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To Test Groundwater for Pentachlorophenol

By
Joanne Pilgrim

Groundwater will be tested for the chemical pentachlorophenol, a toxic wood preservative used on utility poles, including those recently installed by PSEG Long Island as part of a controversial six-mile high-voltage electric line at three East Hampton Town and Village sites.

Town and village officials will hire an independent consulting firm to sample areas around three of the poles installed where there is a high water table and leaching may have occurred, Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell said yesterday.

Earlier this year, water from a basement sump in East Hampton Village’s Emergency Services Building on Cedar Street, along the transmission line route, was found to contain the chemical, a carcinogen that has been banned in countries around the globe and is limited to industrial use in the United States.

A state law banning utility poles coated with pentachlorophenol has been proposed by Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. and State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle. The law also calls for warnings to be placed on existing poles treated with the chemical.

Pentachlorophenol, also called PCP, has been classified by the federal Environmental Protection Agency as a probable human carcinogen and its use restricted, but it has not been banned in the United States as it has in other countries.

A worldwide ban was discussed at the most recent Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, held by the United Nations and its Environment Programme in Rome last month.

Long Island Businesses for Responsible Energy, or LIBFRE, an East Hampton group that has sued PSEG over its installation of the penta-coated poles and high-tension transmission line, seeking to have the poles removed and lines placed underground at PSEG’s expense, earlier this year commissioned tests of soil surrounding some of the new poles and forwarded the results, showing levels of penta 300 times higher than the state threshold for chemical cleanup, to local, state, and county officials.

But in a June letter to Mr. Cantwell, Thomas B. Johnson of the state’s Bureau of Toxic Substance Assessment cited the Environmental Protection Agency’s findings that the use of penta as a wood preservative “will not pose unreasonable risks to humans or the environment.”

East Hampton Town’s natural resources director, Kim Shaw, said that the Suffolk Health Department, where she used to work, once regularly tested for penta in areas where wood treated with the chemical was used. She contacted the Health Department when the issue first arose in East Hampton and was told that the chemical had never been detected in surrounding soils, and that the testing program was suspended.

Depending on how deep the utility poles were inserted into the ground, Ms. Shaw said this week, they may be in contact with groundwater, which, in the area of the Emergency Services Building, flows into the Hook Pond watershed.

A complete environmental analysis, she said, should have included information about how deep the poles were to be sunk and data regarding depth to groundwater in the area.

Other things to be examined regarding the possibility of penta contamination, Ms. Shaw suggested, include whether the utility poles were freshly treated with the chemical, or seasoned, and the interaction between the type of wood used for the poles and the absorption of the chemical.

The town and village will share the cost of the groundwater testing, Mr. Cantwell said, and will have it done by a firm other than the one that conducted the tests for LIBFRE.

 

 

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