PCB's and Country Life

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In the end, the Board decided to give Westinghouse until December 1, 1976, to reduce their PCB discharge to a level set by the EPA. The EPA, however, has yet to recommend an appropriate discharge level.

HEARINGS AND MORE HEARINGS

A significant development occurred on April 28, 1976, when Barry Brown (the Monroe County Prosecutor) and Raymond Schneider (environmental specialist with the Monroe County Health Department) sent letters to the Indiana attorney general, the State Board of Health, and the Department of Natural Resources, stating that legal action might be taken against these offices if something were not done about PCB pollution in Bloomington within 180 days.

The response: the State Environmental Management Board scheduled a hearing for August 18, at which time expert witnesses from around the country were to be brought to Indiana to help health and environment officials decide what the implications of PCB pollution in Bloomington might be.

Incredibly, on August 10—for no apparent reason—the state attorney general's office ordered the cancellation of the August 18 hearing. As you might expect, Bloomington residents were outraged and letters to the editor printed in the local paper reflected this feeling. So great was the uproar regarding this incident that the Indiana Attorney General, Theodore L. Sendak, on August 26 announced that he was ordering the Environmental Management Board to reschedule a hearing date (a date that—as of this writing—has not yet been announced). Sendak's own explanation of what happened is that one of his deputies "made the decision to ask for the postponement because he felt it would expedite the matter".

LIFE GOES ON

Meanwhile—as city, state, and federal authorities sit on their thumbs—Westinghouse continues to discharge PCB's into the city sewer lines, and Bloomington's waste treatment plant continues to produce about 17 tons of processed sludge per month. Progress toward a solution to the pollution problem has been terribly slow . . . despite the fact that the longer we wait to deal with this problem, the more difficult the solution will be.

What people don't realize is that even if Westinghouse were to stop discharging PCB's tomorrow morning, contaminated sludge would still be coming out of the sewage plant's large holding tanks (where anaerobic digestion occurs) for a long time . . . three to five years, according to city chemist Rick Peoples.

Nor will it be easy—over the coming years—to dispose of the PCB-contaminated sludge. At the moment, the only safe way to get rid of such wastes is to put them into a "scientifically controlled landfill" . . . that is, a landfill that [A] is built over heavy, clay soil, [B] is lined with a waterproof liner, and [C] has collection wells around its perimeter, where runoff water can be collected and then trucked to a facility equipped to incinerate the wastes at temperatures high enough to destroy PCB's (2,000° to 2,700° F).

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