New EPA rules not expected to impact Army depot cleanup

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Whatever new restrictions the Environmental Protection Agency imposes on potentially hazardous chemicals used at the Anniston Army Depot, local officials and experts are confident those limitations can be met.

EPA officials announced Monday they plan to tighten restrictions on four specific compounds suspected to cause cancer, including trichloroethylene (TCE), which depot cleanup crews and Anniston Water Works and Sewer Board workers have fought to keep out of the area’s drinking water and ground water for decades.

Though the EPA has yet to announce how tight the new restrictions might be, the agency suggested the acceptable concentration of TCE in drinking water could be lowered from the current 5 parts per billion to 1 part per billion.

Such a decrease is just fine with Jim Miller, general manager of Anniston Water Works.

“We’re basically good to go,” Miller said of the Coldwater Spring treatment plant. “We could handle 100 times the TCE that’s going in now.”

Coldwater Spring is Anniston’s main water supply and is only a mile and a half from the depot.

Tracy Williams, chief of environmental management at the depot, said it would be hard to know the full impact of the EPA’s new TCE restrictions on the facility since full details have not been released, but added that any restrictions imposed would be met.

Williams said not only is the depot meeting current EPA standards for levels of TCE in ground wells and private drinking water, it is surpassing them. She said annual water samples routinely have nondetectable traces of the chemical.

“We do whatever is necessary to keep up with standards,” Williams said.

David Steffy, a Jacksonville State University geology professor and a member of the restoration advisory board, a citizen watchdog group that oversees the depot cleanup, said the Army has been meeting its obligations.

“They are doing very well from my standpoint,” Steffy said. “They are cleaning 99.99 percent of (TCE) from water now … and if the EPA were to increase restrictions, they would still meet it.”

TCE is a chemical used as a solvent for machinery and has been used at the depot and by the military as a whole for decades to degrease machine parts. Waste at the depot, including TCE, was disposed of in trenches, lagoons, landfills or other holding vessels from the 1940s though the late 1970s, when the Army began major efforts to clean up the toxic chemical.

“It’s a very common problem, especially in military bases,” said Probhakar Clement, a professor of civil engineering at Auburn University.

Clement said studies in recent years have linked TCE to causing cancerous tumors in humans.

“It’s not a good thing,” he said. “ You don’t want to drink TCE-contaminated water,” he said.

Miller noted, however, that though TCE may be a health hazard, current EPA standards would require a person to drink the chemical for a long period of time before getting sick.

“The 5 parts per billion is based on if you drink that level every day for 30 years, you’ll get sick,” Miller said. “People should try to keep that in perspective.”

EPA Spokeswoman Davina Marraccini said as far as her agency is concerned, nobody in Calhoun County is being exposed to unacceptable levels of TCE.

“They are doing ongoing monitoring and tests indicate no TCE is being detected,” Marraccini said.

Though Marraccini did not know what impact EPA’s new restrictions might have on the depot’s cleanup efforts, she said there was a chance the changes would have no impact at all.

“There may not be any impact on the cleanup since all the equipment is currently removing the TCE,” she said.

Williams said for the past 20 years, the officials have worked to decrease the use of TCE at the depot. At one time, 11 large vats of TCE were used to degrease parts but now, only two vats are used, she said. In addition, one of those two vats has been replaced with a smaller, more efficient one.

In the early 1990s, the depot installed a network of 15 wells designed to pump up the industrial area’s polluted groundwater. Pipes transported the water to one of three treatment plants. However, iron and microbial slime clogged the pumps and reduced their effectiveness to one-third of their designed capacity.

The depot overhauled the pump system in 2001 and three treatment plants became one, resulting in a decease in TCE concentration.

“In the past five years, we have removed more than 1,500 pounds of TCE from the groundwater beneath the installation,” Williams said.

In 2004, the Army installed devices called air strippers at Coldwater’s treatment plant. The devices pump in contaminated groundwater then blast it with air, thereby turning it into a gas and “stripping” it away. The end result is clean water. Miller said the air strippers were designed so they could be retrofitted to handle larger cleaning duties if the need arose.

“We were proactive in our approach when we set up the treatment,” Miller said.

Clement said while air strippers are one of the main ways to remove TCE from water, the technology is not perfect.

“They do not remove everything,” he said. “And they are very expensive ways to clean.”

To date, there is no technology that can inexpensively clean 100 percent of TCE from water.

“That’s the $1 million question,” he said. “If you have a good technique, you could be a billionaire.”

Contact staff writer Patrick McCreless at 256-235-3561.