The Portland Oregonian
www.oregonlive.com

Wednesday, November 22, 2000

By Jonathan Brinckman

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has found highly toxic PCBs in electrical equipment dumped in the Columbia River beside an abandoned agency landfill at Bonneville Dam.

Corps officials Tuesday were scrambling to understand the scale of the problem. They said the equipment appeared to have been in the water for 30 years or more and was probably junked machinery from Bonneville Dam.

It was unclear Tuesday whether substantial quantities of PCBs contained in the equipment had leaked into the river or, if they had, to what extent. PCBs persist in river sediments for decades, threatening fish and wildlife.

"The materials were a surprise to us," said Michael Gross, an environmental engineer with the corps. "We need to get them out of there."

Workers cleaning up the Bradford Island landfill had reported seeing the equipment underwater last month. Divers sent down early this month retrieved two capacitors, lighting equipment and other material, including miscellaneous porcelain and metal pieces. Six samples were sent to a lab.

Preliminary results from the testing this week showed four of the six samples to be contaminated with PCBs. In one test, a teaspoon full of oily material taken from a damaged capacitor showed a PCB concentration of 200,000 parts per million -- many times higher than all federal standards. Corps officials said they did not know how much of the material remained in the capacitor, which has a capacity of about three gallons.

PCBs, banned in 1976, are highly toxic chemicals once used to cool electrical transformers. The chemical is classified as a "probable human carcinogen," and equipment with PCBs over 50 parts per million must be disposed of in a licensed hazardous waste landfill.

The agency plans to have the remaining equipment removed from the river within two months. It will then gather river bottom sediments for analysis to find out if the surrounding area is contaminated -- a potentially dire consequence. PCBs work their way up in the aquatic food chain, including fish that people eat.

"It was probably a mistake, but we accept responsibility for getting it there," said Dawn Edwards, a spokeswoman for the corps. "We want to focus on getting it out of there and then figure out how it got there." Edwards said the area is forested and not open to the public.

Conservationists were upset. PCBs and other toxic chemicals are found not only in fish that include salmon, carp and sturgeon but other animals that live in or on the Columbia, including river otters and bald eagles.

PCBs accumulate in the body fat of animals. Scientists believe PCBs are linked to sexual deformities in river otters and in eggshell thinning in bald eagles. When eggshells are too thin, eggs will crack before chicks are ready to hatch.

"This is another major problem for the Columbia River, and it's already got plenty of problems," said Cyndy deBruler, executive director of Columbia Riverkeeper, a conservation group based in White Salmon, Wash. "Any additional source of PCBs entering the river could trigger reproductive failures in animals."

Bruce Sutherland, a program scientist with the Lower Columbia River Estuary Program, said that while concentrations of PCBs and other toxic chemicals in animals are declining slowly, they remain far too high. That's alarming, he said, because scientists are gaining a deeper understanding of the importance of the estuary to endangered salmon, which linger in the Columbia and fatten up before entering the ocean.

The National Marine Fisheries Service, when it recommended in July against immediately breaching Snake River dams, said new studies showed that increasing salmon survival in the estuary may be a more effective way of helping the fish.

Sutherland said he suspects sites such as Bradford Island are the reason levels of PCB and other toxic chemicals are not dropping more quickly. "This is not so much surprise as a disappointment," he said.

The Bradford Island landfill, just upriver of a Bonneville Dam spillway, was operated by the corps from 1942 to 1982. Edwards said it contains household garbage, petroleum products such as oil and grease from turbines, paint and paint-related wastes, insulators, mercury vapor lamps, sealed buckets of greases, grit from sand blasting and scrap metal.

Edwards said the landfill was reported to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality after an internal corps audit in March 1996 determined that it could threaten human health and the environment. The corps, with its management of dams and the Columbia's main shipping channel, also is one of the key federal agencies involved in Columbia River Basin salmon restoration efforts.

The corps spent $433,000 on assessing the landfill last year and has $520,000 budgeted this year. A final evaluation report is due next spring, with full cleanup after that.

Edwards said the agency is deviating from its schedule to remove the material from the river as quickly as possible.

"We know there shouldn't be hazardous materials in the river at all," Edwards said. "That's why we are moving quickly."

State and federal regulators Tuesday said they had been told by the corps of the PCB finding.

"It is of concern to us," said Jim Anderson, a project manager with the DEQ's voluntary cleanup program. "If PCBs get to the bottom of the river, they are going to stay there a long time."