A letter written last week by an Environmental Protection Agency official to Sen. Richard Shelby acknowledges that the agency believes significant challenges and unanswered questions remain concerning PCBs in the Anniston area.
Shelby's press aide, Andrea Andrews, said the Tuscaloosa senator wants to meet with EPA officials to review the information contained in the letter, which arrived in Shelby's office Thursday. "We will respond to this," she said.
The letter from EPA's Deputy Regional Administrator Stanley Meiburg explains and gives a chronology of the status of the EPA's PCB investigation in Anniston.
"The final long-term cleanup of Anniston presents extremely complicated, technical and legal issues because the contamination involves a large, diverse geographic area," the letter says in part. "The area of contamination includes Snow and Choccolocco creeks and their floodplains as well as hundreds of residential properties. Therefore, EPA has developed a basic strategy to clean up the most highly contaminated areas first and to follow up with a detailed study to determine the best final cleanup solution to protect the public health and welfare of the people of Anniston."
The letter also says the EPA has not ruled out the possibility that PCB contamination is an ongoing problem. In the final paragraph, Meiburg notes that EPA has conducted an independent review of the old Monsanto landfills in western Anniston, which contain millions of pounds of PCB waste. He wrote, "the review essentially supports ADEM's activities on the property, but also indicates several areas where additional study and work need to be done to ensure that there are not ongoing releases from the facility."
Meiburg assured the senator in the letter that "EPA is fully committed to protecting human health and the environment in Anniston."
Both Shelby and U.S. Rep. Bob Riley, R-Ashland, sent letters to EPA and congressional authorities in January, stating their concerns about lingering and potentially ongoing PCB contamination in Anniston. Both have requested congressional hearings and Riley sent a letter to EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman requesting that she give "greater attention to the matter."
Riley's press aide, Pepper Bryars, said his office has not yet received the EPA's letter.
So far, no congressional hearings have been scheduled regarding the EPA's handling of the PCBs in Anniston.
Riley said in his letter that he is concerned about a potential "double standard" in EPA's enforcement program, which has demanded a $500 billion PCB cleanup by General Electric Company in New York's Hudson River.
EPA responded with the Feb. 1 letter. "If after a review of this material, you have questions or would like a personal briefing on any aspect of EPA's actions, we will be happy to respond," Meiburg wrote.
The letter gives a seven-page narrative history of EPA's involvement in Anniston. According to EPA, the agency first learned about the former Monsanto facility in 1979. The letter does not specifically note a year when EPA first became aware of PCB contamination in Anniston, but official documents collected by The Anniston Star indicate that EPA had received PCB fish tissue data collected from local creeks before 1979.
According to EPA's chronology, the Alabama Attorney General forwarded information to EPA about PCB releases in Anniston in 1985. The letter explained that EPA's Superfund program deferred cleanup of the site in 1993 and 1994 to EPA's RCRA program, which regulates industrial handling of hazardous waste. Following that, EPA's RCRA program deferred to the Alabama Department of Environmental Management the responsibility "to regulate off-site contamination at the facility."
The chronology explained Monsanto's spinoff company Solutia's buyout of 44 homes, 39 vacant residential properties, 14 commercial properties and two churches in western Anniston in 1996, after state and federal health agencies found a PCB health hazard in the Sweet Valley-Cobbtown area.
EPA and ADEM met in 1996 to discuss what to do about the health studies, but it wasn't until 1998 that EPA was alerted by residents that contamination had spread beyond Sweet Valley-Cobbtown, according to the chronology.
Meiburg explained that EPA is now attempting a judicial settlement with Solutia and Monsanto, which will require the company to "undertake a major study and evaluation of the PCB contamination."
EPA and ADEM also are negotiating a Memorandum of Understanding to formalize which agency has the lead authority for multiple PCB-related investigations in Anniston.
