Mayor Fernandez -

I heard your October 16, 2002 WFIU session of "Meet the Mayor" during which you responded to a citizen's inquiry as to the status of the "PCB" problem in Bloomington area. The recent news from Bedford's PCB problem and your response that the problem in Bloomington was resolved suggests that you are not adequately informed about the problem, its history, and the current status. To help you understand that the problem is not resolved, I would like to reiterate some of the ongoing deficiencies with the "clean-ups" after more than two decades and millions of dollars.

1) The sites did not receive a remotely adequate remedial investigation/feasibility study - This RI/FS provision of the Superfund process is needed to correctly assess the identity and distribution of contamination, and what is needed to implement a remediation. The use of the term "functional equivalent" of an RI/FS emphasizes the falsehood. A euphemism is necessary when one is not following necessary protocol. As a result of the city's need to avoid liability for burning hazardous waste in a sinkhole and Westinghouse's refusal to accept responsibility beyond the surface debris, significant levels of PCBs and other contaminants are still in the subsurface. Much of the original PCB disposal involved liquid PCBs that have sunk into the karst. This problem is most significant at Neal's and Lemon Lane, but Bennett's is also likely to have pockets of liquid PCB. Reports from the excavation work at Lemon Lane and Bennett's revealed that pure PCBs were discovered, but not removed. What the workers eventually learned to do was not to dig so deeply. Viacom was paying only for surface soil removal. PCBs and other contaminants in the karst or water were not their problem. The whole scam of "hotspot" removal was a farce designed to give the impression of remediation, but avoid the reality of doing an extremely difficult job. The real PCB problem still remains in the subsurface.

2) The water treatment plant at Illinois Central Spring is not effective - The $7,000,000 of taxpayer money bought a water treatment system to further reduce potential exposure. A recent report by EPA's consultants indicates that about 3 kg of PCBs had been extracted from the water at that point. Using some rather questionable methods to estimate total PCBs released in the spring, estimates of treatment that include the misrepresented "treatment by clarification" by temporary storage in the tanks, an inflated efficiency of about 65% is calculated. Even with those questionable estimation techniques, the costs are at about $1,000,000 a pound for PCB removal. But more troublesome is the system's overall ineffectiveness in reducing the danger of PCBs to the community's health.

Part of the problem is that the system is too small to meet the especially under the rainfall conditions when PCB releases are most elevated. The system was supposedly designed to capture and treat the flow in this one spring for a 25-year/24 hour rain event. In the Bloomington area that is almost 5 inches of rainfall. Considering that the designers didn't know what the flow was from IC Spring, the projection of 1,000 gpm was a wild, and woefully poor guess. We have already had at least seven "25 year rain events" in the past two years. (Many of the performance reports are missing from the library.) Overflows and bypasses are produced by rain events of 1 to 2 inches. Further, water that is temporarily stored in the tanks and then released to the stream is misrepresented as "treated". There are no data that validates this "treatment". Water that does not go through the plant, but is released, cannot be considered as treated.

In fact, the whole monitoring program for the facility, the sediments, the springs, and the air verges on bogus. The analytical methods are not accurate, the sampling times and techniques are convenient for people, but distort sample integrity and are inadequate to assess true contaminant levels, and the validation of the treatment is a guess at most.

And, considering that this is being done at only one spring (which was questionably concluded to be the primary source of PCB release from Lemon Lane), the releases to Richland Creek and Stout's Creek have little hope of being attended to adequately.

3) The "treated" water does not meet Indiana Code Requirements - The water that is treated in the plant is filtered to remove sediment and adsorbed PCBs. The last step of treatment is a carbon chamber where the affinity of PCBs for organic substances is used to extract the "remainder". The extraction is not very effective. Indiana regulations (327 IAC 2-1.5-8 Table 8-3) set a maximum level (30-day average) for PCBs in surface streams at 0.0000068 ug/L. This is designed to reduce additional human cancer risks from this source to tolerable levels (1 additional cancer per 100,000 people). Our treatment system discharges water with a PCB level of 0.3 ug/L. This is more than 40,000 times greater than required. And this only addresses PCB cancer risks, not the danger of PCBs as endocrine disrupters and disturbing fetal development.

4) Airborne PCBs threaten a larger community - Ron Hites of SPEA did the last measure of airborne PCBs in the Bloomington area in 1993. This showed that even the butyl rubber cover then installed at Lemon Lane as a temporary fix had not reduced PCB levels in the atmosphere. The springs continued to release elvels that were far in excess of background for the Midwest. Using his 1993 data and EPA's risk formula, cancer risk levels are more than five fold above what the EPA reported to the community. Streams all over the state are impacted by airborne PCBs and have fish consumption advisories. The leakage from the springs and the treatment plant continue the problem and potential danger to the community.

So, is the PCB problem resolved? Just because we have spent millions of dollars and moved a lot of dirt, does not mean success. Far from it. The mother lode of PCBs is still there, the water isn't clean, the fish are still too dangerous to eat, and the air and anyone breathing it are receiving a dose of the PCBs.

There are more detailed communications to IDEM and EPA on the COPA web site where my letters and their responses are presented. I hope that your incorrect statements indicate that your staff has not informed you of the real details and discrepancies in the "remediation" of PCBs in the community rather than a knowing misrepresentation of the facts. I would be glad to meet with you to discuss these issues to help you understand the deficiencies and what you can do to make more accurate statements about the PCB problem in the community.

Sincerely,

Joseph G. Hailer