John Boyle

AP

ARDEN – Residents and activists who have fought for 15 years for a cleanup of the CTS site say a Supreme Court ruling issued Monday morning is a "devastating" development that favors corporations to the detriment of residents and homeowners.

"It's unbelievable," said Dot Rice, who lives a few hundreds yards from the former factory on Mills Gap Road. "With everything else going on right now, this is just another slap in the face."

The Supreme Court said a group of Asheville-area homeowners can't sue the company that contaminated their drinking water, CTS Corp., because a state deadline has lapsed. The case centered around a state law that established a "period of repose" for pursuing legal action in a pollution case.

Samantha Urquhart-Foster, the EPA's remedial project manager for the CTS cleanup, said today's Supreme Court ruling "won't affect the investigation or cleanup of the site at all," because the legal case centered on the homeowners' ability to sue CTS.

The EPA will conduct additional air testing on more homes near the site because of the high levels found in a home and two nearby trailers. Urquhart-Foster and other EPA officials were coming Monday to Asheville to determine which nearby homes to test.

The justices ruled 7-2 that state law strictly bars any lawsuit brought more than 10 years after the contamination — even if residents did not realize their water was polluted until years later.

Residents near the CTS plant first noticed the pollution in 1999, 13 years after the plant closed and 12 years after CTS sold the property.

The ruling also impacts Camp Lejeune, where health officials estimate as many as 1 million people may have been exposed to tainted groundwater over several decades. In 2012, President Barack Obama signed a bill into law providing health benefits to Marines and family members exposed to the water from 1957-87.

The high court ruling comes three days after the Environmental Protection Agency recommended that 13 residents near the former CTS plant move from their homes because of unsafe levels of the carcinogen TCE, Trichlorethylene, in air vapor. Those having to move out include Rice's son, Terry, who has lived at his home at 275 Mills Gap Road since 1984.

The EPA conducted testing near ground springs by Terry Rice's home and in his home. Two micrograms per cubic meter is considered a safe level of TCE, but the EPA found readings of 11 in the living quarters, 14 in the basement and 16 outside.

Rice, a friend who lives with him and 11 people who live in two trailers on the property all had to move, with the EPA footing the bill for temporary housing or hotels.

The justices heard oral arguments April 23 in the case of CTS Corp. vs. Waldburger, named after Peter Waldburger, one of the 25 residential landowners whose property is on the 53.5 acres where CTS manufactured electronics and electronic components from 1959-85.

The high court reversed a lower court ruling that said federal environmental laws should allow the lawsuit against electronics manufacturer CTS Corp. to proceed.

The Citizen-Times could not reach a CTS spokesman or Waldburger for comment Monday.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said Congress did not intend to pre-empt state "statutes of repose" laws that set a deadline for property claims based on the date of final contamination. He said federal environmental laws only cover statutes of limitation, where the clock starts running at the time of the injury.

"The case for federal pre-emption is particularly weak where Congress has indicated its awareness of the operation of state law in a field of federal interest, and has nonetheless decided to stand by both concepts and to tolerate whatever tension there is between them," Kennedy said.

In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Congress was concerned about state statutes that "deprive plaintiffs of their day in court." That concern is apparent in the case of diseases like cancer that take years to develop before a victim understands the cause, she said.

Ginsburg said the majority's decision "gives contaminators an incentive to conceal the hazards they have created until the repose period has run its full course." She was joined in dissent by Justice Stephen Breyer.

Tate McQueen, a resident and activist in the CTS pollution saga, said readings of TCE in the air and water are higher now than they were in 2002. The Supreme Court decision baffles him, especially considering the lifespan of a typical barrel or drum used to hold chemicals is 25-30 years.

The Supreme Court decision "provides preferential treatment to big-monied corporations at the expense of the people," McQueen said, adding that only a handful of states have 10-year periods of repose.

"We are predicting that big money lobbyists will flood state legislatures to get statutory periods of repose enacted to protect corporate polluters that have devastated places like Asheville, where we've had 13 people who have been rendered into environmental refugees because of a company that left town nearly 30 years ago but didn't take their toxic waste with them," McQueen said.

The EPA is working with CTS officials to determine the best course of action for cleaning up the water in the springs. CTS has been cooperative, Urquhart-Foster said.

"If they refuse to do it (cleanup of the springs), we could take it over, but right now they've said they want to work with us," Urquhart-Foster said, adding that several options are under consideration, including a water collection and treatment system, and one that involves installing carbon mats to treat pollution.

"We'll see what can be done quickly and most effectively," she said, adding that cleanup of the springs will likely take several months. "There are some other options, too."

Dot Rice said the only solution to the problem is what they've been pushing for all along: a cleanup of the property to get the contamination out of the ground and out of groundwater.

The ruling will put the pressure back on the EPA to make sure that happens.

"I think it just gives corporations the opportunity to do whatever they want to and not even value the human health aspects of it at all," she said.

Urquhart-Foster said cleanup of the underlying groundwater is the ultimate goal. That likely will not occur before 2016, though, she said.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.