GILES ASKS EPA TO APLY LIME TO PCBs

Richard H. Giles would like to see the Environmental Protection Agency try lime as a means of eliminating PCBs on the Missouri Electric Works site in Cape Girardeau.

"We asked the EPA to give serious consideration to using lime," said Giles of Missouri Electric Works Inc. "But officials say the use of lime is still in the testing stage."

EPA officials of Region 5, headquartered in Chicago, are looking at lime as a possible treatment for PCBs.

In January the Chicago office reported the disappearance of PCBs from two hazardous-waste sites in the agency's Region 5 where lime was used over a period of two years.

"We received an advisory from the Chicago office concerning the use of the lime," said John Horton of the EPA's Region 7 office at Kansas City. "But there were some questions as to whether it would actually work."

The site, 6.4 acres about a half-mile north of the highways 74-61 intersection, is one of more than 20 hazardous-waste sites in Missouri that are on a federal cleanup list.

And despite a shift in the thinking about the dangers of dioxin during the past week, the federal cleanup of contaminated Times Beach and the other 20 sites will continue, officials say.

"We're going full speed ahead on all cleanup projects," Harmon said Friday."

What prompted the reassurance that cleanup work would continue were remarks earlier this week by a federal official concerning dioxin at Times Beach, where former residents were uprooted from their homes in 1982.

Dr. Vernon N. Houk of the Centers For Disease Controls said this week that if he knew in 1982 what he knows now about dioxin, he never would have recommended that the town be evacuated. He said he no longer views dioxin as a serious health threat.

Times Beach, a community of 2,242 residents in southwestern St. Louis County, was abandoned in December 1982, and later was bought out by the government. It has since been disincorporated. The cleanup of dioxin-tainted soil in the town began last month and experts estimate that the cleanup at Times Beach will cost $200 million by the time of completion in 2000.

"We're in various stages of cleanup at various sites throughout the state," said Hattie Thomas, community relations coordinator of the Region 7 office. "We're still in negotiation stages with the Missouri ElectricWorks steering committee at Cape Girardeau."

EPA officials have estimated it will take 15 years to complete the Cape Girardeau cleanup at a cost of about $10 million. The EPA has proposed a method of on-site incineration of the polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB)-contaminated soil at the site, and is looking to potentially responsible parties for a source of funding.

"The negotiations should be completed within another 30 to 60 days," said Thomas. "The cleanup plan could be implemented by September."

She added that the cleanup project could take from two to four years to clean up the contaminated soil, with treatment of ground water at the site to continue for about 15 years.

The site was added to the EPA's National Priority List of Superfund Sites in 1989. Missouri Electric Works is a motor and transformer repair and sales business, which has operated at the site since 1953. Contamination of the soil occurred from waste oil that had leaked from some of the more than 100 drums at the site, said EPA officials.

Meanwhile, Illinois EPA officials are still looking into lime as a possible cure for the PCB problem.

Dan O'Riordan, a spokesman for the Region 5 EPA public affairs office, said Friday that lime had been used over a period of two years at two different sites and that during that time all evidence of PCBs disappeared.

"We're still looking into the lime factor," said O'Riordan. "We're still investigating what happened at the sites and what it can mean for the future.

"At this time we still have not determined all the `whys' of what happened. We're still involved in research and don't know how long it will take to compile final reports."

The sites where lime was used were the former Cam-Or Oil Refinery site near Westville, Ind., and a site at Toledo, Ohio.

The Cam-Or site once contained more than triple the concentration of PCBs allowed by law, but now appears to be free of the contaminants, said O'Riordan.

In 1986 the EPA drained and treated the waste water in three infested lagoons and added lime to help solidify the waste, said O'Riordan. The EPA then covered the new lagoon with a tarpaulin to prevent rain from washing contaminants out of it and left it covered for two years.

When EPA officials returned to test the lagoon in mid-1988, they found the oil sludge intact but the PCBs gone. The monitoring of well water around the site showed the chemicals did not seep out of the lagoon and the PCBs appear to have disintegrated into harmless chemical components."

Lime was also used at the Toledo site about the same time, to harden sludge, and the PCBs disappeared.

EPA officials say one theory is that high heat and low moisture during a long drought in 1988 could have combined with the lime to make the contaminants disintegrate. EPA Region V is using lime on some PCB projects, but it's too early for preliminary test results.

"We are not sure if it was the environment or the lime, or the combination of both, which caused the disappearance of the PCBs the Indiana and Ohio sites," said another EPA spokesman. "But, this could be a big step in PCB control. We'll be keeping watch on the lime use of current cleanup sites."