Word: pcbs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Pacific coastal waters are generally cleaner than most, but they also contain pockets of dead -- and deadly -- water. Seattle's Elliott Bay is contaminated with a mix of copper, lead, arsenic, zinc, cadmium and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), chemicals once widely used by the ( electrical-equipment industry. "The bottom of this bay is a chart of industrial history," says Thomas Hubbard, a water-quality planner for Seattle. "If you took a core sample, you could date the Depression, World War II. You could see when PCBs were first used and when they were banned and when lead was eliminated from gasoline...
Stiff fines and even prison sentences may get the attention of landbound polluters. Under Administrator Mike Deland, the EPA's New England office has acquired a reputation for tough pursuit of violators. In November 1986 the agency filed criminal charges against a Providence boatbuilder for dumping PCBs into Narragansett Bay. The company was fined $600,000 and its owner $75,000; he was put on probation for five years...
After a two day search, workmen patched the leak which was found Monday in the section of an oil pipeline underneath a Metropolitan District Commission parking lot on Soldier's Field Road. The oil, which does not contain cancer-causing PCBs, is used to cool a 115,000-volt electrical transmission line that connects Cambridge and Brighton...
Such measures, however, have not stopped the spread of 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...