Environmental group wants consultant removed from job

Associated Press, Staff
Published January 10, 2006

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. -- An environmental group is asking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to cancel the contract of a consulting firm that's evaluating decades of contamination at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Washington, D.C-based Environmental Working Group contends ChemRisk has a conflict of interest. The Environmental Working Group said ChemRisk was hired by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. in California to help the utility fight a lawsuit that alleged chromium contamination, but now is investigating the chemical at the lab. "Now we see that it's (ChemRisk's work at Los Alamos) a direct conflict of interest because ChemRisk is paid by PG&E and other polluters to downplay the risk of chromium in drinking water," the group's senior vice president, Richard Wiles, wrote CDC Director Julie Gerberding on Monday. The nonprofit environmental group wants her suspend ChemRisk's Los Alamos contract and ban the firm from further CDC contracts. "As far as I'm concerned, their credibility is destroyed," said Bill Walker, who heads the environmental group's West Coast office in Oakland, Calif. The Associated Press left messages Tuesday at ChemRisk's San Francisco offices and at the CDC's Atlanta offices seeking comment. The CDC hired ChemRisk in 1999 to determine how much pollution Los Alamos has released since the lab's inception as a top-secret project to build the atomic bomb in 1943. The company's work includes investigating chromium contamination in Los Alamos' regional aquifer. The National Nuclear Security Administration last month reported chromium-6 levels in a monitoring well in Mortendad Canyon at Los Alamos were more than four times the federal drinking water standards and eight times the state's ground water standard. Elevated levels were first detected in January 2004. The state Environment Department ordered an investigation and gave the lab 90 days to create a plan to determine the extent of the contamination. Tests have shown no contamination in Los Alamos' drinking water. Prolonged exposure to chromium-6 can cause liver and kidney damage and has been linked to types of cancer. Danny Katzman, the laboratory's lead manager for the canyon investigation, said Friday it is focusing on lab cooling towers, which use chromate and other chemicals to inhibit corrosion. A Jan. 3 memo from Stephen Yanicak of the Environment Department's Oversight Bureau suggested the problem might originate from industrial and sanitary sewage releases and cooling tower effluent. Tom Widner, who heads up the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment project for ChemRisk, said Monday his team has collected relevant documents and would take a closer look at its chromium data. "Anywhere there was water in a cooling system, there was chromium to reduce corrosion and prevent scaling," he said. "You have to get rid of the water ... It usually went into one canyon or another." Widner said he planned a public report on environmental measurements of chromium from the project's data in the next couple of months. ChemRisk's overall assessment project involves reviewing millions of documents to identify and evaluate past releases of toxic chemicals and radioactive materials.