SamPratt.com

Scientist: TCI tests “invalid,” untrustworthy

Dr. David Carpenter

In an unusually balanced and well-researched Register-Star article, the director of the University of Albany’s School of Public Health’s Institute for Health and Environment questions the validity of State tests which claim no pollution impacts from the towering TCI inferno on August 1st and 2nd.

Reporter John Mason (who cut his teeth on pollution issues while reporting on the St. Lawrence Cement proposal) cites UAlbany’s Dr. David Carpenter as saying that he “does not trust the results because they relied on Aroclor tests, which he said are not appropriate.” Dr. Carpenter, who also runs an independent PCB testing lab, states that

“I don’t trust (the DEC testing) at all... I would say it’s invalid. These analyses are cheap and relatively fast. The congener tests are expensive, but this is not going to tell you anything. I would recommend a much more detailed analysis of the soot.”

Mason’s article also gives the State plenty of opportunity to defend itself. This is the type of in-depth reporting which can really earn a local paper the trust of readers, and is all too rare in the Register’s pages. This site has heard through separate channels that the Register is in possession of one or more samples of debris collected at a neighboring property, and may be in the process of having it analyzed.

Dr. Carpenter’s assessment is particularly timely in light of tonight’s 6:30 meeting at the West Ghent Fire Company (near the entrance to the Commerce Park off Route 9H, about a half-mile south of Kozel’s, which unfortunately I cannot attend due to a prior obligation). The meeting was organized by State Assembly member Didi Barrett, who expects all or most of the involved officials and agencies to be in attendance.

Glencohort

One of these things is not like the others... in Glenco Mills (NY).

Video interview: TCI neighbors speak out

 

Working with videographer and filmmaker David McDonald, this site has produced a video interview with two of TCI of NY’s closest neighbors, Dmitri and Barbara Bassakalis. The couple evacuated their house on the night of August 1st, then stayed up all night observing the fire from a safe distance—all the while hoping they would have a house to which to return.

Some key revelations from their interview last Wednesday include:

• According to the couple, a representative of the NYS State Department of Environmental Conservation who visited their site (after Mr. Bassakalis appeared on Albany TV) declined to take a sample of the countless black, oily objects which fell on their deck, cars, lawn and into their pool.
  


• Instead, the couple says they were told not to worry about the many black objects, and told to simply wash it away. (Note: Their house relies on well water.)
  


• Mr. Bassakalis, who also works for the State, reports that he was refused entry to the County and State’s joint press conference on Thursday, August 1st, where he had hoped to learn details of what had just happened in his neighborhood;


• At the time of this interview, the couple said they had not been visited by anyone from TCI, and their multiple calls to the company’s insurer Zurich had not been returned.
  

A request sent to TCI by this site last week, asking to sit down with a representative of the company, has not been answered.

Below is a still image of some of the material observed in their aboveground pool late last week, during a visit with Ghent resident Patti Matheney. Other images and video clips appear in the video by permission from Lance Wheeler, Tony Bashford and Mark Johnson.

Rabid beaver bites Boy Scout leader’s butt

Once again, a toothy rodent is putting Columbia County on the national media map. Only this time, it’s a rabid beaver.

Image: National Geographic

Boy Scout Troop 32 out of Elizaville was camping along the Delaware Water Gap in Pennsylvania when its leader, a Pine Plains resident, was attacked repeatedly by a beaver. The Troop leader “suffered bites [on] his backside, his leg and arm” before his scouts “killed the animal as it clung to its victim even after he reached shore.”

According to The Pike County Courier and dozens of other media outlets around the country, the beaver was tested and found to be rabid. The man is being treated for rabies, and of course is wished a speedy recover.

(Growing up along a small river, in my experience these animals avoid humans whenever possible, and aren’t to be feared—but rabies will turn any critter into a crazed killer.)

No wonder DEC has no time for testing

According to YNN, a (now-former) environmental engineer has pled guilty to petit larceny, and paid $20,000 restitution, for making “hundreds of calls” to phone sex numbers “while on the job as an engineer for the DEC” [New York State Department of Environmental Conservation]. According to the Times-Union’s coverage from the time of the engineer’s arrest, the calls “totalled more than 500 hours when [he] was on state work time.”

Welcome to the Machines

Online ticketing is now closed for this weekend’s Pitchfork music events at Basilica Hudson (which includes Kris Perry’s much-anticipated Machines performance). But Melissa Auf Der Maur advises that tickets will still be available at the door before each show.

Their schedule can be found online at: http://www.basilicahudson.com and http://pitchfork.com/news/47329-final-details-announced-for-next-weeks-basilica-music-fest-presented-in-association-with-pitchfork/

Fined vs. fine

If you put your half-full cans of paint, turpentine, gasoline, bleach or even household garbage into a barrel, then burned it in your own yard, you get fined.

But when the equivalent of dozens or even hundreds of burn barrels explode several hundred feet into the air, resulting in a fire and a huge plume that rages for the better part of a day, officials rush to assure everyone that it’s just fine.

More onsite at TCI than previously known

YouTube video posted by firefighters onscene

Reports from the TCI of NY fire have repeated the reassuring claim that only one small drum of PCBs and a limited quantity of mineral oil were onsite at the time of the massive blaze.

Previously, report such as Tuesday’s Catskill Daily Mail article stated that “officials said the blaze began when a drum of PCBs, about 20,000 gallons of mineral oil and trucks somehow caught fire.” Other assurances from officials and the company have characterized the amount of PCBs onsite as small, and in low concentrations of 50 parts per million (ppm) or less.

But news reports from the past 24 hours paint a different picture. The Columbia Paper on Thursday includes an inventory said to have been supplied by TCI to the New York State DEC of “materials that may be present” in the building in their Falls Industrial Park Road facility in Ghent. That inventory includes:

• “9 drums of PCB debris/oil”
• “2 drums of PCB containing oily water”
• “Hazardous waste PCB oils (50-449 ppm PCBs)” [quantity unspecified]
• “6 PCB bushings with oil”
• “10 55-gallon drums of non-hazardous PCB mineral oil (<50 ppm PCB)”
• “127,000 gallons of non-hazardous PCB containing oil (less than 50 ppm PCB within 16 large tanks”

Also inventoried are “60+ full transformers” and a “500-galon diesel fuel tank.” The Columbia Paper also says that a second company, Power Substation Solutions (PSS) was storing sodium, oil, nitrogen tanks and diesel on site, but the company has not yet been reached by EPA.

All told, that’s a great deal more than one small drum of PCBs and 20,000 gallons of mineral oil.

Meanwhile, The Albany Times-Union’s James Odato has obtained “records that showed some 50,000 pounds of PCB-containing materials and oils moving from the Ghent complex this year… The regulatory reports for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Environmental Conservation show that TCI reported eight transactions involving about 50,000 pounds of transformers, fluids and other materials containing PCBs, including big shipments of petroleum oil or other liquid containing levels of 50 parts per million to 500 ppm, which is considered a hazardous concentration.”

The T-U article includes the same inventory as The Columbia Paper, but adds that “the company also reported having transported 2,700 pounds of ‘solid waste that exhibits the characteristics of ignitability’ this year.” A former company employee, Fran Vecellio of Kinderhook, is quoted at length in the article downplaying the severity of the fire.

Walter Hang, a prominent opponent of hydrofracking who also runs an environmental assessment firm, calls in the article “for a study of the toxic components in the soot because of the potential that PCBs went up in flames.” Neighbors of the facility interviewed by this site say that a visiting DEC official declined to take samples of oily clumps of material which fell on their decks, cars, lawns and into their pools—and were told instead to just wash or scoop these up. More on that soon.

Black pancakes in the pond

A Ghent resident downwind of the TCI fire took these photos of unusual debris she noticed in the pond on her property several days after the emergency. She has called the New York State Department of Conservation to attempt to get a representative to visit the property.

Chez Shez

Sherrell Jacobson, who for many years maintained a studio in the “sliver” building on the south side of Hudson’s 400 block, is having a two-day show of her work this weekend entitled Imperfections: The Stuff of Shez.

The show will include sculpture, collages, drawings, jewelry and found objects. It takes place from 12-6 on the weekend after next, Saturday August 11th and Sunday the 12th, at 848 West Main Street in Catskill, about 1 mile west of the train trestle on Route 9W.

Beyond PCBs

Hudson resident Peter Seward, who has dealt with many materials and remediation issues on jobsites, points out that while the main focus of official concern regarding the TCI fire in Ghent has been PCBs, that questions ought to be raised about other pollutants as well.

Seward urges the public to also be mindful of “the fact that [what burned] was a hazardous waste site.” There ought to be, he says, an additional focus on waste oil, which “consists of bitumen by products which in turn consist of: arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead” and other worrisome components.

The question agencies such as DEC ought to be asked, Seward says, is: “Why is used oil regulated?” He further notes that

“Only through legal practices, and with set high temperatures, are such toxic things allowed to be burned. We, as a community, all may consider this... including the first responders, who, likely, suffer the most from the initial start of the fire until its demise. This isn’t a simple thing—very unlike what we have to deal with daily. This has been a real life hazardous waste fire. It requires thoughtful consideration, not bigotry and unnecessary ‘passing the torch’ to the state.”

One also wonders what other materials were onsite in the way of (for example) plastics, vinyl, metals, treated lumber, etc.; a waste handling structure is not built like an ordinary framed house.

Meanwhile, back on the PCB question, an environmental scientist in Kinderhook writes to a neighbor, after checking with a source familiar with utility companies’ practices for recycling transformers:

“TCI is considered a transfer station, in that they do not treat or incinerate the metal and the mineral oil. They send it elsewhere for destruction. The mineral oil contains the PCBs, and their permit should indicate the volume they are allowed to have onsite at any given time. If you know the maximum volume allowed, and the ppm limit for PCB, then you can get an idea of how much risk there is when the facility has a fire. Someone would have to do a ‘worst case’ modeling run to estimate exposure to surrounding environment and people.”

Part of the problem (per my interviews with DEC and DOH officials) is that none of these agencies appear to have any definitive idea of what was in or around the building at the time of the fire. Those agencies are either still trying to gather information—in the case of DEC, they have no shipping manifests for TCI in the public database after March of this year—or have made assumptions based on the company’s claims and others’ suppositions.

Understanding the TCI test data

On Monday night, State and County officials released raw testing data related to the TCI fire in Ghent. No executive summary or other analysis was provided, except for broad assurances that the data was no cause for concern. Though a staffer at the State Department of Health stated that his agency was several days away from having such a document completed, officials went ahead with a call for an end to further testing.

Ghent resident Deborah Masters, who lives approximately 6 miles due east of the TCI fire site, has provided this site with an analysis of that technical data, after consulting with an engineering colleague. Masters ascertained that the limited testing was done by a company called Clean Harbors and processed by Adirondack Environmental Services in Albany. But when she spoke with a company rep (Tara Daniels) she would “only confirm their testing, and would not have any further conversation.”

In her opinion, using the PCB tests “as an excuse not to do further wipe tests on people’s properties is very strange,” yet typical of such agencies. “The very high levels of toxic fumes the residents may have breathed through their windows while sleeping,” she says, “were also never recorded.”

Masters writes that “the most troubling thing” about the situation “is not having air sampling from Thursday night or Friday day during the burn period of this fire. I suspect that there were samples taken, just not ones they are prepared to share with us.” She encourages residents to send Freedom of Information Law requests to the agencies responsible to attempt to secure that data.

Masters went on to discuss with her engineer the topic of

“why no VOC [Volatile Organic Compound] tests, which are more immediate tests, cheaper tests, and can’t be done once a hot fire is over, were never taken. Any mobile lab prepared for testing PCBs could easily test for VOCs.

“The other tests not taken, or at least not delivered to us, were tests for furans which result from burned plastics which the PCB byrms were made of (huge, heavy double-walled plastic bowls at the bottom of each PCB containment vessel—there would have been 4 or 5 of these within the facility), and for burning gas and oil which are both EPA-list carcinogens.

“The likely reason for very little soil residue is that very hot fires completely incinerate certain chemicals, which would include anything like toluene, turpentine, etc.

Regarding the presence of large amounts of mineral oil, Masters says that this “is used as a substitute in which to put PCBs after they are removed from the oil they used to be stored in.” She notes that only PCB sampling has been done, and that in at least one case the results ought to have led to more localized testing:

“They have tested for different kinds of PCBs, but the samples all read as ND (or non-detect), except for sample Aroclor 1260 which tested at 131 ppb (parts per billion), which is higher than the NYSDEC allowable limit of 100 ppb. This is one of the soil samples on the top left of the map. The over-the-limit level indicates that they should do grid sampling in that area to determine if there are oher high levels in that geographic area, but a wider area.

“They often use this kind of sampling to indicate that ‘there is no reason to do further sampling’ as all the samples, except one, are non-detect. However there are different soil and air samples from the map which have no indicated readings. These samples are listed on the map as AR, DT [and] DR. DT is listed in the legend as "dust track", and my engineer thinks the AR is at least an air sample, probably a troubling sample, as there is no information listed.

On a technical level, Masters explains for those trying to puzzle out these forms that the header “PCB TOTAL < 1.0 ug/100cm2” means less than 1 microgram per 100 centimeters squared. The notation “Surr.” means “surrogate,” indicating that the testing regimen used “a measured quantity of another chemical which acts as a control to verify the PCB sample methodology and specifies the percentage of recovery in the sample. So the sample of PCBs is spiked with the chemical surrogate, for accurate testing.” The abbreviation PQL means Practical Quanitation Limit, or the percentage range of recovery of materail from the sample.

Regarding the sampling of soil and surface water on the ground, Masters says that oils (found on a film on the water samples) were “collected by Westin Solutions on Thursday Aug 2nd and delivered to Accutest LabLink at 5:54 PM Saturday, Aug 4th. The wipe tests were collected on Friday Aug 3rd by Clean Harbors and analyzed by Adirondack Environmental Services between 12:20 am – 2:20 am Saturday Aug. 4.”

Masters says that her engineer agreed that citizens and officials should be on the lookout for the following:

• Whether fire responders in the 9 different fire companys were properly notified of what was onsite before being sent to fight an inferno there;


• Whether a sufficient Evacuation Plan was on file with the Office of Emergency Management, and whether citizen members were serving on that board;


• Whether NYS DEC conducted sufficient inspections of the facility;


• Whether TCI properly filed necessary reports to the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory database, and the RTK database; and


• Whether the community was properly notified of the potential catastrophe in progress.

 

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