Mopping Up the PCB Mess

By Janice Castro

The repairman from New York's Long Island Lighting Co. was trying to fix a faulty home-heating system when he found a mysterious oily sludge in the natural-gas pipe connected to the house. LILCO soon learned that the substance contained dangerous concentrations of PCBs, a class of highly toxic industrial chemicals. That startling discovery in 1981 eventually led the Environmental Protection Agency to launch a major investigation of Texas Eastern, the Houston-based firm that supplied the gas to LILCO. Last week, in the largest settlement of an EPA case in history, Texas Eastern (1986 revenues: $4.1 billion) agreed to undertake a massive cleanup of PCB contamination along the company's 10,600-mile network of pipelines, which runs through 14 states, from Texas to New Jersey. The cleanup will cost Texas Eastern some $400 million, plus a $15 million fine that the company must pay EPA.

Unfortunately, the PCB contamination at Texas Eastern is not an isolated case. Starting in the 1930s -- decades before it was discovered that minute concentrations of PCBs can cause cancer in laboratory animals -- the chemicals were widely used in electrical equipment as a flame retardant to reduce the risk of fires and explosions. Texas Eastern, for example, long ago put PCBs into the compressors that drive natural gas through the company's pipelines, and the stubborn residues of the chemicals are still present. The firm is only one of 14 pipeline companies the EPA has been investigating for PCB leakage. Less severe problems may exist at hundreds of other enterprises, from electric utilities to railroads. Industrial users have scattered an estimated 1.2 billion lbs. of PCBs throughout the world. As a result, most people have absorbed at least tiny amounts of PCBs.

Researchers do not know how dangerous the PCB threat is, partly because an increase in the incidence of ill effects caused by the chemicals might take a ^ long time to show up. As a precaution, the Government has been moving to mop up the PCB mess. In 1979 Congress banned the production, sale and distribution of PCBs. Companies were permitted to keep using equipment that already contained the chemicals, as long as the machinery was carefully sealed. As the equipment wears out, owners must deposit it at federally approved toxic-waste disposal sites.

Such measures, however, have not stopped the spread of PCBs. In the case of Texas Eastern, the firm agreed in 1982 to clean the PCBs out of its compressors and haul the material to approved landfills. But the company continued to remove other residues -- some of which also contained high levels of PCBs -- from its pipelines. The EPA found PCB-laced sludge buried in rough pits at 89 company properties.

Some firms are not waiting for EPA directives. California's Pacific Gas & Electric is voluntarily replacing equipment that contains PCBs. The project, nearly complete, has cost more than $120 million, but the company learned the hard way four years ago that a failure to act can be costly as well. At that time, a fire in a PG&E transformer spewed PCB-laden smoke into a San Francisco high-rise. The price tag for the cleanup: $22 million.

With reporting by Lianne Hart/Houston and Dick Thompson/Washington