Pipeline Agrees to Record-Cost Toxics Cleanup, Fine

A major gas pipeline company accused of dumping cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls in 89 earthen pits along its 10,000-mile transmission route has agreed to pay a $15-million fine plus cleanup costs expected to reach $400 million, the Environmental Protection Agency announced Monday.

The agreement by Texas Eastern Transmission Corp. represents the highest penalty and cleanup settlement negotiated by the EPA, officials said.

The EPA says Texas Eastern illegally disposed of PCB-laden liquids in 14 states, leaving soil contaminated at levels as high as 240 times the agency’s safety guideline. Deposits of the banned chemical in mostly rural areas were found within 200 feet of a residential drinking water well.

Texas Eastern spokesman Fred Wichlep said the agreement by the Houston-based company does not represent an admission of wrongdoing. It was intended, he said, to “expedite a settlement and avoid the uncertainties of litigation.”

The dumping “was not intentional,” Wichlep said. “It was a problem created in the natural course of doing business” in which PCBs were used by Texas Eastern and other pipelines as a fire-retardant lubricant.

But company executives also have acknowledged that the firm discharged PCBs into earthen pits after it had pledged to stop.

Monday’s announcement of an “agreement in principle” with Texas Eastern, to become a binding consent decree in a federal court in Houston, completes the first phase of a wider EPA investigation into PCB dumping by the nation’s 13 interstate pipeline companies. EPA official Frederick F. Stiehl said two or three other firms have released PCBs but none as extensively as Texas Eastern.

The EPA banned disposal of PCBs in 1978 after tests on laboratory animals turned up evidence of tumors and reproductive disorders. Wichlep said the company stopped using PCBs in 1977. But chemical residues remained in compressor crankcases and continued to taint pipeline liquids.