Word: epa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...just this seemingly lackadaisical review process that concerns critics. According to Oklahoma Congressman Mike Synar, who headed an investigation of the 1986 incident, the EPA and other agencies tend to defer to the NRC in matters involving radioactive materials. But the NRC, he says, "fixes almost exclusively on the radioactive, not chemical, hazards," which may be more to the point in this case. State efforts to regulate the spraying have meanwhile been stymied by jurisdictional questions, which were finally resolved last spring, when the Oklahoma water resources board asserted its right to address the possible threat to groundwater. Its decision...
...contained dangerous concentrations of PCBs, a class of highly toxic industrial chemicals. That startling discovery in 1981 eventually led the Environmental Protection Agency to launch a major investigation of Texas Eastern, the Houston-based firm that supplied the gas to LILCO. Last week, in the largest settlement of an EPA case in history, Texas Eastern (1986 revenues: $4.1 billion) agreed to undertake a massive cleanup of PCB contamination along the company's 10,600-mile network of pipelines, which runs through 14 states, from Texas to New Jersey. The cleanup will cost Texas Eastern some $400 million, plus...
...retardant to reduce the risk of fires and explosions. Texas Eastern, for example, long ago put PCBs into the compressors that drive natural gas through the company's pipelines, and the stubborn residues of the chemicals are still present. The firm is only one of 14 pipeline companies the EPA has been investigating for PCB leakage. Less severe problems may exist at hundreds of other enterprises, from electric utilities to railroads. Industrial users have scattered an estimated 1.2 billion lbs. of PCBs throughout the world. As a result, most people have absorbed at least tiny amounts of PCBs...
...PCBs. In the case of Texas Eastern, the firm agreed in 1982 to clean the PCBs out of its compressors and haul the material to approved landfills. But the company continued to remove other residues -- some of which also contained high levels of PCBs -- from its pipelines. The EPA found PCB-laced sludge buried in rough pits at 89 company properties...
Some firms are not waiting for EPA directives. California's Pacific Gas & Electric is voluntarily replacing equipment that contains PCBs. The project, nearly complete, has cost more than $120 million, but the company learned the hard way four years ago that a failure to act can be costly as well. At that time, a fire in a PG&E transformer spewed PCB-laden smoke into a San Francisco high-rise. The price tag for the cleanup: $22 million...