EPA comment period concludes

The formal comment period for the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed plan for the Libby Superfund site closed Friday afternoon. The Lincoln County Board of Commissioners and the Libby Area Technical Assistance Group both offered comments on the proposed plan.

The county commissioners’ comments were focused primarily on the institutional controls to be implemented after the active clean up phase of the operation. The controls are regulatory tools designed to ensure the long-term protectiveness of the remedy, as defined by the agency.

The commissioners expressed concern with the vague nature of the controls in the proposed plan and their desire to ensure community involvement in the design of the controls.

“The Environmental Protection Agency has indicated that the proposed plan is only intended to provide a summary of institutional controls, while detailed development of each institutional control will be completed post-Record of Decision,” the commissioners wrote. “The Board understands this may provide flexibility in institutional control design and future changes. However, the exact design and future evaluation and change processes are not defined. The Board is specifically interested in community involvement during these steps.”

The steering committee, composed of Kirby Maki, Leroy Thom, Gordon Sullivan, Brent Teske, Mark Peck and Tim Lindsay, was formed as a mechanism to enhance collaboration between the agency and the greater community during the design process.

“This is an opportunity for the community to be intricately involved in the process,” said committee member Gordon Sullivan. “It’s also our challenge, to participate and make our voices heard in the process.”

Lincoln County Asbestos Resource Program manager Nick Raines said the creation of the steering committee solves the most common concern his team uncovered during the previous interview process: how to involve the community.

“This approach and their idea addresses one of the concerns we’ve heard most frequently in the interview process: How do we get the community involved?” Raines said.

The commissioners asked for a formal written response from the agency regarding the proposed committee and its involvement in the long-term operation and maintenance of the site.

“The Board is requesting formal written response from the Environmental Protection Agency regarding the proposed IC steering committee involvement discussed above, including detail regarding the following: Roles responsibilities and authorities for all stakeholders (EPA, Montana Department of Environmental Quality and this committee) throughout the institutional control development and implementation process and the process for evaluating the effectiveness of institutional controls and for revising the program into the future,” the commissioners’ letter read.

The commissioners’ final concern was one echoed by the Technical Assistance Group comments: Who will be financially responsible for the management, removal and/or disposal of asbestos contamination left in place once EPA leaves?

“The proposed plan provides no information supporting projected costs for institutional controls and whether adequate money is truly available,” technical advisor Steve Ackerlund wrote. “An ambitious set of programs are proposed at an estimated cost in the Feasibility Study of $407,000. More detailed assessment of funding needs should be provided to better ensure that sufficient funding is available to support the proposed institutional controls. Cost estimates should be provided for each anticipated program, addressing both the development and long-term operating costs. Moreover, statements from Montana Department of Environmental Quality are needed on currently available versus future potential funding amounts.”

The Technical Assistance Group proposed for EPA reduce the potential long-term costs by removing more contaminated soil than is called for in the proposed plan. They proposed the agency completely remediate any yard in which a measurable level of Libby amphibole asbestos is detected.

The group’s comments called into questions a number of assumptions made by the agency in the Site-wide Human Health Risk Assessment issued in December 2014.

“The risk assessment does not adequately quantify reasonable maximum exposure as desribed in points a to c below,” technical advisor Steve Ackerlund wrote. “When exposure is properly accounted for, risks to a sizable portion of the population are expected to exceed acceptable levels, compelling more cleanup. The easiest way to achieve further reductions in exposure and risk is to conduct more soil cleanup.”

The current cleanup protocol allows the agency to leave contaminated soil behind after a cleanup if no more than 25 percent of a yard has Libby amphibole asbestos concentrations of not more than .2 percent. Ackerlund questioned the validity of current testing to accurately establish such a threshold.

“Accordingly, it is unlikely that EPA can reliably delineate that no more than 25 percen tof a yard has LA concentrations less than 0.2 percent,” he wrote. “A single analysis of a soil sample comprised of 20 composites to represent a fourth of a yard cannot be recognized as reproducible, high quality determination that the true concentration is within a Bin B1 interval. EPA’s preferred alternative is overly precise in the face of such uncertainty. Given this uncertainty, and to ensure protectiveness, any positive detection of LA in a yard should qualify that yard for cleanup since the true concentration is too difficult to ascertain.”

Ackerlund argued in the comment document that any known source of outside contamination has the potential to recontaminate an indoor environment, as activity in the contaminated yard could result in tracking the contaminated soil back into the house.

Ackerlund suggested remediating any asbestos-contaminated yard would not only reduce the long-term maintenance costs for the institutional controls, but also help to ensure the protectiveness of the cleanup by requiring a much less burdensome structure of institutional controls.

“Reduced institutional controls cost should be expected when all residential yards having any detectable LA are remediated,” he wrote. “This greatly simplified data management needs over the situation created by EPA’s preferred alternative. A property is simple either not contaminated, remediated or not investigated, without the burdensome need for tracking, verifying and endless debating about where remediation did or did not occur. Also, there will be no need for a nuisance ordinance for residential areas, beyond what is already established, since there will be far reduced concern for disturbance pertaining to the typical small yard project. The need for a permit for each and every small yard project will also be eliminated, leaving any permit system for soil disturbance to apply only to larger construction projects or to disturbances in areas not previously considered accessible.”

Ackerlund said the agency’s proposed plan was crafted to support the desired result, which was support for the current cleanup protocols. A different alternative, between the what is currently being done and the rejected alternative of total removal, should have been considered and should be implemented.

“The structure of the current proposed plan supports a predetermined outcome by not providing a real alternative,” Ackerlund wrote. “Everything less than Alternative S6 has already been done, and Alternative S7 is recognizably impractical. The Feasibility Study and proposed plan needs to consider at least one more alternative to that which has already been achieved by emergency response. This would give real choice to effectiveness, implementability and costs, particularly the cost and effectiveness tradeoffs between more soil cleanup and less institutional controls.”

Ackerlund said area residents will continue to have a number of exposure scenarios and it is incumbent upon the agency to reduce potential exposure wherever possible.

“Area residents will continue to face a multitude of exposure situations that are inherently difficult to model and predict in a risk assessment,” he wrote. “The health consequences to individuals that might receive excess exposure are severe, while the benefits from improved cleanup to psychological, social and economic well-being of the Libby area are great. It is therefore necessary to eliminate any and all exposure pathways that we reasonably can.”