John Boyle

ASH

ARDEN – After getting back test results on pollution in air vapor near the CTS site, the EPA is recommending 13 people nearby move from their homes.

Environmental Protection Agency officials visited the home of Terry Rice on Friday evening, telling him test results show unsafe levels of the pollutant TCE in and around his home, and in two nearby trailers Rice rents out.

“As soon as I pulled in the driveway from work, about 5:30, they were standing there,” said Rice, a self-employed carpenter who’s lived on the property since 1984. “I came home to be told, ‘You should leave.’”

Samantha Urquhart-Foster, remedial project manager with the EPA, confirmed the agency has recommended the residents leave, because the test results were “above a level where we felt we needed to move them away from it.” The agency will pay for the relocations to hotels and temporary housing until nearby polluted springs can be cleaned up, which could take several weeks, she said.

The CTS Mills Gap Road site was added in 2012 to EPA’s National Priority List for cleanup, but the pollution saga has dragged on for more than two decades. EPA officials said earlier this spring that removal efforts weren’t likely to begin before 2016, but Urquhart-Foster said Friday the high concentrations of TCE pollutants in vapor will “cause a quicker action of cleanup of the springs.”

“We don’t have a timeline in place yet,” she said. “We’re still in discussions with CTS Corp. They’re the ones doing the work.”

In 1999, TCE was found in a spring feeding two wells next to the plant property at a level of 21,000 parts per billion, which is more than 7,000 times North Carolina’s groundwater standard for the chemical. Lower amounts of benzene, xylene and toluene also were found.

Bob Taylor, who is staying with Rice, said he’s the one who first called attention to the problem in 1999. Like Rice, he’s dumbfounded that a cleanup has yet to take place.

Rice said the EPA tested for pollution in vapor levels inside and outside his house, just 400 feet or so from the former plant site, which closed in 1986. A safe level of TCE, which can cause serious health problems, is 2 micrograms per meter cubed.

Rice said EPA officials told him Friday the levels were 16 outside a nearby fence on his property, where groundwater springs are polluted, 14 in the basement of his house and 11 in the living quarters. Urquhart-Foster confirmed those readings.

Rice said he’s moving Saturday to a hotel in Biltmore Village, then to a rental home. EPA will foot the bill for him, Taylor and the 11 residents of the trailers to stay in hotels until the levels are safe, Rice said.

While Rice is pleased the EPA finally tested inside his home and made their recommendations, he’s frustrated with the slow pace of action and years of testing that did not include vapor testing inside his home.

“Something they should have done a long time ago is clean up the source,” he said, referring to a plume of underground pollutants on the former CTS site.

Urquhart-Foster said the EPA planned on doing vapor samplings on the Rice property and inside the house in 2012, but “they did not allow us to sample,” so the EPA conducted sampling in the nearby Southside Village subdivision. “They finally agreed to allow us to collect air samples on their property, and we did the testing,” she said.

Rice’s mother, Dot Rice, lives a few hundred yards away off Mills Gap, and because she’s slightly uphill does not have to vacate. She, too, is skeptical the EPA will force CTS to clean up the site soon. “They say they’re going to do it, but are they going to do it?” Dot Rice said.

Jeff Wilcox, a UNC Asheville associate professor in the department of environmental studies, has worked with the families on the CTS issue for six years and was at Terry Rice’s home Friday.

“It’s good news for the families — it’s what we’ve been asking for for years,” Wilcox said, referring to the interior and exterior vapor studies. “But I’m simultaneously disappointed that it took this long.”

Based in Elkhart, Ind., CTS manufactured electronic components at the plant for nearly three decades before shutting the facility down in 1986.

TCE has been linked to cancer, liver and kidney damage and immune system disorders. The chemical also was detected in several drinking water wells at nearby homes that since have been connected to the city water system.