[Durham INC] State investigating 11 chemical spill sites in Durham (Herald-Sun)

[John Schelp]

Below is an article from today's Herald-Sun that contains some troubling information about the State not informing neighborhoods of several chemical spills in Durham.

Can Neighborhood Improvement Services please post the list of 11 chemical spill sites in Durham that the State is investigating?

with appreciation,
John

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Contaminants force church to move
By Ray Gronberg, Herald-Sun, 21 June 2009 

State and city officials closed a West Club Boulevard church in May after learning that the building it was using, a one-time dry cleaning store, is the source of a chemical contamination. 

An inspector from the city's Neighborhood Improvement Services Department condemned the building at 1103 W. Club Blvd. on May 11 on the grounds that fumes of a chemical called perchloroethylene were evident inside the structure. 

The chemical, also known as tetrachloroethylene, perc or PCE, is a common dry cleaning solvent. Regulators consider it a "probable carcinogen," said John Powers, head of the special remediation branch of the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources' Superfund section. 

The order displaced the congregation of the Word of Faith Christian Community. Condemnation means a building cannot be rented out until repairs occur, said Rick Hester, acting assistant director of Neighborhood Improvement Services. 

The building's owner lives in Maryland and is aware of the order, Hester said. 

Powers' office spearheads a statewide effort to clean up contamination linked to old dry cleaning stores. It's working on the West Club site and has found there "some pretty high levels of contamination" affecting both soil and groundwater, Powers said. 

The plume of underground chemicals measures about 350 feet long by 190 feet wide and stretches north across Club Boulevard into the parking lot of Northgate Mall, he said. 

Measured levels in groundwater clocked in at levels in the "tens of thousands of parts per billion," which are high relative to the state drinking water standard for the chemical of 0.7 parts per billion, Powers said. 

State regulators found and mapped the plume by doing a series of soil borings and putting in monitoring wells. 

The chemical appears to be moving slowly -- the dry cleaner that used to occupy the site was last in business in 1974 -- but analysts are eager to do "a little more investigation" on adjoining properties to the south and east to see if it can be found there, Powers said. 

The adjoining properties include another church -- the Triangle Family Church on Watts Street -- and what Powers said were "at least three" houses on the north end of Dollar Avenue. 

"The primary risk is just on the source property," Powers said. "If we find the contamination hasn't migrated [to the adjoining properties south and east] that would close it off in that director and we feel everybody else would be fine." 

State officials have been in contact with the former occupants of the building and the adjoining property owners, but have not gone beyond that to notify the neighborhood. That's drawn criticism from an environmental group, plus a posting by the group to at least one of Durham's many activist e-mail lists. 

"We feel this is a neighborhood issue that extends much further than those property owners with land adjacent to the contaminated site," said Sue Dayton, coordinator of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League's N.C. Healthy Communities Project. 

Dayton favors wider notification so residents can have a say in and watch over any cleanup effort. "There's no question the state is going to do the best they can to mitigate the site," she said. "However, there are uncertainties involved here, especially when a plume of this magnitude has to be cleaned up." 

Powers said the state does in fact see to it that the site is cleaned up, using a combination of techniques. Possibilities include digging up the contaminated soil and injecting it with "agents that help break down contaminants in the ground," he said. 

Chemical cleanups in the past have also used pumps to extract underground chemicals, but that method isn't as much in favor these days because "it's been found a lot of contamination remains behind," he said. 

Cleanups take awhile, and require at least a year of groundwater monitoring. The state program is working with 219 sites, 11 of which including the Club Boulevard site are in Durham. 

The program began in 1997 but only has been going full speed since 2003, Powers said. In the past couple of years it's graduated five sites with lesser contaminations than the West Club Boulevard site's, and is poised to finish with 10 more. 

Dayton was responsible for the e-mail posting and said her group would like to meet soon with city leaders, the Inter-Neighborhood Council, and neighborhood groups in Trinity Park, Walltown and Trinity Heights to discuss the problem. 

Local real estate agent Ellen Dagenhart lives on Dollar Avenue a few doors south of the affected area and said Friday that before Dayton sent out her e-mail she'd known little about the matter. 

"I had heard off and on over the years that there was contamination, but had no idea that it was to the extent detailed in the letter," she said. "It's scary to think about something like that."