TCE in our air

I am glad to hear that someone is taking the time to check up on our DEP and trying to make sure we are safe. This whole TCE thing keeps getting bounced back and forth from we are safe to we are in danger. I don't know what to believe anymore. Is there too much in our air? Is it within levels?

Does anyone know really what point we are at now? Are there any public meetings soon on the topic? If anyone has any information, please leave a comment. Anonymouse posters are welcome. Any information would be appreciated.

Article from Monday's Mercury

Local man sues over tests for TCE
By Evan Brandt, ebrandt@pottsmerc.com

On Halloween, the same day the state announced approval of a permit change that will allow Superior Tube to lower its emissions of a carcinogenic chemical, the specters of more off-site pollution and a federal lawsuit were raised by an activist who has been conducting independent air tests.

Jon Goodman, a founder of People for Clean Air and Water, announced Oct. 31 that tests of air in a neighborhood behind Superior Tube showed higher levels of TCE than were found at two other area sites during more than a year of testing by the state Department of Environmental Protection.

The levels of trichloroethylene found in Goodman’s Oct. 15 samples, taken at Hildebidle and Collegeville roads, were .81 parts per billion by volume, more than three times the average found over the course of the DEP’s year of tests in Trappe.

Eight days later, Goodman took another sample at the football field at Perkiomen Valley High School and results showed the TCE level in the air there was .22 parts per billion, which is below the Trappe average but above the .14 parts per billion average from a year’s worth of samples at Evansburg State Park.
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Goodman used the same Massachusetts lab to test the results as he did when he took samples outside Skippack Elementary School in September. The TCE levels in that sample were 17 times higher than the averages at the two state test sites.

The state responded in October by including Skippack Elementary School in its mobile testing program.

Goodman has filed a $300 million “citizen’s federal lawsuit” against the DEP, Superior Tube and Accellent, another narrow tube plant that emits TCE and is located in Trappe. In the suit, Goodman charges all three defendants with violating the Clean Air Act.

Because Montgomery County is in a “non-attainment area” for safe ozone standards, the Clean Air Act sets certain restrictions on the release of chemicals such as TCE and the family of chemicals to which it belongs, called volatile organic compounds. Both Superior and Accellent emit in excess of 70 tons of TCE into the air each year, and do so under DEP permits.

Goodman said he was informed by the Environmental Protection Agency that because of the county’s status as an “ozone transport region in a moderate non-attainment area,” a cap of 50 tons per year is imposed on emitters of TCE by the Clean Air Act.

Emissions from both plants and the DEP, which allows those emissions, are

in violation of the act, he argued.

“Why is the DEP allowed to supercede federal law?” he asked. “I don’t think that’s allowed.”

DEP spokeswoman Deborah Fries said the department would have no comment on the lawsuit other than to acknowledge that the agency had been notified of its existence.

Francine Carlini, who heads up the air quality program at the DEP’s Norristown office and who has overseen the agency’s air sampling program in the Collegeville area, did comment on Goodman’s sampling.

“Given the fact that he’s doing grab sampling, where he gets 60 seconds of air, and we’re doing 24-hour samples, it’s kind of comparing apples to oranges,” she said.

“When you do a 60-second sample, you may get a low, you may get a high, you may get nothing, depending on what is happening during that 60-second period of time,” Carlini explained. She said that is why the DEP uses samples taken over a 24-hour period.

Carlini conceded that Goodman’s results “are certainly not atypical from what we’ve been getting in our sampling.”

Goodman’s results are “on the same order of magnitude” as the DEP testing results, Carlini said.

She said the results of the mobile testing done in October are in and “we’ll have something to present to the public shortly. We’re analyzing the results now.”

The results of the change in Superior Tube’s permit, which will allow for an 8 percent reduction in emissions according to the company’s calculations, will not be immediately evident on test results in the area.

“They haven’t given us a date, but I think it will be fairly quick,” Carlini said of the change expected to eliminate 7.4 tons per year from the Lower Providence facility. “But they’ve been fairly anxious to get started.”

Had a public hearing not been delayed over concerns about its original July 3 date, those changes might have occurred sooner, Carlini said.

“Given that we had to wait for the public hearing, and then have it rescheduled, and then wait 30 days for the comment period to be over certainly added some time,” she said. “We worked on it as expeditiously as possible.”