The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last month began testing the air inside dozens of South Bay homes near two of the nation’s worst chemical dumping sites, worried that through a process known as vapor intrusion the pollutants could be evaporating through the soil and into homes, putting residents at risk, it was reported Monday.
Residents and community activists have pleaded with the EPA in recent years to test their homes for soil vapors, the Los Angeles Times reported in an article posted on its website Monday morning.
The demands follow decades of discoveries of contaminated soil and groundwater in an unincorporated community near Torrance, the legacy of decades of chemical dumping at the former Montrose Chemical Corp. DDT plant, at the Del Amo synthetic rubber plant, and at other industrial operations that closed years ago, according to the newspapers.
The EPA is testing for trichloroethylene, benzene and chlorobenzene, according to The Times. Federal officials now agree that indoor air quality tests are urgently needed. They cite recent scientific studies that show breathing trichloroethylene, or TCE, an industrial solvent often used in the area, poses more serious health risks, including cancer and birth defects, than previously thought.
Montrose manufactured DDT at its 13-acre plant from 1947 to 1982, dumping the since-banned pesticide and chlorobenzene, a raw ingredient used to make it, into ponds and trenches and into the ground and aquifers below, The Times reported. The facility also released chemicals into stormwater channels, the sewer system and the Pacific Ocean.
In 1989, the EPA added the Montrose plant to its list of Superfund sites under the 1980 federal law that aimed to clean the nation’s most hazardous dumping grounds.
At the Del Amo site, a large industrial complex built during World War II, benzene was used to make synthetic rubber, and the chemical waste was dumped in unlined pits and evaporation ponds, according to The Times. The U.S. government sold the 280-acre site to Shell Oil Co. in the 1950s, and it was listed as a Superfund site in 2002.
— City News Service