Published in the Asbury Park Press 10/06/98
By KIRK MOORE
STAFF WRITER
TOMS RIVER -- Low traces of two chemicals have disappeared from a well in the United Water Toms River wellfield near the Garden State Parkway, 2 1/2 months after the underground plume of contamination from the Reich Farm Superfund site was apparently drawn into the well by heavy summertime water demands.
"The good news is since that time we've seen a steady decline of the (styrene acrylonitrile) trimer and trichloroethylene, to the point where it had disappeared by Sept. 17," Jerald A. Fagliano of the state Department of Health and Senior Services told last night's meeting of the Citizens Action Committee on Childhood Cancer Cluster.
"We're continuing to monitor it to make sure that condition stays," Fagliano added.
But the news was viewed skeptically by some committee members, who wondered when ground water conditions might again shift and lead to the compounds reappearing. Committee chairwoman Linda L. Gillick echoed calls to equip Well 29 with carbon filters and air strippers like the ones that remove trace contaminants from two nearby wells.
"If it (contamination) is in the minutest part per trillion" but the effects aren't fully known, the equipment should be installed, Gillick said.
"We don't know if this (trimer) is a carcinogen . . . and we don't regulate chemicals at this level," said John Gorin, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency remedial project manager for Reich Farm, where an independent hauler trucked in Union Carbide waste during the 1970s. "This would be different from anything we're doing anywhere else in the country."
Last month officials reported low traces of trichloroethylene and styrene acrylonitrile trimer were detected for the first time in United Water's Well 29, although neither compound could be detected in water as it entered the company's distribution system.
A plume of underground contamination from the Reich Farm Superfund site, which reached the nearby Well 26 about 10 years ago and later showed up in Well 28, was probably drawn toward Well 29 last summer when increased demand led the company to pump the well beyond its usual rate of 400 gallons per minute.
Tests of water at the wellhead of Well 29 found levels of trichloroethylene between .4 and .8 parts per billion. The state standard for trichloroethylene in drinking water is 1 part per billion.
Levels of the trimer were from 30 to 40 parts per trillion. There are no state and federal standards for how much of the trimer should be permitted in drinking water, because there have been no studies of its toxicity -- something the EPA, Union Carbide and federal scientists have just started to test for.
Trimer dosages given to rats were 1 million to 10 million times greater than the exposure rate of humans ingesting water containing 1 part per billion of the chemical, Craig A. Wilger, Carbide's project manager for the Reich Farm Superfund site, has said.
Recent rounds of testing on bacteria cultures and laboratory rats yielded mixed results, Gorin said. One test showed high levels of trimer, just below the concentration that will kill bacteria outright, caused chromosome damage.
Chromosome damage or mutations can lead to development of cancer. EPA officials say a toxicologist with the National Institute for Environmental Health and Safety is expected to propose a study that will expose pregnant female lab rats to trimer, and study the mothers and their offspring through infancy.
A group of toxicologists and representatives from government agencies and Union Carbide will design protocols over this winter for more comprehensive tests on the health effects of the trimer, and cancer committee members pressed for the EPA to allow them to have a representative too.
The committee already knows of several qualified toxicologists it could hire to represent them on the study group, Gillick said.
"I think we have a right to be present in these meetings," she told EPA workers. "Later on, you're not going to have as much backlash if the committee has someone there."
EPA workers said the committee can nominate someone to the "peer review" committee that will examine the work plan before a full cycle of experiments start in late spring 1999. But they agreed Gillick should talk about her request with EPA officials.
Source: Asbury Park Press
Published: October 06, 1998
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