ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Human Life, First and Foremost

When federal and state authorities first announced that they were investigating allegations of the mishandling of toxic material at a General Electric plant in Anaheim, management and employees offered vastly different portraits of safety procedures.

Some employees said they had not been warned of health risks of PCBs and that supervisors had told them they didn’t need safety equipment, leading them to handle toxic waste wearing only shorts and T-shirts. Management replied that it couldn’t believe such a thing would happen and that safety concerns were constantly impressed on workers.

Clearly, both sides couldn’t have been right. Now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has weighed in with a determination that the company seriously mishandled these wastes and did indeed put workers at risk. For the first time within EPA’s western region, a PCB storage permit has been suspended.

This means that the GE Apparatus Service Center cannot continue to accept shipments of PCB waste for the decommissioning of old electrical equipment, which amounts to about 20% of the plant’s business. The work involves the draining of hazardous waste from equipment being taken out of service.

The EPA could have revoked the permit but decided to give the company time to clean up its act.

The company is wise to say it will cooperate completely and to offer a promise that it will operate the plant safely. It was given 15 days to get moving. The suspension will permit the correction of violations without resorting initially to extreme punitive measures.

One worker’s simple observation went to the heart of the matter: “Income is necessary, but life is more necessary.” PCBs, a family of more than 200 related chemical compounds, have been designated by the EPA as a probable cause of cancer in humans and have been banned from use in the United States since 1979. The issue is corporate responsibility.

The least that can be done for workers decommissioning old equipment, a service to all of us, is to ensure that they are protected.