Corps rejects blame for pollution
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers does not accept responsibility for toxic chemicals found in numerous wells near a former U.S. Defense Department missile site on the West Plains because the contamination could have come from other sources, a corps spokesman said.
The corps’ position was spelled out in a May 26 letter to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Seattle office. On Tuesday, the letter was made available to The Spokesman-Review, which previously had reported the corps “has not yet determined whether it is responsible” for contamination of groundwater near Fairchild Defense Area Nike Battery 87.
“In fact, the corps has made a determination,” Steven Cosgrove, the corps’ public information officer in Seattle, said in an e-mail to the newspaper on Tuesday. “The corps has determined that, based on information available to date, the data are inconsistent with the Nike 87 site being the source of the contaminants found in the area around Euclid Road.”
Four wells in the Deep Creek area of the West Plains have been found to be contaminated with the toxic solvent trichloroethylene, and numerous other wells have been found with perchlorate, a salt used on rocket motor fuel, and N-nitrosodimethylamine, or NDMA, a rocket fuel igniter, according to EPA officials.
The EPA considers the Nike site, built in the 1950s to defend Fairchild Air Force Base, “a possible source” of the contamination. It is one of 40 such “formerly used defense sites” under review by the EPA in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana.
On May 31, Cosgrove told the newspaper that the corps had yet to determine whether the Deep Creek-area contamination was linked to the missile site and that there were other explanations as to the source of the chemicals.
“At this point we don’t have sufficient information,” Cosgrove told The Spokesman-Review then.
But the Corps of Engineers had already replied to a May 16 letter from EPA Region 10 asking the corps to reconsider its earlier determination based on new ground water sampling.
“As you are aware, TCE, NDMA and perchlorate are also constituents found in other products, including organic fertilizers, herbicides, animal wastes and household bleach, all of which are common to agricultural areas such as this,” the corps responded on May 26. “TCE is not naturally occurring; however it was commercially available in the past.”
However, Harry Craig, remedial project manager for the EPA in Portland, was quoted in the newspaper’s June 1 editions as saying, “The combination of these three chemicals is fairly unique. The only places that I’ve seen that is at rocket motor facilities.”
Craig could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.
Though the corps has declined to accept responsibility for the contamination, the corps’ Cosgrove and Tony Brown, EPA spokesman in Seattle, said the two federal agencies are consulting on the study area surrounding the former defense facility, the Hutterite compound and other homes and farms just west of Deep Creek and just north of U.S. Highway 2.
Cosgrove said that the corps’ staff was “very well-versed in the occurrence of these substances,” and that a formerly used defense site project manager was “in contact weekly” with the EPA.
“We continue to work with them,” Brown said on Tuesday. “They haven’t closed the doors.”