PCB Problems
May 14, 2009
Inlander
Kevin Taylor
If a power pole falls in the parking lot of a Coeur d’Alene restaurant, how many fish sticks can you eat on the Spokane Indian Reservation?
This is more than a zen koan, oh grasshoppers. It is the next big mystery box of how we clear poisons and pollution out of the Spokane River.
Gov. Christine Gregoire just this week signed a bill that doubles the amount of time dischargers are allowed to reduce phosphorous in the river, a process that has been convoluted, contentious, long-delayed and expensive.
But reducing a nutrient like phosphorous may be the kindergarten of river cleanups. Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), on the other hand, are man-made chemicals that are ridiculously tiny, and so toxic there has been a nationwide ban on their manufacture since 1979.
PCB compounds have life spans rivaling Methuselah’s — three decades later we are still surrounded by them, and it doesn’t take much to set off alarms.
Just before 3:30 pm on April 28, a cloudy, windy day, Kootenai County Fire and Rescue was dispatched to a fairly innocent call: power pole down.
It turned into a convoluted hazardous materials response that had specialized contractors hauling away dirt, asphalt and entire drain systems to a storage warehouse for contaminated materials.
An Avista power pole in the parking lot of the Cedars Floating Restaurant had been weakened by rot and toppled in a gust of wind.
The pole had three transformers. Two of them cracked and leaked out an estimated 50 or 60 gallons of mineral oil. The oil in one of the transformers also contained PCBs at 4 parts per million.
“What appears to have happened is someone piled up several feet of dirt around the pole for landscaping,” says Bruce Howard, Avista’s director of environmental affairs. The dirt was piled higher than the several feet of pole treated for rot resistance, thus weakening it.
Also, Howard says, someone placed a 5,000-gallon propane tank next to the guy wire that stabilizes the pole.
So when the power pole fell, the guy wire sliced off the valve on the propane tank. Firefighters and Avista repair crews had to wait roughly 30 minutes for the gas to disperse — all the while watching the pool of oil creep across the parking lot toward the Spokane River.
And there was one more surprise. Someone had installed a drainage system under the landscaping. So the oil, instead of soaking into the dirt and stopping, shot down a pipe that came out inches above the rushing water.
It still didn’t seem like this was going to amount to much.
After all, says Geoff Harvey, a supervisor with Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, we are talking about tiny, tiny amounts of PCBs into a full-throated spring runoff river.
“The USGS [U.S. Geological Survey] gauge at the Post Falls Dam had the river at 19,100 cubic feet per second,” Harvey says, taking a deep breath as he does the math out loud. “Assuming all 26 gallons [from the PCB transformer] goes in over a 23.75-hour period, if you calculate 85,000-some-odd seconds multiplied by 19,100 that gives you 1.6 billion gallons of water going past that point. Now, if you go from billions of gallons to grams, you are now at ten-to-the-twelfth in grams of water …”
Minutes later, Harvey had concluded the spill was well below the most stringent human health standard on the river — the Spokane Tribe’s 3.37 parts per billion of PCBs.
Then he checked his work.
“I must admit I am not accustomed to dealing with such small numbers,” Harvey wrote later in an e-mail about the spill sent to Washington Department of Ecology and federal EPA regulators.
He announced a stark conclusion that the worst-case calculation for this small spill “… would exceed the most stringent criteria on the river roughly two-fold.”
And what would happen if this were September and there was far less water in the river?
“What’s really interesting about the Tribe’s standard is that it’s set so people can consume 86 grams a day — which is a fish stick,” says Brian Crossley, water and fish program manager for the Spokane Tribe.
The Spokane are a fish-eating people. For perhaps 10,000 years they feasted on some of the biggest chinook salmon in the entire Columbia River system, fish so mind-bendingly large they were called June hogs by early white settlers.
Canneries at the mouth of the Columbia took out the June hogs early on. Dams sealed off the rest. Now the Tribe faces industrial pollution in both the Spokane and Columbia rivers.
“PCB … basically, if you can detect it, it’s a problem,” Crossley says.
He was canoeing the river last summer with David Moore of Ecology and, not surprisingly for two water scientists, talk turned to PCBs.
“David said, ‘Brian, we are going to have to do 99.7 percent removal to meet the 86 grams,’” Crossley says.
And the Tribe is considering an even tougher standard based on a more realistic consumption of two pounds of fish.
Ecology and the Spokane Regional Health District, via the state’s Urban Waters Initiative, are this summer investigating Spokane’s stormwater overflow pipes, suspected to be the biggest contributor of PCBs in the river. Levels jump from roughly 106 ppb upstream of the city to 399 ppb downstream.
A draft cleanup plan, known as a TMDL for total maximum daily load, for PCBs has been on hold since 2006 as Ecology takes the position of “one TMDL at a time” and, after a decade, has yet to finish the one for phosphorus.
A workshop to discuss PCBs next month was canceled when Ecology would not participate. “We should be looking at a suite of technologies and removal strategies,” for multiple contaminants, says Andy Dunau of Spokane River Forum, who tried to organize the workshop to build trust among the sometimes fractious parties.
“To me, Ecology’s strategy is not in the interest of the river, or of people trying to work on river issues.”
Clearly, the PCB issues are stark, if a single power pole falling at the head of the river can potentially affect the health of people 140 miles away at the other end of it.