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Library: Articles: Herald-Times | |||||||||||||||
Request to stop airtests deniedby Jennifer Jill Fowler A request from Westinghouse Electric Corp. to stop air samplings at its PCB interim storage building was denied by the city utilities service board Monday. "I just don't feel we need to let up on any detection regulations we have until we see some movement on general cleanup," said Samuel Vaught, the board's president. Westinghouse used PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, at its Bloomington capacitor factory in the 1960s end '70s. The chemicals, linked with cancer in some studies, made their way to area dumps and a city sewage plant. Under a 1985 court-ordered agreement, Westinghouse was to incinerate PCB-contaminated waste and soil. Public opposition stopped the incinerator plan, and Westinghouse agreed to seek alternative cleanup methods. But the company did dig up PCB-contaminated materials from the Anderson Road Landfill and some area streams and truck them to the interim storage facility, a big metal structure adjacent to the Winston Thomas sewage treatment plant on South Ind. 37. None of the quarterly samplings taken since 1987 has detected airbome pollutants leaving the building, said John Langley, environmental projects coordinator for the city utilities department. Citing that reason and the fact that the lab that conducts the tests will no longer do the work, Westinghouse representatives asked the utilities board to allow the elimination of the sampling requirement for the site. City utilities staff didn't go for that idea but proposed an alternative -yearly sampling each summer with the condition if pollutants were detected, Westinghouse would resume quarterly sampling. The staff proposal would have required Westinghouse to get permission from the other consent degree parties, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management and Monroe County before reducing the number of samplings per year. But utilities board members were leery of sending a message that PCBs are not as big of a problem as the city once thought. They also expressed concern at the lack of progress on cleaning up other PCB sites. The board agreed that the utilities staff should review the situation over the next six months and propose the agreement again if they feel it is warranted. |
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