Tonya Maxwell

tmaxwell@citizen-times.com

ASHEVILLE – Failures in oversight by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency might have left residents near the CTS of Asheville Superfund site with prolonged exposure to a cancer-causing chemical, a federal report released Wednesday found.

The 53-page document validates concerns raised by residents who live nearest to the CTS site at 235 Mills Gap Road, said Jeff Wilcox, an environmental studies professor at UNC Asheville and a longtime friend of the Rice family.

Dot Rice and her son Terry Rice live in separate homes near the site and, for a day in autumn 2014, prevented CTS contractors from entering their property to begin cleanup work on springs in their yard, which carry the chemical trichloroethylene, better known as TCE, to the surface.

They maintained that monitoring and cleanup of TCE was not adequate.

“The work plan had an inadequate sampling plan and the residents were concerned about that and weren’t going to allow it to move forward until it was sufficient,” Wilcox said. “It was frustrating to have an idea of how the sampling ought to be done and to see that it was not done that way.”

The Rices were not immediately available for comment.

The report, written by Office of the Inspector General within the Environmental Protection Agency, was prompted by the June 2014 evacuation of Terry Rice and a dozen other residents living in three homes near the site as well as concerns of other people, said Kathy Hess, an author of the 53-page document and lead program analyst with the agency.

“In the OIG’s opinion, some monitoring activities conducted since 2012 did not meet all requirements and were delayed,” Hess said in a recording that accompanied the report. “We identified specific problems with the agency’s plans for investigative and system monitoring. Those problems potentially prolonged exposure of nearby residents to unsafe levels of TCE in their homes.”

Though the document does not name her, the report is critical of monitoring and cleanup efforts overseen by Samantha Urquhart-Foster, the EPA’s remedial project manager for CTS from 2012 through 2014.

Among officials familiar with the project, CTS was regarded as a difficult company to work with, indicating that Urquhart-Foster would have needed strong support from supervisors to move forward with demands.

Among the biggest criticisms is the agency failed to notify residents about the hazards of breathing TCE vapors. That chemical, once used widely as a metal degreaser, plagues the site.

In late 2011, the EPA updated its health risk assessment for TCE following a two-decade long study. The agency determined the chemical is carcinogenic and can cause harm throughout the body, including to the central nervous system, kidneys and liver.

But with that update, one that made TCE monitoring level standards more rigorous, the EPA failed to monitor air for TCE inside homes until April 2014, leaving nearby residents vulnerable.

They continued to breathe air that may have been fouled until June 2014, when the EPA advised them to evacuate.

The residents live near CTS and natural springs, where TCE percolates to the surface and rises in fumes from a wetland. A system of piping and vacuums was installed in late 2014 to collect and clean toxic air before it can reach homes and remains in place.

Hess is critical of the EPA’s communication with the community, and noted that while improvements have been made, the agency should bolster monitoring efforts.

“In our opinion, monitoring has been too sparse and too infrequent to ensure that TCE exposure risks remain at safe levels since CTS installed the system to capture the TCE vapors that were rising off the contaminated springs near the homes,” she said.

The report criticized CTS contractor Amec Foster Wheeler for failing to determine if toxins have penetrated into deep bedrock, as they were required to do under a 2012 settlement to better sample and analyze the extent of saturation.

It also found EPA officials did not call on CTS to create a conceptual site model of the area. That map-like rendering helps visualize the known and suspected extent of pollution, and serves as a common touchstone as several agencies examine the site.

Last year, the EPA produced and released its own site model of the CTS pollution, one that determined contamination could have spread over 119 acres, though most is concentrated near the old plant site.

In examining a polluted area, Wilcox said he instructs his students that a top priority is to complete a conceptual site model, to better understand and picture the scale of the problem.

The CTS site, one where electronic components were manufactured for nearly 30 years until the company shuttered its doors in 1986, was declared a Superfund site in 2011.

EPA officials in Region 4, which includes North Carolina, disagreed with several points in the Inspector General report, the document notes, and argued they had met with Dot Rice and diligently tried to gain access to the property for the purpose of collecting air samples.

“On several occasions the property owner was accompanied by representatives she chose to assist her in understanding the material the region was presenting,” EPA officials told inspectors. “Despite these efforts, Region 4 was repeatedly denied permission to collect air samples from this property.”

Buncombe County will not sue CTS as planned





CTS report