The hazards of human exposure to the popular wood preservative known as creosote from skin rashes to lung cancer are well known to government regulators and scientists.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency recognized creosote's perils in 1978, announcing its intention to phase out the coal-derived preservative's required registration.
That was more than 200 years after London physician Percival Pott's ground-breaking discovery of high cancer rates among British men who cleaned soot from chimneys.
Yet despite those well-documented risks, coal-tar creosote has been a timber industry staple for the past century. Each year, 825 million pounds of creosote are used to protect telephone poles, marine pilings and most of the nation's countless miles of railroad ties from wood-boring pests and foul weather, according to industry estimates.
When mishandled, it seeps into soil and groundwater. Its fumes permeate the largely poor and rural neighborhoods surrounding wood treatment plants. And its toxic chemical cocktail leaves behind a legacy of suspicious illnesses and premature deaths.
"These chemicals have been known to be hazardous," said Jay Feldman, executive director of Washington-based Beyond Pesticides, one of more than a dozen advocacy groups suing the EPA in an effort to stop the use of creosote. "We have a national problem with these contamination sites."
Coal tar creosote and two related wood preservatives have been found in at least 100 current or former sites on the EPA's Superfund National Priorities List or state contamination lists.
In Louisiana alone, public health officials have identified 32 creosote hazardous waste sites a problem severe enough to earn the state a $1 million grant from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track cancer clusters.
"It's a witch's brew, a convoluted concoction of chemicals," said James Cain, a Lake Charles, La., attorney whose law firm has won three settlements against the Kerr-McGee Corp. over creosote exposure in Louisiana, Mississippi and Pennsylvania.
In Florida, the EPA has identified two Superfund creosote sites: Cabot/Koppers in Gainesville and American Creosote Works in Pensacola. Both are still being cleaned up.
A third creosote site in DeSoto County isn't on the Superfund list but is still subject to the same cleanup rules and public health warnings as part of a compromise reached between the property owner and EPA.
And in Collier County, a state-supervised contamination area in the old mill town of Jerome is at the heart of a series of lawsuits in which 50 former residents, mill workers or their descendants have accused Collier Enterprises and Collier Development Corp. of failing to properly decontaminate their drinking water.
The DeSoto County site, just south of Arcadia and about 45 miles northeast of Fort Myers, first came to the attention of state regulators more than two decades ago.
As in Jerome, the DeSoto land was polluted by a creosote wood treatment plant that had ceased operations years earlier.
Among other violations, the plant's owner, Seaboard System Railroad Inc. of Jacksonville, discharged wastewater into an unlined pit, according to a 1984 consent order filed with the state agency known then as the Department of Environmental Regulation.
Thirty years after the plant's 1952 closing, state regulators found elevated levels of anthracene, fluroanthene, pyrene and benzene in abandoned concrete sumps left over from the railroad tie treatment process. The state found that carcinogenic chemicals had leached into the groundwater and were a potential threat to enter the nearby Peace River, which supplies drinking water to Punta Gorda, Port Charlotte and most of Charlotte County.
The contaminated equipment was removed and the property owner required to clean up the site. In 1997 13 years after the consent order was signed a local resident again summoned state officials after finding creosote in a nearby drainage ditch.
That discovery led to another legally mandated cleanup, this time supervised by the EPA and required of the property's new owner, CSX Transportation of Jacksonville.
In an August 1999 letter, EPA assured residents that "the findings show no threat to human health."
Dozens of private wells in the rural community are now tested quarterly for contaminants.
But don't try telling Gladys Marshall, 62, that everything is all right. The lifelong DeSoto resident said she first noticed problems soon after moving into her Hull Avenue home 25 years ago.
"When we first started using the water, there was this greasy film. If you made coffee, it would be greasy," she said.
Marshall was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2000. With a sweep of her hand, she gestures from the front porch toward nearby homes, rattling off the names of eight neighbors in an area of several blocks who have died from cancer.
"It's pretty much all over the neighborhood," she said. "There's not a community where everybody starts dying out unless there's a reason."
Her own children frequently broke out in skin rashes. The contaminated water stained the family's clothes and kitchen utensils, she said. Marshall didn't wait for the county health department or the EPA to say something was wrong.
"I just had the feeling I should stop drinking the water," she said. "So I just started buying it (bottled)."
Sharleen Thompson, 49, has lived in a trailer on Oak Creek Avenue for nine years. Since 1997, the underground well that pumps drinking water into her home has included an ultraviolet sterilizer an elaborate filter to eliminate benzene, one of several cancer-causing chemicals found in creosote.
None of her many health problems, including gastritis and colitis, have been conclusively linked to the water, said Thompson, who also drinks bottled water as a precaution.
Still, she can't help but wonder.
"What if it's going through the water when I wash my hair, or take a bath?" Thompson said.
EPA officials expect to release a more detailed report on the site and the property owner's cleanup plans later this year, said Jamey Watt, who manages what's known as the Hull/Nocatee cleanup from the agency's regional office in Atlanta.
Thompson, whose stepfather worked at the creosote plant, remains skeptical.
"How can you clean up stuff that is in the water basin?" she asked. "You can't."
"All this land down here is just messed up."
An industry besieged
In the nation's capital, the efforts by a dozen environmental and organized labor groups to ban creosote are part of a larger strategy to curtail two other popular wood preservatives, chromated copper arsenate (CCA) and pentachlorophenol. Each are licensed as pesticides.
A quarter-century ago, the EPA announced its intent to not renew the three pesticides' registration.
But in 1984, health considerations took a back seat to monetary ones: the agency ruled that the absence of "economically viable alternatives" outweighed the risk to human health even as it chastised the wood preserving industry for relying on "bad science" to bolster its case.
On Dec. 31, 2003, a voluntary industry phaseout of CCA a staple of wooden playground equipment and backyard picnic benches took effect, removing those treated products from the marketplace but not addressing wood treated prior to that date.
Now opponents of wood preservatives are asking the courts to follow suit on penta and creosote.
"EPA action to protect the public, workers and the environment from these wood preservatives is long overdue," said Feldman of Beyond Pesticides.
Citing the federal agency's own data from 20 years earlier, Feldman and other environmentalists have lobbied the EPA since 1997 to not renew the required registrations. Tired of what they called foot-dragging by EPA, a 15-group coalition of environmental and labor groups filed suit in December 2002.
They cited a ban put in place last year on the sale and consumer use of creosote by the then- 15-nation European Union. The EU also ordered creosote manufacturers to significantly reduce the amount of benzoapyrene found in the wood preservative.
Feldman and his colleagues arranged meetings between federal regulators and business owners who had developed alternatives to treated wood products, including composite railroad ties made of plastics and other synthetic materials.
And they submitted scientific data showing how creosote destroys the lungs, burns the skin, shuts down kidneys and travels through the placenta into an unborn child's tissue.
Wood preservative opponents have also railed against what they consider an excessively collegial rapport between the government regulators and the industry those bureaucrats are paid to regulate.
Feldman pointed to a series of closed-door meetings over the past two years between a represent of the Creosote Council, an industry group, and EPA scientists.
Prior to one such meeting in April 2003, a creosote industry lobbyist urged an EPA official to withhold the group's comments from the public until the agency had an opportunity to "revise the draft preliminary risk assessment in accordance with the comments."
At least one federal judge was not swayed. In late January, a U.S. District Court judge in Washington, D.C., dismissed a portion of the lawsuit because of concerns that the EPA had yet to issue a final ruling, a requirement before appeals can be made under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, or FIFRA.
Creosote industry leaders point to their own, industry-funded research to rebut the claims that the wood preservative in use for more than 130 years isn't safe.
"From our knowledge of workers and plants in over a century (of use) we certainly feel the stuff is safe when handled appropriately," said Mel Pine, a Creosote Council spokesman. "It's something the public has little or no contact with."
Pine called Beyond Pesticides, the lead plaintiff, "an extremely one-sided organization" with an ax to grind.
"They have an agenda, which is to get rid of all pesticides," he said. "They try to make extreme arguments."
Direct pipeline to the EPA notwithstanding, the five American companies that manufacture creosote and the countless smaller businesses that use it to treat wood are in many ways on their heels.
Faced with financial woes caused by a steady stream of lawsuits over health problems linked to CCA-treated playground equipment, the American Wood Preservers Institute, a leading industry advocate, shut its doors in late 2002.
That same year industrial giant Kerr-McGee one of a handful of American creosote manufacturers and owner of six wood treatment plants announced it was getting out of the wood products business entirely.
It too had suffered too many legal wounds.
In Vermont, telecommunications leader Verizon agreed last year to no longer use creosote-coated telephone poles after a three-year legal battle with local utilities and labor unions concerned about health risks.
And state legislators in New York and California have echoed those concerns in the past year, introducing proposals to ban the sale, manufacturing and use of creosote. While each of the proposals was not successful in 2003, supporters vow to keep up the fight.
"We plan to do everything we can to ban the use of this harmful product in the future," said Stephen McInnis, political director for the New York City District Council of Carpenters.
"Our guys are in a constant state of first-degree burns when they use it."
Finding a better way
More than 10,000 miles and an International Date Line away from EPA's Washington headquarters, Australian scientist John Watkins considers his role as the creosote industry's savior.
The 71-year-old inventor has worked to develop a creosote alternative since 1967, when unionized utility repairmen in his country threatened to strike over their exposure to creosote-stained telephone poles.
By the mid-1990s, Watkins had pioneered a technology known as pigment-emulsified creosote. The process trapped the chemical concoction's oils inside wood, thereby reducing the creosote emissions that would leach, or "bleed," into soil and water.
The technology, refined and dubbed PCT 2000, was sufficiently promising that Watkins lured by eager industry officials and curious American government officials moved his operations from near Melbourne to the United States in 2002.
He spent most of the year working at a Kerr-McGee plant in Madison, Ill., as eager company officials sought to bring the technology to market. He consulted with railway officials in Alaska and U.S. Navy bridge builders in Mississippi.
"It worked beautifully," said Doug Crawford, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Products Laboratory in Wisconsin who worked with Watkins.
But then Kerr-McGee Watkins' biggest industry backers pulled out of the creosote business. Watkins was forced to return to Australia as U.S. immigration officials restricted visas following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. And officials at the Australian university where Watkins works fought his claims for the creosote emulsion patent.
So Watkins sits in his Rowville, Australia, home and waits. So do several American experts who are eager to capitalize on his invention including a high-ranking Kerr-McGee official at the company's corporate headquarters in Oklahoma City. The Kerr-McGee official is pursuing the project on his own, Watkins said.
"This is the only technology that will save creosote from the people trying to shut it down," Watkins said. "This is the only thing to keep creosote alive."
Pine, the creosote industry spokesman, said Watkins' efforts and other alternatives are not cost-effective options for the thousands of miles of railroad tracks that would need replacing.
"You can't just put down a few," he noted. "You would have to wave a magic wand and replace every tie in the whole system. There really aren't any practical alternatives."
Jim Gauntt, executive director of the Railway Ties Association, echoed Pine's assessment.
"To say there are alternatives is one thing. To actually have viable alternatives is something different," he said.
But just last year, Gauntt was far more effusive in his praise of Watkins' work.
In the March/April 2003 issue of Crossties, an industry magazine, an article by Gauntt on the new technology noted how creosote emulsion technology "could revolutionize tie treating."
Bob Michel, the Kerr-McGee researcher who championed Watkins' work, called the treatment method an "opportunity to chart a new course for the entire industry."
John Falcone, manager of the Illinois wood treatment plant where Watkins worked and which Kerr-McGee plans to close this month said the new technology was a marked improvement.
"It left you with an end product that was much cleaner than a traditional creosote-treated product," he said.
Falcone suggested that the railroad industry, which uses the overwhelming bulk of the creosote produced in this country, is being too cautious.
"The railroads are historically notoriously difficult people to change," he said. "These folks feel like they know what works best."
He also questioned the industry's reliance on an economic theory that could prove its undoing.
"Cost-prohibitive? That's always true, to a point," Falcone said. "At some point, it becomes cost-effective if you want to stay in business."
Watkins' work could be the best opportunity for a beleaguered industry to save itself, to prevent future tragedies like the wave of illnesses and cancer deaths that is the modern legacy of the old Collier County mill town of Jerome.
Because after nearly 140 years of use, the wood treatment industry is in no hurry to abandon the horse it came in on.
"We're growing more wood than we harvest," said David Webb, the Creosote Council's executive director. "Wood is the only structurally renewable material. Plastics come from oil. Steel is mined from the earth With wood products, we can sustain a structural product ad infinitum.
"It will never go away."
ALAN SCHER ZAGIER, aszagier@naplesnews.com
source: http://www.naplesnews.com/npdn/news/article/0,2071,NPDN_14940_2906705,00.html 25may04
After a lifetime on the road working the weekend crafts circuit, David Leach was ready to settle down.
In 2000, the 55-year-old marine photographer and picture framer, and his wife Susan, 52, planted roots on a picturesque, 3-acre patch of waterfront property along the Caloosahatchee River east of Fort Myers near the town of Alva.
The property, which borders the river's W.P. Franklin Lock and Dam, was a dream come true for the Leaches. There was plenty of room for their two dogs, Susan's teenage son from a previous marriage and the framing studio.
The couple didn't pay the adjacent flood control structure much mind. But when a barge packed with 300 creosote-soaked poles parked behind their home in May 2003, the fumes became unbearable, they said.
"This was supposed to be our little nest egg," David Leach said. "Now it's become a toxic waste zone."
The treated marine pilings were brought in by a contractor working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which was rebuilding a guidewall installed decades earlier.
The barge remained docked 150 feet from their home for three months, bringing with it daily doses of diarrhea, headaches and nausea in the heat of summer, Susan Leach said. Her 18-year-old son, already beset with severe allergies, broke out in a full-body rash.
Unwilling to endure the stench, the Leaches packed their RV and returned to the craft-show road life they had hoped to abandon. Susan Leach sent her college-age son to vocational school in Orlando to get away from the noxious creosote poles.
"Imagine the worst chemical combination you can think of baking in the South Florida summer sun with a light breeze, so the greater-than-air vapor density can slither along the ground for your next breath," David Leach said.
Complaints to the Army Corps, the state Department of Environmental Protection and the office of Gov. Jeb Bush fell on deaf ears, according to the Leaches.
"Use of creosote-treated timbers for this project is allowed by both federal and state guidelines, and has been minimized to the maximum extent possible," Army Corps Col. Robert Carpenter wrote in October 2003, after the couple complained to U.S. Rep. Porter Goss, R-Sanibel.
Carpenter, head of the agency's Jacksonville district office, noted that the piling installer moved the barge a quarter-mile away from the Leach residence, a move he said was taken "in an abundance of caution and in an effort to maintain positive public relations."
Carpenter's letter also noted that contrary to the Leaches' complaint, an investigation by the state Department of Environmental Protection "found no sheen on the surface of the Caloosahatchee River."
Yet five months after that letter was written, on a warm and windy March afternoon, a glossy sheen of creosote was plainly visible in the water from a perch on the lock and dam's new public observation deck.
A strong odor, reminiscent of oil, filled the air as children swam nearby at a public beach. From the deck, David Leach dipped a glass jar into the river. He pulled out a darkened water sample filled with creosote that had leached from the pilings.
The odors and attendant health problem have lessened since the barge moved farther away, acknowledged the Leaches, who returned to their Lee County home after the craft circuit slowed down for the season. Still, they fear that their slice of paradise has been permanently altered and through an attorney are asking the Corps assurances aside for financial compensation.
"No amount of rhetoric is going to change the fact that (creosote) contains some of the most toxic chemicals on the planet," David Leach said.
source: http://www.naplesnews.com/npdn/news/article/0,2071,NPDN_14940_2906707,00.html 25may04
Coal tar creosote and two related wood preservatives have been found in at least 62 of the current or former sites on the federal Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund list.
Public health risks were verified in dozens of those cases by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease registry.
A partial list of those creosote Superfund sites, as well as others suspected of causing human health problems and on state cleanup lists are shown below.
|
|
source: http://www.naplesnews.com/npdn/news/article/0,2071,NPDN_14940_2906763,00.html 25may04
|
To
send us your comments, questions, and suggestions click
here |