New Team To Complete Incinerator Study State Rejected Assessment By Previous Consultant

A new scientific team will complete a long-overdue, state-mandated study of health risks from Spokane’s trash plant - including dioxin impacts.

They’ll start from scratch to redo the work of Kathryn Kelly, the city’s previous consultant whose work was rejected by the state in 1998. They’ll finish by early next year.

Kelly didn’t follow federal guidelines for risk assessments, ignored major dioxin exposure pathways for nursing mothers and neglected the incinerator’s impact on a 30-mile area that includes the city of Spokane and the region’s major lakes and rivers, according to the state review.

The Washington Department of Ecology has refused to reimburse the city for the $300,000 the city has already spent on the discredited study until the work is done right. That will cost Spokane taxpayers an additional $99,800, which won’t be reimbursed.

The new consultants are from Pioneer Technologies Corp. of Olympia, a company that’s studied dioxin emissions at a trash incinerator near a U.S. Navy base in Japan.

Brad Grimsted and Chris Waldron of Pioneer are working with Kirk Winges of MFG Inc. of Lynnwood. Winges is an atmospheric scientist who modeled air emissions for the Centralia Coal Plant.

“They are highly regarded,” said Harriett Ammann, senior toxicologist for the Washington Department of Health.

“We hope to get a good risk assessment so we can determine whether or not there’s a risk from the incinerator,” she said.

Pioneer will look closely at pathways for dioxin uptake in nursing mothers in the vicinity of the Spokane plant, Grimsted said.

The consultants toured the city-owned garbage plant for the first time last week and also met with the project’s technical oversight committee.

The team is reviewing the plant’s nine-year emissions history to come up with emission rates for all major pollutants.

Mercury and dioxin are the chemicals most critical in determining long-term health risks, they told the committee last week.

They’ve proposed including a controversial 1997 stack test for dioxin in their study. The test alarmed the city because it showed dioxin levels slightly above the plant’s permit limit - as much as 146 times higher than any previous amounts measured since 1991.

A 1998 retest showed dioxin levels far below the limit, but there was no proof the 1997 test was in error.

Their work has already detected several trends in plant emissions.

Sulfur dioxide and mercury were emitted in much higher concentrations in the plant’s early years and have been greatly reduced since, they said in a July 12 memo.

Besides the 1997 dioxin spike, they’ve identified higher emissions of PCBs and hydrogen fluoride in 1991, hexavalent chromium in 1995, nickel, selenium and zinc in 1992 and hydrogen chloride in 1994.

“These data will be included in the averages unless additional information can be provided that explains or invalidates” them, their memo says.

The peer review of EPA’s new draft dioxin report, which says the compound is at least 10 times more likely to cause cancer than previously thought, won’t be complete by the time the Spokane study is done.

But the EPA’s assessment of higher risks will have to be addressed, said Wayne Krafft of the Washington Department of Ecology, a member of the oversight committee.

“The public knows this is out there. We can’t just ignore it,” he said.

City officials hope the new work will restore credibility to the incinerator study, delivered three years late and tarred by a conflict of interest scandal.

Former Spokane city engineering director Phil Williams was fired in 1997 after The Spokesman-Review reported his personal relationship with Kelly, the scientist hired in 1990 for the risk assessment. Williams was Kelly’s supervisor on the study, which dragged on three years past its original 1995 due date.

In 1998, a review team led by Ammann rejected Kelly’s work, saying it ignored two important years of incinerator emissions and didn’t address major questions about the plant’s safety. Kelly had concluded the plant was safe.

The incinerator has been controversial for over a decade.

Faced with growing public concern about incineration hazards in 1988, then-Ecology Director Christine Gregoire insisted on the risk assessment as a condition of a $60 million state grant to the city, a major chunk of the $134 million project to build the trash plant and close Spokane’s leaking landfills.

Spokane’s elected officials, who had opposed a study of the plant’s health impacts, reluctantly agreed with Gregoire’s request. The city got all the money minus $300,000 for the study, which it still hasn’t delivered 12 years later.