Tag Archives: EPA

From Seven Out in Waycross to CSX to Pecan Row Landfill in Lowndes County

CSX was involved directly in the

Seven Out contamination,
storing hazardous water that leaked:
and then that water was apparently shipped to the Pecan Row Landfill in Lowndes County.
This is in addition to the

the CSX trichloroethylene groundwater contamination dating back to 2000 and earlier.

According to a letter from Georgia Department of Natural Resources
to BCX, Inc. of 20 July 2004,

EPA Identification Number: GAR000030007,

Twenty-seven tanks of wastewater were stored at the facility.
Four portable tanks were storing the excess capacity of wastewater next door
on property owned by CSX Transportation.
These portable 10,000-gallon tanks were not labeled to indicate their contents;

According to a BCX representative, one of the portable 10,000-gallon tanks
had a gasket failure on the forward manhole which caused the release of an
unknown substance onto the ground at the site owned by CSX
Transportation;

Dead vegetation was observed in a 15 feet by 30 feet area downgradient of the
tank that caused the release;

A yellowish-green substance was observed on the ground between the portable
tank that had the release and another portable tank adjacent to it. There was
also dead vegetation observed between these two tanks; and

And GA EPD tested the soil and found something the document doesn’t
specify, but whatever it was was enough that: Continue reading →

CSX groundwater contamination in Waycross

The MCLG for
trichloroethylene
is zero.

Around the
Seven Out and CSX contamination areas in Waycross more than 100 people
have gotten sick or died,
most since 2000, with groundwater contamination
known since 1985, according to Joan Martin McNeal,
So the CSX problem long predates

the Seven Out problem.
Here’s her map of the CSX property (in yellow) and contamination, sickness, and death:

brown stars: known contamination areas

red markers: confirmed deceased or confirmed cases of severe illness
mostly cancer (bone, lung, prostate, blood, colon, breast),
some severe neurological disorders, some heart failure,
with ages ranging from 4 to 85 years.

green markers: likely early stage cases of such problems

According to this February 2000

tricholoroethylene isopleth map,

there was already extensive contamination in the CSX railyard by 2000,
extending across an internal drainage ditch that goes into the
Waycross Canal that become Tebeau Creek, running through downtown
Waycross into the Satilla River.

According to U.S. EPA,

Trichloroethylene 79-01-6 Hazard Summary-Created in April 1992; Revised in January 2000, Continue reading →

Waste from Superfund site in Waycross went to Lowndes County landfill

What was in that waste water
that went into landfill in an aquifer recharge zone,
with surface runoff into the Withlacoochee River?
The 44 shipments from the toxic waste site in Waycross to the Pecan Row
landfill in Lowndes County were
“Non RCRA Regulated Liquids”, but
“PCBs are not defined as hazardous wastes”
and
according to the U.S. Department of Energy,
“To be a hazardous waste, a material must first be a solid waste.”
So “Non RCRA Regulated Liquids” apparently says nothing about hazard
or toxicity.

44 shipments went from the
“7 Out Site”
to “Pecan Row, Valdosta, GA” for $59,495.00 total
of your federal tax dollars paid to Veolia,
according to
pages 12 and 13
of

Final Report, Task Order # F-0032, Seven Out LLC Tank Site, Waycross, Georgia,
Contract No. 68S4-02-06
for
Emergency and Rapid Response Services, EPA Region 4,
Prepared By WRS Infrastructure & Environment, Inc.,
5555 Oakbrook Pkwy, Suite 175, Norcross, Georgia 30093,
May 2, 2006.

Is this where those
PCBs in the landfill came from?
EPA itself says,

Are polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) regulated under RCRA as a hazardous waste?

PCBs are not defined as hazardous wastes (Memo, Weddle to Verde; May 18, 1984 (RCRA Online #12235)).
However, it is possible that PCBs may be incidental contaminants in listed hazardous waste (e.g., solvent used to remove PCBs from transformers) or may be present in wastes that are characteristically hazardous. In these cases, wastes that otherwise meet a listing criteria or are characteristically hazardous are still subject to RCRA regulation regardless of PCB content.

However, to avoid duplicative regulation with Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), certain PCB containing wastes that exhibit the toxicity characteristic are exempt from regulation under RCRA (Monthly Call Center Report Question; September 1996 (RCRA Online #14014)). Section 261.8 exempts from RCRA Subtitle C regulation PCB-containing dielectric fluid and the electric equipment which holds such fluid if they satisfy two criteria. First, these PCB wastes must be regulated under the TSCA standards of Part 761. Second, only the PCB wastes which exhibit the toxicity characteristic for an organic constituent (waste codes D018-43) may qualify for the exemption (§261.8).

Apparently any liquid wastes from a Superfund site would be
“Non RCRA Regulated Liquids”, according to
U.S. DoE EH-231-034/0593 (May 1993),

Exclusions and Exemptions from RCRA Hazardous Waste Regulation,

any solid or dissolved material introduced by a source
into a federally owned treatment work (FOTW) if certain
conditions, described in Sect. 108 of the FFCA of 1992,
are met;

industrial wastewater discharges that are point source
discharges regulated under section 402 of the Clean
Water Act [§261.4(a)(2)]

If a Superfund site is not a federally owned treatment work,
what is?
And if the Seven Out site was not an industrial wastewater
point source, what is?

The Onyx Waste Manifests on pages 75-120
say the materials were “Non-Hazardous Non-Regulated Waste water”.
(Onyx became Veolia Environmental Services in 2005,

according to Veolia.)
As we’ve seen, “Non-Regulated” apparently means little.
We don’t know what was in that waste water
that went into a landfill
in a recharge zone for
the Floridan Aquifer, the source of our drinking water,
and

with surface runoff into the Withlacoochee River.

-jsq

Where is the Alapaha Water Treatment Plant?

Where is the Alapaha Water Treatment Plant
that has had

20 violations in the past 10 years,
for which the Lowndes County Commission

had Lovell Engineering write a letter to GA EPD
and then

approved
a

no-bid contract to the same firm?
April Huntley supplied this pictorial answer. -jsq

Take Highway 84 east from Valdosta GA:

After passing through Naylor GA look for this neighborhood on your right (Lake Alapaha Hidden Cove):

Continue reading →

Aquifer and well contamination miles from Waycross Seven Out Superfund Site

At the

Waycross Seven Out Superfund Site meeting,
caller Anthony Samsel said

(42 minutes and 10 seconds into the video)
of a site in Massachusetts:

I was the first person to track contamination of the ground to aquifers
that travel several miles; plastics, formaldehyde, from a plastics manufacturing plant,
and there was contamination of city wells
with a lot of cancer clusters
and a lot of sick, dead, and dying people.

He was talking about the Wells G & H Superfund Site in Woburn, MA, where,
according to EPA,

The groundwater was contaminated with industrial solvents, called
volatile organic compounds (VOCs), such as trichloroethylene (TCE)
and tetrachloroethylene (PCE). Soil on the five properties was
contaminated with VOCs, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs),
polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and pesticides. Sediments in the
Aberjona River were contaminated with PAHs and heavy metals such as
chromium, zinc, mercury and arsenic.

Thirty years later,

that one is still toxic.

In a

29 September 2011 coment
Samsel said Continue reading →

Seven Out Superfund site in Waycross –Joan McNeal for Channel 22

People are still getting sick and dying in Waycross after
Chemical company Seven Out closed and left a toxic waste site.
It’s now a Superfund site, which doesn’t mean anything has
been cleaned up.
10 out of 30 City Hall employees have cancer and 8 have already died.
Many living around the site are sick, and teachers and school children.
What will Georgia Reps. Jason Spencer and Ellis Black who attended do after that 29 August 2013 meeting?
Will action wait until more people die?
And to which landfill were those precipitated solids taken?

State representative Jason Spencer District 180
said the state health report should be finished in October,
and was quick to point to

Rep. Ellis Black District 174 as representing the specific area.
Rep. Black said they’d just heard about this and would be looking into it, and:

I’m a farmer from Clyattville….
I spent some time in the farm-supply business
and I have messed with agricultural chemicals all my life and
I’ve got a lot of experience there.
And I can tell you that I know firsthand
something about the danger and the challenges of dealing with these
really sensitive products
and how minute amount can cause problems.
And it’s something that’s Continue reading →

Japanese government forced to take over Fukushima nuclear crisis

This is not the type of “crisis” or “leak” that ends quickly even with the Japanese government now taking over from TEPCO:
radioactive water has been seeping into groundwater and the Pacific
Ocean for two years, many of those tanks
holding radioactive water,

built with rubber seams only meant to last five years,
are leaking,
and the containment wall next to the ocean is making groundwater rise behind it,

spreading into the aquifer and spilling over it into the ocean,
with

every tuna caught off California bearing radioactive signatures from Fukushima.
The radioactive uranium cores are somewhere in

or under
their containment buildings, with no known way to extract them,
still requiring cooling water poured over them for some unknown number of years,
and continuing to be radioactive for thousands of years.
Remember, the Fukushima reactors are the same GE Mark I model as Plant Hatch
on the Altamaha River.

Why are we building more nuclear reactors in Georgia when

ten U.S. nukes have been cancelled or will never be built in the past year?

Google already installed on time and on budget
almost as much solar and wind as both new Plant Vogtle
nukes would produce and for less than what has already been spent on them,
plus solar panels and wind farms don’t leak radioactivity.

Photograph by Kyodo/Reuters

Latest Radioactive Leak at Fukushima: How Is It Different? by Patrick J. Kiger
for National Geographic 21 August 2013,

The water from the leaking tank is so heavily contaminated with
strontium-90, cesium-137, and other radioactive substances that a
person standing less than two feet away would receive, in an hour’s
time, a radiation dose equivalent to five times the acceptable
exposure for nuclear workers, Reuters reported. Within ten hours,
the exposed person would develop radiation sickness, with symptoms
such as nausea and a drop in white blood cells.

Mari Yamaguchi wrote for AP 28 August 2013,

Fukushima Leak Upgraded To Level 3 Severity, Continue reading →

Violations at Alapaha Water Plant in Lowndes County –EPA @ LCC 2013-07-23

Did Demarcus Marshall know

when he asked, “The water is good now, right?”
about the
15 “Health Based Violations”
and the 4 “Complete Failure to Report” plus the 1 “Monitoring, Routine Major (TCR)”, all in the last ten years?
Maybe some of those have to do with why

Lowndes County is doing major upgrades to the Alapaha Water System
by the end of March 2015.
However, given all those “Complete Failure to Report”, how will we know
when or if it’s fixed?
These reports found by Chris Graham.
-jsq

U.S. EPA

SWDIS Violation Report:

LOWNDES CO.-ALAPAHA PLANTATION S/D

VALDOSTA, GA 31601-1349

229-671-2504

Primary Water Source Type	Population Served
Groundwater	205

This report was created on AUG-22-2013

Results are based on data extracted on JUL-30-2013

NOTICE: EPA is aware of inaccuracies and underreporting of some data in the Safe Drinking Water Information
System. We are working with the states to improve the quality of the data.

The tables below list all violations that the state reported to
EPA for this water system. Health-based violations are listed first,
followed by monitoring, reporting, and other violations.

Health Based Violations:
amount of contaminant exceeded safety standard (MCL) or water was not
treated properly.

Type of Violation	Compliance Period Begin Date	Compliance Period End Date	Drinking Water Rule or Contaminant	Analytical Result	Violation ID
MCL, Average	JUL-01-2012	SEP-30-2012	TTHM	.166	11422

Follow-up Action	Date of Response
St Public Notif requested	MAR-05-2013
St Violation/Reminder Notice	MAR-05-2013

Continue reading →

EPA raising radiation limits? Comment period still open

Should we worry about

those radioactive tuna off California?
Should we raise radiation limits like EPA is proposing?

J. D. Heyes wrote for NaturalNews 30 May 2012,

Fukushima radiation now detected in the U.S. food supply,

“I wouldn’t tell anyone what’s safe to eat or what’s not safe to
eat,” Madigan told Reuters. “It’s become clear that some people feel
that any amount of radioactivity, in their minds, is bad and they’d
like to avoid it. But compared to what’s there naturally […] and
what’s established as safety limits, it’s not a large amount at
all.”

PR from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility 8 April 2013,

WHITE HOUSE APPROVES RADICAL RADIATION CLEANUP ROLLBACK:
Civilian Cancer Deaths Expected to Skyrocket Following Radiological Incidents,

The White House has given final approval for dramatically raising
permissible radioactive levels in drinking water and soil following
“radiological incidents,” such as nuclear power-plant
accidents and dirty bombs. The final version, slated for Federal
Register publication as soon as today, is a win for the nuclear
industry which seeks Continue reading →

News media finally reporting Fukushima leaking radioactive water into ocean

It’s not just a storage tank, either; radioactive water has been leaking
for more than two years, from the broken reactor buildings into groundwater and the Pacific Ocean.
It’s not just a local Japanese problem: Fukushima is here.

The cautious version, by Antoni Slodkowski and Mari Saito, Reuters, today,

Radioactive water seeping into Pacific from Fukushima is ’emergency,’ official says,

Highly radioactive water
seeping into the ocean from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant
is creating an “emergency” that the operator is struggling to contain, an official from the country’s nuclear watchdog said Monday.

This contaminated groundwater has breached an underground barrier, is rising toward the surface and is exceeding legal limits of radioactive discharge, Shinji Kinjo, head of a Nuclear Regulatory Authority task force, told Reuters.

Countermeasures planned by Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) are only a temporary solution, he said.

VOA News, also today, admits leaks have been going on for more than two years
and nobody knows how to stop them,

Fukushima Operator Under Fire for Radioactive Leaks,

Rianne Teule, a nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace International,
says the issue is a serious environmental concern.

“Most of all it proves TEPCO is incapable of dealing with this
situation and that the Japanese authorities should really step in
and ensure that proper action is taken to stop the leaks,” said
Teule.

But it is not clear what other actions TEPCO could take at this
point. Former Nuclear power plant designer Masashi Goto worked on
several projects with TEPCO.

“The situation is already beyond what Tepco can handle,” said Goto.
“If Continue reading →

On the LAKE front

Citizen dialog for transparent process by the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange