Why the Times Beach Incinerator Should be Shut Down

[Cdstelzer@aol.com]

WHY THE TIMES BEACH INCINERATOR
SHOULD BE SHUT DOWN

An RFT investigative report 

BY C.D. STELZER

first published by the Riverfront Times (St. Louis), Nov. 20,1996

Some of the toxic shipments hail from the hinterlands, forgotten places in
rural Missouri with strange
names like Bull Moose Tube, Moscow Mills and Piazza Road. But the bulk of the
dioxin-contaminated
soils now being hauled to the Times Beach dioxin incinerator near Eureka
comes from nearby sites in St.
Louis County and the city of St. Louis. It is a mammoth Superfund project
being conducted with little
fanfare, and it would now seem little regulatory oversight. 

Federal and state regulators have went to great lengths to assure the public
that the incinerator is operating safely; that igniting
an estimated 228,000 tons of hazardous waste is not a risk to human health or
the environment. Since deciding to burn the
waste, the government agencies responsible for the project have encountered
the resistance of citizens and locally elected
officials. Public concerns, which were dismissed as unwarranted, have since
been borne out. Accidents have occurred. Lies
have been told. Nevertheless, those in control remain unrepentant and the
project has proceeded under the arbitrary terms of the
1990 federally-court-ordered consent decree. 
For now, the 80,000-pound dump trucks laden with dioxin-tainted dirt continue
to trundle down city streets, county roads and
Interstate highways, as they have for the past year. Sometime in 1997, the
last shovelful of poisoned earth is expected to be
burned. The incinerator is then scheduled for disassembly. After the project
is completed, the Missouri Department of Natural
Resources (DNR) has promised to transform the location of the former town of
Times Beach into a park. It would seem a noble
end for an ignoble legacy wrought more than a quarter-of-a-century ago by the
misdeeds of Russell Bliss, the waste oil hauler
responsible for dispersing dioxin across the region.
Unfortunately, serious questions about the safety of the dioxin incinerator
still remain unanswered. Internal corporate memos
from the incinerator operator and scientific data obtained by the Riverfront
Times show numerous omissions and
inconsistencies in documenting the handling of last year's dioxin stack test
samples. The laboratory analysis of those emissions
samples prompted the state to issue the requisite permit for the incinerator
to operate. 
In recent weeks, separate DNR and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
inquiries have also noted serious lapses in
scientific protocol during the November 1995 dioxin stack test, lapses that
cast doubt on whether the incinerator can be legally
considered protective of human health. In this regard, the RFT has learned of
a recommendation at EPA headquarters in
Washington, D.C to shutdown the incinerator pending a retest. 
Much of the impetus for the reexaminations of the stack test can be traced
back to environmental opponents of the project, who
have doggedly sifted through mounds of technical data. Based on their
research, they now allege that the original stack test
results are fraudulent.
"Documents have been doctored," says Steve Taylor an organizer for the Times
Beach Action Group (TBAG). "Samples were
mixed and matched to give optimal results. Massive inconsistencies exist
between the log book ... and the final report presented
to the DNR and EPA." Taylor's latest charges are an extension of his previous
objections to the relationship between
International Technology Corp. (IT), the incinerator operator, and Quanterra
Environmental Services, a partially-owned
subsidiary that handled the samples ("Twice Burned," RFT, Aug. 28).
Although all sides in the controversy now recognize that test documents are
flawed, they disagree on the ramifications. In a
report published earlier this month, the DNR, for example, declares that
"chain of-custody documentation procedures were less
than satisfactory." The state agency, nevertheless, has expressed renewed
public confidence in the analytical results of that
same test., 
By releasing its vacillating findings in advance of an imminent EPA ruling on
the same subject, the DNR has undercut the
bargaining position of the EPA official who most favors shutting down the
incinerator until the stack test can be redone. The
call for a shutdown and retest has also been potentially muted by the
well-timed release of a Missouri Department of Health
(DOH) blood study that claims dioxin levels have actually fallen among
residents who live near the incinerator. A chemist for
the environmental group Greenpeace has disputed those findings ("Blood Feud,"
RFT, Nov. 13). Last week, the St. Louis
County Council asked that DOH for raw data pertaining to the blood study that
has been withheld from the public. Meanwhile,
the EPA recommendation for a shutdown is expected to be released in an
interim report to EPA assistant administrator Elliot
Laws this week, according to a source close to the investigation.
Whether the recommendation will be quashed or accepted is uncertain. One
obstacle working against the approval of a retest is
money. In an Oct. 16 letter, Syntex Agribusiness Technologies Inc. (ATI) --
the company liable for the cleanup -- threatened to
pull out if there were costly delays due to retesting. The letter, from ATI
project coordinator Gary Pendergrass, presented DNR
and EPA officials with an ultimatum: " ... (W)e feel strongly that it would
be imprudent to set a precedent of requiring
additional testing based exclusively upon allegations that are without merit.
Any interruptions will be costly to the project and to
the community, and may jeopardize the continuing availability of all of the
thermal treatment team." 
Less than a month after the Pendergrass letter arrived on his desk, DNR
director David Shorr exonerated the incinerator
operator of any wrongdoing."There is no evidence of criminal misconduct,"
said Shorr. "However, International Technology
(IT) would have been better served by hiring a financially independent
contractor, especially on a project this sensitive to the
community." 
"The state and maybe the feds, too, are doing everything they can to keep
this thing on track without admitting anything serious
enough to cause a shutdown," says R. Roger Pryor, exectutive director of the
Coaliton for the Environment. "(But) if the EPA
releases this recommendation, I don't see how Shorr and DNR can pooh-pooh
that. One of the guarantees that we were given
since that day one was that if any irregularities showed up that were
contrary to the original specifications they wouldn't
hesitate to shut the thing down to make sure corrections were made. Now it's
time for them to live up to their word." 
Despite its waffling, the DNR report does conclude that IT, the incinerator
operator, and its partially-owned subsidiary,
Quanterra Environmental Services, violated their own chain-of-custody
requirements pertaining to test samples. In addition,
IT's lax documentation also skirted the state's specified custodial
procedures, according to the DNR report. 
In the absence adequate chain-of-custody documents, DNR investigators
scrambled to gather verbal accounts that allegedly
confirmed the collection and transfer of the test samples from Times Beach to
a North Carolina analytical laboratory. 
With alibis in hand, The DNR then ruled out the possibility of any sample
switching, because the lab involved in the test
marked each tube with a distinctive resin that acts as a fingerprint. A
chemist for the laboratory that analyzed the samples
explains it this way: "Dioxins and furans are highly stable compounds and can
only be removed from the resin by extraction. It
would have been apparent by the appearance of the ... resin if it had been
extracted and placed back into the modules." 
"Any attempt to modify the dioxin samples would have disturbed the resins and
invalidated the samples," explains Shorr of the
DNR. "The sample handling documentation employed by Quanterra was not the
best, but it has not affected the validity of the
dioxin stack test data." 
On the surface, the test was based on a fail-safe system then. However, the
DNR report is itself fails to even mention certain
key documents known to have been turned over to the state agency. "These
documents show unaccounted resin (sample) tubes
shipped in the middle of the night directly from Triangle (Laboratories) to
Times Beach," says Taylor. "There is compelling
evidence that tubes and samples have been switched to falsify test results.
"The withholding of these documents by David
Shorr is an obstruction of justice and a coverup."
Shorr responded to the charge by saying: "I did not do the investigation. But
as far as I'm concerned our report was complete."
He says he provided the Pendergrass letter and all of its attachments to the
appropriate quarters. "They were conveyed down to
the portion of the agency that did the investigation. ... As far as I'm
concerned ... it's another piece of paper in the file.
(TBAG) raised allegations that we felt merited our spending resources in
order to do a thorough investigation. We did that
investigation. We responded to each of the allegations, and found issues,
certainly, of poor judgment. But there was nothing
that we could find that represented an illegal act or an act that compromised
the sample integrity."
As the behind-the-scenes debate rages on, so too do the dioxin fueled fires
at the incinerator; fires that continue to destroy
public trust.
A litany of sources could not be reached for comment on this story. Their
silence hints at what the paper trail has already
confirmed. The narrative that follows chronicles the botched dioxin stack
test of last year and the recent efforts to defend it.
This explanation of events is based on copies of documents, scientific data
and a voice mail message obtained by the RFT.

BREAK

Just before noon on Aug. 29, Rob Kain of ATI made what sounded like an urgent
call to William C. Anderson at Quanterra
Environmental Services in Knoxville, Tenn. But Anderson, the quality
assurance officer for the Times Beach project, never
received the message. That's because Kain confused a local telephone prefix
with the Knoxville area code. Thinking he had
reached Anderson's voice mail, the ATI official left this stuttering message:

"This is a message for Billy Anderson. This is Rob Kain with ATI. Billy,
we're going to have a conference call at one o'clock,
and Con Murphy (an IT employee) has-the-ah-has-the-ah-has a good part of the
information on the questions that are going to
be discussed. If you get this call before one o'clock, you'll probably want
to check with him. In particular we're going to want
to know more information on what happened exactly with the samples between
Times Beach and Knoxville (Tenn.). It took
two days for that to transport so the people want to know where they stopped
overnight (and) any additional information we
might have. So we'll talk to you at one o'clock. Bye-bye."
The telephone message shows that ATI, the company liable for the cleanup, and
its subcontractors, IT and Quanterra, quickly
moved to get their version of events straight one day after the publication
of an RFT story that raised questions about the stack
test. The message also makes clear that there was uncertainty among the
participating parties as to the exact whereabouts of
certain Quanterra employees during the transport of the test samples. 
It eventually took a week for Quanterra to ship the test samples from Times
Beach to Triangle Laboratories in North Carolina.
According to a chronology of events prepared by ATI, two Quanterra employees
departed from Times Beach with the samples
on Tuesday morning November 21. They arrived in Knoxville late in the evening
on the same day.
No chain-of-custody documents exist for this leg of the journey, or of the
subsequent transfer of the samples in Tennessee.
Once in Knoxville, the Quanterra employees are supposed to have turned over
the samples to Anderson, who was in charge of
quality assurance for the project. Instead of transporting the samples to
Triangle Laboratories the next day, Anderson took them
home for the Thanksgiving holiday. The samples stayed in his possession until
Monday Nov. 27, when he finally signed them
over to a Triangle Laboratories representative. 
The seven day gap between completion of the test and the arrival of the test
samples at the analytical laboratory is enough to
give pause. But more snafus have now come to light.
The dioxin stack test purportedly consisted of three runs in which test
samples were taken from each. But the project logbook
shows a fourth run. Two pages dedicated to the fourth run have dates either
missing or changed. A diagonal line runs across
each of these pages with the words "not collected" written above it. 
Although the testing reportedly ended on Nov. 20, test work appears to have
extended beyond that deadline. An internal IT
memorandum provided to the DNR and EPA shows that a second shipments of
sample containers arrived at Times Beach on
Nov 21 -- the day after the documented completion of the test. The new batch
of sample containers, referred to as XAD-2 resin
traps or tubes, were ostensively requested on short notice in case a fourth
run was needed. A custody sheet shows the sample
containers being released by a Triangle Laboratory representative -- but
there is no signature showing who accepted the order. 
However implausible a secret fourth run may seem, it is obvious that proper
controls were not being used to assure the validity
of the test findings. In short, quality assurance had run amok. The simple
act of keeping track of laboratory materials became
an impossible chore. According to the internal IT memo: "The 5 unused resin
traps, which are not part of the stack samples and
not stored in the stack sample cooler, are left at the site in the sample
recovery trailer. The trailer is removed from the site
approximately one week after the completion of the dioxin stack test." 
In other words, the incinerator operator is admitting that five sample
containers mysteriously disappeared . And no one from IT
or Quanterra signed for the last shipment of four. 
None of this adds up, of course.
By its own account, IT used a total of nine sample containers during the
course of the entire test. The incinerator operator had
ten sample containers on hand to begin with -- more than enough for the task.
No indication is given in the test documents that
any of the original containers were either lost or broken. There would then
seem to be no need to use any of the late-arriving
containers for a test that had already been completed. Nevertheless, samples
D-1208 and D-1209, which are a part of the last
batch, are listed as being used as "spiked resin blanks" for run #3 on Nov.
20. The IT chronology, however, shows D-1208
and D 1209 arriving on Nov. 21, after the test had been allegedly finished. 
Another irregularity relates to sample D-1182. In Anderson's final report,
D-1182 is listed as being collected from run #2 on
Nov. 20. But according to his request for analysis, D-1182 appears as part of
run #1 on Nov. 19. In addition, the date on a
D-1182 sample label is missing. This particular omission did not become
apparent until last month, when Triangle Laboratories
turned over a missing data page to IT. In an Oct. 3 letter to an IT official,
a Triangle Laboratories vice-president wrote: "While
doing our cross-reference check, we discovered that one page was
inadvertently omitted from the data package." 
A missing page, a missing date, a missing signature. Most of all missing
accountability. In his final report, Anderson states:
"No significant problems were observed that would adversely affect the
application of these analytical data as being completely
indicative of the TTU (thermal treatment unit) dioxin emission performance." 
If this seems to be drifting into a tedious hair-splitting analysis, keep in
mind that there are more inconsistencies in the stack test
than can ever reasonably be expected to be explained in one newspaper story.
Proponents of the incinerator, on the other hand,
have been nothing short of verbose in their defense of the project. The ATI
letter, for instance, measures 16-pages in length,
minus sundry attachments. The DNR report, which for the most part absolves IT
and Quanterra of wrongdoing, is 188 pages
long. 
"What's significant about the state's report is not what's in it, but what's
not in it," says Taylor. "Shorr is giving partial truth,
and withholding information from the public in order to conclude that the
samples are valid. The missing shipment of tubes is
never mentioned nowhere other than in attachments to the letter sent to David
Shorr by Gary Pendergrass," says Taylor. "The
presence of extra traps and resin completely invalidates the state's
conclusion that samples could not have been tampered with."

Again, DNR director Shorr takes issue with Taylor's assertion. "You're
working on the switcheroo theory. Well, the part that I
would question in your theory is the fact that sample casings and the samples
that were sealed were the ones that made it
Research Triangle Park. Those were sealed in front of DNR inspectors. And
that was included in the report."
In contrast to Shorr's reassurances, a document obtained by the RFT casts
doubt on the integrity of the sealed sample. The
page -- from a Triangle Laboratories data report -- clearly indicates sample
seals absent on arrival at the lab. The carrier is listed
as Bill Anderson. The inventory sheet is signed by Triangle sample custodian
John Guenther. When state investigators recently
questioned Guenther about the transfer of samples, however, he "recall(ed)
that all samples were properly packagted and di not
appear to be tampered with." 
It is difficult to conceive of the toxic-nature of one molecule of dioxin.
Scientists still debate its dangers. But most, including
those at the EPA, assume dioxin is a carcinogen and they are even more
certain that it causes damage to the immune and
reproductive system in humans. The sources of dioxin, although now on the
decline, are. nevertheless, ubiquitous in the
environment. It has long been established that Incineration is one of those
sources. And so it would seem more than a little
ironic that the EPA would choose to dispose of dioxin in a manner that would
at the same time create it. Those who favor
hazardous waste incinerators point out the presumed state-of-the-art
efficiency of thermal technology. 
That kind of hard-nosed attitude is often trotted out and displayed as
expedient pragmatism. At the same time, it is a convenient
means of defending lucrative government contracts between the hazardous waste
disposal industry and the federal government.
William C. Anderson is no stranger to that largesse. His resume shows that in
the past he has worked on a PCB cleanup in
Utah for the Army. IT, the incinerator operator, also has longstanding ties
to federal coffers. A Standard &;Poor's report from
August indicates that 63 percent of IT sales in 1995 involved U.S. government
agencies, including the Departments of Defense
and Energy. In 1994, when congressional legislation threatened stronger
oversight of hazardous waste incinerators, including
the Times Beach incinerator, IT complained to the Security and Exchange
Commission that the plan would jeopardize millions
of dollars of its assets and "could (have a) material adverse effect to the
company's consolidated financial condition."
Obviously, somebody listened. The adverse effects of the incinerator's
emissions on human health be damned. 

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