The Air Force was convinced that the EPA would toughen its allowable limit of TCE in drinking water of 5 parts per billion by at least fivefold. The service was already spending $5 billion a year to clean up TCE at its bases and tougher standards would drive that up by another $1.5 billion, according to an Air Force document. Some outside experts said that estimate was probably low.
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How Environmentalists Lost the Battle Over TCE
THE NATION
First of two parts
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday March 31, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 71 words Type of Material: Correction
Risks of solvent: Due to an editing error, an article in Wednesday's Section A about the regulation and dangers of the industrial solvent trichloroethylene, or TCE, quoted Alex A. Beehler, the Pentagon's top environmental official, as saying: "We are all forgetting the facts on the table. Meanwhile, we have done everything we can to curtail use of TCE." Beehler actually said, "We are all for getting the facts on the table."
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After the EPA issued the draft assessment, the Pentagon, Energy Department and NASA appealed their case directly to the White House. TCE has also contaminated 23 sites in the Energy Department's nuclear weapons complex -- including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Bay Area, and NASA centers, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge.
The agencies argued that the EPA had produced junk science, its assumptions were badly flawed and that evidence exonerating TCE was ignored. They argued that the EPA could not be trusted to move ahead on its own and that top leaders in the agency did not have control of their own bureaucracy.
Bush administration appointees in the EPA -- notably research director Paul Gilman -- sided with the Pentagon and agreed to pull back the risk assessment. The matter was referred for a lengthy study by the National Academy of Sciences, which is due to issue a new report this summer. Any resolution of the cancer risk TCE poses will take years and any new regulation could take even longer.
The delay tactics have angered Republicans and Democrats who represent contaminated communities, where residents in some cases have elevated rates of cancer and birth defects but no direct proof that their illness is tied to TCE.
Half a dozen members of Congress last year wrote to the EPA, demanding that it issue interim standards for TCE, instead of waiting years while scientific battles are waged between competing federal agencies. EPA leaders have rejected those demands.
"The evidence on TCE is overwhelming," said Dr. Gina Solomon, an environmental medicine expert at UC San Francisco and a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "We have 80 epidemiological studies and hundreds of toxicology studies. They are fairly consistent in finding cancer risks that cover a range of tumors. It is hard to make all that human health risk go away."
But Raymond F. DuBois, former deputy undersecretary of Defense for installations and environment in the Bush administration, said the Pentagon had not been willing to accept whatever came out of the EPA, though it cared a great deal about base contamination.
