News Coverage
Arsenal told to test water for pollutant
Published September 5, 2003
FAIRLAWN - State regulators this week asked the Radford Army Ammunition Plant to begin testing for the rocket fuel ingredient perchlorate in drinking water it supplies to plant workers, to the new Prices Fork water system in Montgomery County and to parts of Pulaski County.
Since emerging as a national issue in the late 1990s, perchlorate pollution has been found around military bases and defense plants around the country, particularly in California, where the most widespread testing has been conducted. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency links perchlorate to thyroid damage and tumors, and developmental problems in infants.
At the Radford arsenal, a vast, Army-owned, contractor-operated facility that calls itself the largest propellent manufacturer in North America, perchlorate is one of a number of potentially hazardous substances discovered during a years-long, ongoing effort to clean up waste pits and other sites mostly used before modern environmental laws were in place.
Monte Waugh, a technical services assistant at the Virginia Health Department, said his agency's decision to ask for quarterly perchlorate tests was prompted by arsenal statements in June that perchlorate was found in a 1999 analysis of groundwater at a burial site for waste propellant ash in the eastern tip of the Horseshoe Area, a part of the plant enclosed by a large bend of the New River. Since the result was quite low, showing a concentration of just a few parts per billion, a second groundwater test was performed last year. Results are not yet available, Army arsenal operations chief Rob Davie wrote in an e-mail this week.
In July and August, The Roanoke Times collected six jars of river water along the Horseshoe Area and sent them to two EPA-certified laboratories for analysis. No perchlorate was found.
The arsenal's main manufacturing area has two water systems that draw from the more than four miles of the New River that flow through the plant. Since late 1998, homes and businesses in the Fairlawn area of Pulaski County have received some of their water from an arsenal system with an intake near the downstream edge of the plant. Montgomery County's new Prices Fork water system draws from the arsenal's other water intake, located near the upstream end of the facility.
The arsenal's water systems operate under the same health department regulations as other public systems in Virginia. But those regulations don't require testing for some of the metals, explosive residues and other substances turned up by the cleanup.
That's because drinking water and environmental cleanup are handled as separate spheres of regulation, Waugh said.
"We don't usually get much information from them," he said of the EPA, which oversees the cleanup at the plant.
In July, EPA spokesman David Sternberg said the agency wasn't aware of plans to pipe water from the arsenal to Prices Fork, and supported more testing for perchlorate around the plant based on its experience at other facilities.
The arsenal's perchlorate use is largely in the past, Davie wrote. Only two products use perchlorate, and they account for less than 0.4 percent of annual production.
The EPA has suggested that perchlorate could affect human health at concentrations as low as 1 part per billion. The U.S. Department of Defense has argued for a limit of 200 ppb. No federal standard is expected soon. At least eight states, although not Virginia, have some form of advisory level for perchlorate.
Bill Walker of the Environmental Working Group, a not-for-profit research organization that follows environmental issues, said national attention to perchlorate seems unlikely to diminish any time soon.
"I believe we have far more to find out than we know, and I believe what we find out is going to be troubling," Walker said Friday from California.
The 21 binders of environmental studies and cleanup plans the arsenal has placed in the Christiansburg branch of the Montgomery-Floyd Regional Library System show that other substances could be reaching drinking water.
A 1999 letter from the EPA mentions that at the same site where perchlorate was found, groundwater is contaminated with HMX, or high-melting explosive.
Davie wrote in an e-mail that there has been "activity" at the site since 1999, but said that the documents that would provide details were not available this week.
The waste site is about 150 feet from the river. Anything in the groundwater is almost certainly reaching the river, said Ernst Kastning, a Radford University professor who studies the porous limestone geology that underlies the arsenal and much of the rest of the region.
Waugh said the health department does not test for HMX. The U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry says there is limited information about the health effects of HMX, though animal studies suggest the potential for liver and nervous system damage.
A 1999 assessment of ecological risks around the arsenal found lead levels in New River surface water exceeded the EPA action level. But Brian Blankenship, a health department engineer who works with New River Valley water systems, said the arsenal's systems have had no problem passing lead tests, which are performed every three years.
A groundwater study due to be finished this fall at the arsenal is expected to tell more about what substances are reaching the New River.
Davie, the arsenal operations chief, said information generated during the cleanup might be of limited use in designing drinking water safeguards. There's no proof that any of these chemicals are present at the site of either water intake, he wrote in an e-mail.
"Sometimes you can use data from one effort to build on another but that must be done very carefully to avoid missing something," he wrote. Richard Roth, president of the Friends of the New River citizens group, welcomed the new perchlorate testing, saying any fresh information about the river's health was welcome. Montgomery and Pulaski officials also were pleased, saying they relied on the health department to assure the safety of drinking water.