, friends, and neighbors. And now polluters are trying to avoid the evidence in front of them because it is too expensive to clean up. The truth is scary. But I wasn't given the choice to ignore the realities of TCE exposure. They shouldn't be given that choice either.”

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