EPA's mobile lab heading to Dover to test for toxins (DE)
EPA owns a bad-ass mobile toxin detector. Officially, it's known as the Trace Atmospheric Gas Analyzer (TAGA). According to EPA:
The Trace Atmospheric Gas Analyzer (TAGA) is a self-contained mobile laboratory capable of real-time sampling and analysis in the low parts per billion level of outdoor air or emissions from various environmental sources and concerns. In addition, the TAGA has specialized sampling equipment for measuring indoor air and at remote locations.As we understand it, EPA has a limited supply of these mobile labs. Apparently, one of them is headed to Dover, DE this spring:
Federal pollution investigators will dispatch a mobile laboratory to Dover this spring as part of an expanded probe of toxic vapor risks from chemical contamination in groundwater flowing under the state’s capital.Read the full story here.
The Environmental Protection Agency work will target pollutants spilled into the soil from a former coal gas plant and dry cleaning operation west of the city center.
Studies of the Dover Gas Light Company Superfund site have been under way since the mid-1980s. More than a decade later, officials acknowledged concern that vapors from some of the contaminants might trickle into buildings after escaping from shallow, tainted groundwater.
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Part of the work scheduled for this spring includes use of a mobile Trace Atmospheric Gas Analyzer (TAGA) bus to sample vapors under the bottom slabs of buildings along the contamination plume.
The TAGA samples can be drawn from a small hole drilled into the floor of buildings, in a process that takes about 30 minutes. Some indoor air sampling work also is planned, using small, portable devices that collect samples over a 24-hour period.
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Although public water supplies are considered safe from the pollution, past tests have found shallow groundwater contamination levels in worst-hit areas thousands of times higher than federal drinking water standards.
Chemicals most often mentioned include tetrachloroethylene (PCE) and trichloroethylene (TCE), solvents used in dry cleaning that are known to cause cancer or other health problems after long-term exposure at high levels.