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...most plants are dormant. "The algae that fish feed on will be wiped out in the short term," says Tom Purcell of the Environmental Protection Agency, "but they will easily be replenished from upstream." Then, too, escaped oil will eventually be broken down by naturally occurring bacteria, although the EPA's Ray Germann admits, "No one can tell how long it will take...
...EPA standards, says Tim Fields, director of the agency's emergency- response division, "the company is doing everything we would do" to clean up the mess. Says Purcell: "As long as they report it and make every effort to clean it up, they're safe." Although the required dike around the tank did not work, it appears to have been of a size approved by the EPA to contain accidental overflows...
...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...
...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...