EPA can end the back-and-forth of this region

Fayetteville Observer
Published January 27, 2006

The Environmental Protection Agency's intervention in the C8 controversy came none too soon. An EPA-brokered agreement among DuPont and seven other companies to ensure better containment of the chemical addresses head-on a matter that DuPont and its critics have been addressing mainly along the periphery. Not quite two months ago, a DuPont scientist noted that C8, now produced exclusively at the company's Fayetteville Works just south of the Cumberland-Bladen county line, is essentially "an unregulated chemical" because the evidence of harmful effects on humans is so thin. This week the C8 Working Group, convinced that C8, used in the production of Teflon and other coated products, poses serious health threats to humans, demanded a "comprehensive EPA investigation" of the plant. This has all been exciting, but not terribly informative - although the Working Group's latest packet, part recycled news and part new research, lent weight to the suspicion that C8 is migrating off-site. And now DuPont's ready acquiescence in the agreement may imply second thoughts about the adequacy of a system that until this month had been among its bragging points. The EPA's approach short-circuits all that by having DuPont and the others agree to behave as if C8 is dangerous. The jury is still out; but while "the science is still coming in," an EPA official said, striving for near-perfect confinement of the ubiquitous, long-lived chemical "is the right thing to do for our health and our environment." This is a distinct improvement over what we had a few days ago: a manufacturer pleading for the public's trust and an advocacy group making it easy for people to panic over something whose health effects remain in doubt. Now, DuPont will at least have regulatory parameters within which to work, and the public will know its information is coming from a disinterested source. Maybe DuPont is trustworthy. Or maybe panic is exactly the right response when you add to the groundwater situation the particulate matter blanketing the area. The EPA is right: It's time to end the uncertainty. How the EPA might go about setting realistic standards for something that is pervasive but not yet proven harmful to humans is problematic. But it is most emphatically the EPA's problem. If the agency can settle a C8 worker-exposure case in West Virginia, and impose a record fine on DuPont for failing to make prompt disclosure of a C8 "health effect," then it has already taken on the role of regulator in every area of concern to the people of this region. Let's have at it.