Enforcement Varies : Response to Toxic Peril Often Slow

Twelve-mile Creek cuts a sleepy, winding course across the wooded northern edge of this tiny Appalachian town before vanishing a few miles downstream in the shallows of Hartwell Lake. In the stifling summer of 1961, Carole Whitfield remembers, she and other young women would escape the midday heat by soaking for hours in the cool waters near the village power plant.

The memory is hardly so pleasant now. Whitfield blames Twelve-mile Creek for the seven local babies she says were born with birth defects that year, including her own retarded son. She credits it with the miscarriages, reproductive ailments, bloody skin rashes, nervous disorders and other unexplained illnesses that some frightened townsfolk say still occur with ominous frequency.

The source of the problems, she believes, can be traced a dozen miles upstream to the Sangamo-Weston Co. factory, which makes electrical capacitors--and which acknowledges dumping polychlorinated biphenyls, the highly toxic chemical commonly known as PCBs, into Twelvemile Creek for some 20 years.

Bemused Tolerance

For a long time, Whitfield’s concern was greeted with bemused tolerance by South Carolina officials and by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which have checked and charted the creek’s PCB woes since 1970. “It’s much ado about nothing,” Chuck Pietrosewicz, the federal Centers for Disease Control liaison with the EPA, said this summer. “That’s not the way I’d prefer that you put it, but it’s what we’ve concluded.”

Today, however, there is growing--though still not conclusive--evidence that the EPA may be wrong. Most recently, medical studies of residents ordered by Whitfield’s lawyers in a suit against Sangamo, indicate severe liver and immune-system abnormalities consistent with toxic-waste poisoning.

Given those findings, the EPA--which considered its voluminous Cateechee file closed as recently as June--decided last month to reopen the case.

Textbook Example

Twelvemile Creek appears to be a textbook example of how pollution threats still can be greeted with near-indifference in some regions of the country, despite extensive federal laws and rules aimed at environmental protection.

The EPA’s toxic-waste bureaucracy largely relegates decisions on investigating and cleaning up waste sites to state officials and to the EPA’s own regional offices. And the vigor of those local-level agencies varies enormously from one part of the country to another.

“The EPA’s whole hazardous waste cleanup program needs to be guided by objective guidelines,” said Ellen K. Silbergeld, a Washington staff scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund. “It’s become a lottery. Where you live determines what kind of attention you get.”

It is no trifling charge. So far, only 850 sites across the country have been put on EPA’s list of situations dangerous enough to qualify for cleanup under the federally assisted Superfund program. But nationally, EPA says 19,000 sites are potentially hazardous enough to compete for Superfund status, among them the Sangamo plant near Cateechee. The congressional Office of Technology Assessment says the list could total as many as 100,000.

“There hasn’t been a terribly effective way of assessing sites out there,” said Jane Bloom, senior projects attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York. “The EPA gets recommendations from the states, and the states that are aggressive and put up money and time to identify sites are obviously more likely to have their sites considered.”

Firm Hand Missing

Differing selection standards and the lack of a firm federal hand are reflected in the fact that Florida, for instance, has 37 Superfund sites while neighboring Georgia, with more potential cleanup candidates awaiting evaluation, has only five. And Louisiana--considered by many experts to be one of the nation’s most polluted states--has but six.

This lack of uniformity helps explain why EPA’s Region 4, a band of eight Southern states from North Carolina to Mississippi, contains only 85 Superfund sites. Environmentalists say the EPA’s attention to toxic-waste cleanups traditionally has been strongest in the Northeast, where citizen activism and political support is greatest, and weakest in the South.

The latest internal EPA review of its toxic waste programs, issued in May, 1984, concluded that Region 4’s oversight of state toxic waste programs “is clearly inadequate.” In addition, “regional office knowledge of (state) program activities, its ability to anticipate problem areas and its influence on program direction is unacceptably low,” the report stated.

“There’s a historical preference among the regional (EPA) people not to step on the toes of the state officials,” said one top official in EPA’s Washington headquarters, who spoke on the condition that he not be named. “And it’s no secret here that Region 4 is one of the worst.”

Difficult Task

EPA’s deputy regional administrator Howard D. Zeller and other Region 4 officials unquestionably have their hands full trying to prod the region’s eight states into sometimes-unpleasant enforcement and cleanup duties. For beginners, South Carolina and some other states have sometimes refused outright to give Region 4 officials data on their toxic waste actions.

But top officials in the Atlanta region call the characterization of their operation as “one of the worst” unfair, saying the performance has improved.

Their critics say that you cannot prove the progress by Cateechee. There, two decades’ dumping of PCBs into the town’s fishing spots, swimming holes and, eventually, into its public water system have yet to merit a fine, much less a cleanup.

In a June interview, Zeller said the agency considered the pollution problem solved when Sangamo’s plant ceased PCB dumping in 1977 and buried its remaining PCB wastes in a landfill.

“That action is in place and completed,” Zeller said. “We felt . . . that the action was complete as to what they did on site to prevent further contamination of PCBs.”

No Order Issued

“As far as I’m aware, there was never any order issued” to rid Twelvemile Creek of PCBs, Christian I. Liipfert, Sangamo-Weston Co.’s general counsel, said in July. “There’s a fair amount of thought that in the area of trying to clean up stream beds, you’re better off not trying.” A cleanup effort might stir up more PCB pollution than it would remove, he said.

Yet pollution of Twelvemile Creek has been pervasive enough that drinking-water samples tested in the mid-1970s showed PCB levels well in excess of the current recommended federal limits for health effects and, in some cases, hundreds of times greater than those currently recommended to minimize the risk of cancer.

PCB concentrations in the creek’s fish have exceeded federal safety standards since the standards were set in 1976, and still average nearly 10 times the allowed maximum. Fishing in Twelvemile Creek and Lake Hartwell’s northern reaches has been banned for nine years.

Region 4 officials, while admitting “residual contamination” of the creek, had contended the problem was solved when Sangamo was ordered in the 1970s to stop polluting. They see no reason why Sangamo or anyone else should pay to clean up PCB hot spots in the creek, upgrade treatment equipment at local waterworks or conduct medical studies of neighborhoods where PCB exposure appears greatest.

“The EPA developed guidelines (to halt pollution), and basically, the company was able to meet them,” said Lamar Priester, who uncovered the Sangamo pollution in 1970 as a state worker and is now an adviser to Whitfield’s attorneys. “They quit worrying about measuring adverse health effects as long as the guidelines were met. The guidelines started running the program.”

Guarded Reaction

Today, as it reopens the case, EPA continues to react guardedly. “Lamar Priester was in last July 31 with health effects findings that are undergoing peer review,” Jim Finger, director of the EPA’s environmental services division, said in mid-August. “We are re-revisiting the (Twelvemile Creek) situation. We’re checking to determine if a possible Superfund cleanup is applicable, and if it is, we’ll proceed.”

Officials still maintain the area’s water is safe for drinking and swimming, he said, but the agency will conduct new tests of PCBs in creek sediments, which he said have not been closely studied since 1976, and will conduct a first-time test for dibenzofurans--an extremely toxic compound whose presence in PCBs can vary widely depending on a range of factors, including whether the PCBs were heated.

Whitfield’s lawyers contend the PCB-filled capacitors in the Sangamo plant were baked before shipping, and that wastes may contain high levels of the compound.

The history of PCB dumping here is straightforward enough. From 1956 to 1977, Sangamo’s Pickens capacitor plant, which used millions of pounds of liquid PCBs as an electrical insulator, washed PCB wastes down a concrete culvert into Town Creek, a tiny stream that empties into Twelvemile Creek a few hundred yards away. Dumping dwindled but did not stop after the state discovered the pollution and ordered Sangamo to stop in 1970.

Drifting PCBs

During those years, tides of PCBs drifted far down Twelvemile Creek, piling up behind the dams that bracket the village of Cateechee some 12 miles downstream and then, after rainstorms and floods, washing farther south into Lake Hartwell.

State and federal EPA officials banned fishing in the creek and checked local death records for evidence of unusual cancer rates after the human dangers of PCBs became clear in the mid-1970s. They concluded that the levels of pollution posed no threat to Cateechee residents or anyone else.

Region 4 EPA chief Jack E. Ravan said in 1976 that “citizens in the surrounding areas need not be alarmed about drinking water safety” and that “swimming and other water recreation need not be restricted.” The state Health and Environmental Control Department told Sangamo to dump its remaining PCB wastes into a landfill on the factory grounds.

Reads Article on PCBs

The case might have ended there if Whitfield had not stumbled across an article on PCB-linked health problems in 1983. The descriptions seemed to mirror the maladies she had seen for years in her son, her neighbors and herself.

Whitfield’s face, arms and back often are covered with large, bloody blisters, and other residents suffer from skin irritations so severe that one woman is sometimes forced to sleep wearing gloves. Stories of birth defects, miscarriages and other reproductive problems are common; so are more vague accounts of recurring diseases such as chicken pox and severe colds that could be related to immune-system deficiencies.

Whitfield, waving her own blistered hand toward some 25 neighbors in a meeting hall overlooking Twelvemile Creek, said last April: “Every woman in this room has probably had a baby to die, a miscarriage, a baby with learning defects, cancer. You can’t tell me all this here is coincidence.”

Even top state officials concede that something appears amiss in Cateechee residents’ health. “You don’t have to be smart to realize it’s not what you see in the normal population,” said Dr. Richard Parker, the chief of the state bureau of disease control.

Study Needed

But determining how abnormal things are here would require an epidemiological study that the state will not finance, said Ronald Rolett, a state-employed doctor who oversees community health matters in western South Carolina.

“They have very real physical problems--no question about it, either now or in the past,” Rolett said. “Nobody questions that. The problem is establishing the linkage between what they believe to be the cause and their current illnesses.

“I’ve asked for assistance from the CDC (the federal Centers for Disease Control) and state sources, and the word I got back was that it would cost anywhere from a half million to a million dollars. And the state doesn’t have that kind of money.”

Rolett persuaded the state in July, 1984, to measure PCB levels in blood samples drawn from 27 Cateechee volunteers. The results, reviewed by CDC officials in Atlanta, disclosed slightly elevated PCB blood levels in two residents--one of them Whitfield--and near-normal levels in the others.

In the view of EPA, CDC and state officials, the blood samples showed that PCBs pose no threat to Cateechee residents.

But Silbergeld argues that blood samples do not reflect either the frequency of PCB-related health effects or PCB concentrations in human tissue, where the chemical is stored. (South Carolina officials have refused to test the tissue of Cateechee residents, arguing that the cost would be too great and the tests too painful.)

Pietrosewicz, the CDC’s liaison with EPA Region 4, said his agency had enough concerns about the South Carolina tests that it recommended more studies of the validity of Cateechee residents’ health complaints.

Pietrosewicz said the CDC’s own 1983 and 1984 studies of “environmental data” at Cateechee--primarily water samples--produced “levels (which) in terms of our cancer assessment levels were high, and they warranted further examination. . . . The issue was not so much a one-time exposure that might cause effects, but long-term exposure.”

‘It’s Their Turf’

The CDC did not go to Cateechee or conduct further studies because “we don’t work directly with individuals . . . unless we’re requested to” by the state, he said. “Since it’s their turf, they’re the ones who deal directly with the affected community.”

Which side holds the high ground in this medical and scientific debate is unclear. Several national experts consulted by The Times were unconvinced that PCBs in Twelvemile Creek pose dangers to residents.

“Those numbers don’t bowl me over,” said David Ozonoff, chief of the environmental health section at the Boston University School of Public Health, when presented with the results of the blood tests and data on sediment and water contamination.

But Ozonoff and others also allow that in cases such as Cateechee, where longtime pollution is documented and residents complain of illness, reams of data are worth far less to a health specialist than seeing the problems with one’s own eyes. “If common sense tells you one thing, and the lab tells you something else, it’s not very good judgment to go with the lab numbers,” he said.

In this case, says EDF’s Silbergeld, common sense tells a lot. Besides the residents’ visible health problems, she says, tests of fish in 1976 showed PCB concentrations as much as 70 times the maximum deemed safe by the federal Food and Drug Administration. In 1983, PCB levels remained four or five times greater than the FDA standard.

Moreover, PCB levels in 1974 drinking water samples were as much as 11 times greater than the current state limit. And although levels have dropped since, they remain at least five times higher than what EPA scientists say is prudent to reduce the lifetime risk of cancer.

Neither state nor federal officials have made those points to Cateechee residents--an oversight Silbergeld calls “really duplicitous.”

Climbing PCB Levels

There are other harbingers of potential trouble at Cateechee. Rather than declining, as had been expected, PCB levels in the bottom mud of parts of Twelvemile Creek have climbed rapidly since 1977, recent tests have found.

“We don’t know whether new (contaminated) sediments are reaching further downstream or whether sediments there in the past are being redistributed by the current,” said Russell Sherer, the state director of water quality assessment. “It hasn’t really been looked at.”

Further tests might be pointless, though, because officials have no intention of cleaning the creek regardless of the results. “The overall damage to the system would be greater by removing (the PCB waste) than to leave it as it is,” Sherer said. “And to dispose of that volume of material--well, where?”

Meanwhile, Carole Whitfield’s anxiety continues. “There’s people down there now swimming,” she said. “It’s just stupid to let people continue swimming in this water.

“I try not to think about it. But sometimes in the dead of night, you’re just lying there. And it all comes back to you.”