Bubbling to the Surface
March 20th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
There’s a lengthy story in the Washington Post today about one Tennesee family’s fight with TCE, trichloroethylene, a chemical solvent and carcinogen once heavily used to degrease metal machinery. Even though the EPA continues to shuffle its feet, there is evidence that exposure to TCE, which for years was routinely dumped into the ground near neighborhoods, leads to increased rates of cancer and birth defects.
Of course, Texas has had more than its fair share of problems with TCE. The Post’s story reminded me of an L.A. Times’ article last year about the horrible effects of TCE contamination in and around Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio.
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….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 city was lucky, in the grimmest sense of the word, that the contamination seems limited to wells drawn from a shallow aquifer below the area and not the Edwards Aquifer, which is much further below ground and serves millions of people across the region. The people who unknowingly tapped into the tainted water are not so fortunate.
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 (Dr. Fernando A. Guerra, director of the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District) and Weegar have consistently underestimated their exposure….
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….
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.
Cleanup is expected to cost the Air Force $455 million. And if the story of a massive environmental disaster that could have been avoided sounds familiar, it’s because a similar story is playing out in microcosm in Helotes, where TCEQ failed to prevent a giant mulch pile from catching on fire, putting the town’s air quality and the region’s water supply at at risk.
No wonder bloggers like Charles Kuffner are frequently calling on legislators to give TCEQ the tools it needs to do the job — a job that should focus on prevention instead of always scrambling to the next disaster.
March 20th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
My father along with two uncles, his brothers, worked at Kelly. Two died of liver cancer. The other died of complications from wounds received at St. Lo during WWII. Wounds thought long healed but for some reason complicated during his employment at Kelly. In San Antonio, it is common knowledge that its growth and expansion has always been at the expense of the southside, where the blue collar labor and families live. I live in a political district near downtown and almost daily will see wonderful improvement for the American tourists but squat for its citizens. The budget bragged how San Antonio was number one in the country for touristism and therefore, need the majority of the budget. Now why does this money need to go to touristism if we are number one, are we going to number one plus one? There are five major contaminated sites in my district, including the once famous brewery of Lone Star beer, yet not one cent is budgeted for clean up. Environmental issues in San Antonio mean garbage pick-up and re-cycle bins. Our city is too precious to us to let it die under the greed of developers.
March 20th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
Though it concludes otherwise, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’s February, 2007 Public Health Assessment for East Kelly provides strong evidence that VAPOR INTRUSION is indeed a completed pathway at Kelly.
Table E-2 shows soil gas levels for PCE (14,230 micrograms per cubic meter) and TCE (618 micrograms per cubic meter) high enough to indicate a potential human health impact and for the community to INSIST UPON ACTUAL INDOOR AIR SAMPLING - if those soil gas samples were taken under or near homes. This is what the Air Force is doing at Hill Air Force Base, an active Air Logistics Center in Utah.
Understanding the way models are used to predict indoor air concentrations is difficult. You can read a recent analysis I did at http://www.cpeo.org/pubs/DouglasTCE.pdf.
TCE and PCE levels in homes are typically 1/50 to 1/1000 of the soil gas concentrations. That means that people may be breathing (and may have been breathing for years) vapors well above the 1 microgram per cubic meter action level that many jurisdictions use.
March 21st, 2007 at 4:46 pm
They have all the tools they need in terms of authority, they just need to use it or be funded to use it.
In the case of the Helotes fire, the state is required to have and does have response authorities under the federal air, water, and waste statutes in order to be able to implement those statutes on a delegated basis from EPA. But those authorities, and the procedures accompanying them were not used. Instead, the Governor ordered TCEQ to act and TCEQ acted unilaterally. They gave the landowner a notice saying he had three days to come up with a plan to do it himself and then they hired their own contractor three HOURS later. Sounds like someone already had their mind made up (which, in case you didn’t catch on, is illegal if you still believe in that “due process” part of our Constitution, since once the state steps on the property, liability attaches to the owner). If TCEQ had just used the authority they had, and waited the extra three days (they had already waited two weeks at the time), they wouldn’t be in such a bind. But politics took control, instead of the law.
And you’re right, maybe they should have come up with a more preventative standard for that type of operation, but just the knee-jerk response of “give them more authority” would not have prevented the situation in Helotes…which, I will note, the City of Helotes itself contributed to by disposing of brush at the site.
March 21st, 2007 at 7:57 pm
You’re right, it’s not just more authority that’s needed at TCEQ(a word we didn’t use). It’s better funding, more inspectors, and leadership willing to use its power to try to prevent disasters instead of only taking (questionable) actions under political duress.