Perspectives: Making the Case for 1,4-Dioxane Remediation at EPA Headquarters in D.C

This story begins on a sleepy Sunday afternoon in September 2019. I sort of wanted to go out to hear a talk, but I also sort of wanted to stay home and relax. But I had announced the talk by email in my role as Green Acton Water Committee Chair, and Green Acton Co-President Debra Simes had responded to the announcement by saying the speaker was amazing. With this slight extra nudge, I schlepped down to the TriCon Church in Concord to hear the talk by Lois Gibbs. 

Gibbs was being honored by the Al Filipov Peace & Justice Forum, a Concord-based foundation honoring a local resident killed on 9/11. The story Lois Gibbs told us was spellbinding. Back in the early 1980s, she was a young housewife and mother, living her dream life in Niagara Falls. She had married her high school sweetheart and had two children. Her husband supported the family as a chemical plant worker, and they lived in a small but well-kept house in a friendly neighborhood.

But then her son got sick, as did neighbors’ children. She discovered that her house, indeed her entire neighborhood, was built on top of a chemical waste dump. She rallied the neighbors, gathered evidence, built collaborations with experts in law and toxicology, and confronted authorities at the local, state, and federal levels. And she did all of this with only a high school education, no background in science or law, no public speaking experience, and no community organizing experience. Eventually, following huge efforts by Gibbs and many others, President Jimmy Carter declared a State of Emergency, and more than 800 people were evacuated. 

Gibbs’s neighborhood was the infamous Love Canal. The dire events at Love Canal and several other sites heightened public awareness of the dangers of toxic waste dumps, and led to the 1980 passage of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) commonly known as the federal “Superfund” legislation.

After Love Canal, Lois moved on to found a nonprofit organization called the Center for Health, Environment & Justice (CHEJ). The second part of her talk was about her organization’s work with other Superfund-impacted communities over the 40 years of Superfund history. CHEJ provides strategic support, policy analysis, and scientific expertise to grassroots groups in communities impacted by Superfund sites, and connects such groups to local and nationwide allies. 

After the talk, there were tea and cookies in the parish hall. I approached Lois and said that I admired her work, loved her talk, and . . . oh, by the way, we have two local Superfund sites leaching toxic 1,4-dioxane into our groundwater. One of which, I added, is apparently being well remediated and the other of which is not — because 1,4-dioxane wasn’t recognized as a problem at the time that the groundwater remediation plan was finalized for the WR Grace site. 

Lois said, “Well, you just have to get the ROD [Record of Decision] reopened, and 1,4-dioxane added to the remediation plan.” 

To which I said, “Great idea, but we have been trying to do this, and getting no traction. The Acton Water District has been advocating for this for years. Both the Water District and Green Acton gave stakeholder interviews during the recent 5-year review for the WR Grace Superfund site, and both advocated for 1,4-dioxane to be added to the remediation plan. We’ve gotten no response.” 

Then Lois said, “What are you doing on October 22?”

Taken aback, I sputtered, “Why, what’s Oct 22?”

She said that CHEJ has a quarterly meeting at Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Headquarters in Washington, DC with the EPA Administrator or his deputy, and the head of the Superfund Task Force. Lois gets to fill up to 12 seats at the table. The ground rules are that: (a) each person has to represent a grassroots community organization, not a government entity or company; (b) each of those people has to be from a community impacted by a Superfund site; and (c) each must have a specific “ask” — a specific request on which EPA could potentially act. (You can’t just go there and complain.) I seemed to qualify on all three counts. 

I approached the co-presidents of Green Acton cautiously. Could this really be happening — that someone I just met over tea and cookies, following a talk that I almost didn’t go to, had actually invited me to make a pitch in person to the EPA Administrator about Acton’s 1,4-dioxane problem? We did our due diligence, and concluded that the offer was for real, and that it could be a breakthrough in a stubborn problem.

The Green Acton Directors approved a statement for me to deliver. We emphasized that the Superfund program had already invested in the development and testing of processes to treat for 1,4-dioxane at the neighboring NMI (Nuclear Metals, Inc.) Superfund site, and that it made no sense to remediate at NMI but not at WR Grace, given that they feed into the same water supply. 

Green Acton did some quick fundraising among directors for my travel expenses — with the proviso that I would need to travel by train rather than plane to minimize the carbon footprint. Many thanks to the generous donors who supported this unexpected expense on short notice. 

I also presented this opportunity to the Acton Water District Commissioners, who were intrigued by the possibility and saw the potential. The Acton Water District provided a strong supporting letter for me to deliver to the EPA Administrator and Superfund Task Force director (AWD letter to EPA oct2019).

So, I took the train down to DC. Over lunch, I met my fellow petitioners. The others were from Alabama, North Carolina, West Virginia, and two different sites in Texas. Lois, CHEJ’s toxicologist, and the community representatives strategized and got to know each other a bit. We practiced our presentations and anticipated questions. All of the others had been to EPA Headquarters before, coached by CHEJ through multiple rounds of negotiations. I was the only newbie.

I also had the “mildest” problem to present. Here in Acton, we are affected by Superfund sites, and we do have a probable carcinogen in our groundwater. But it is being monitored by EPA, MassDEP (Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection), and the Acton Water District; further, the level in the drinking water has been kept consistently below the Massachusetts guidance level by dilution. The woman from North Carolina has a son with thyroid cancer, unusual in children, which is what launched her on the path to advocacy. She is 20 or so years into this process. The man from Houston had, himself, suffered birth defects that have been attributed to his mother’s prenatal exposure to the San Jacinto River Waste Pits site. He had to retire early from a career in law enforcement as his health problems worsened, and now volunteers full-time on Superfund advocacy.

In addition, some of the other community representatives have been struggling with terrible local governance problems. The man from Birmingham had been working for years to get his neighborhood into the Superfund program and onto the National Priorities List (NPL) for clean-up. The contamination score that qualifies candidate sites for inclusion on the NPL is 28.5; his site scored a 50. Inclusion on the list wasn’t happening and wasn’t happening. Then, about a year ago, a federal jury convicted a coal company executive and lawyer of bribing a state legislator to advocate for their respective employer’s/client’s opposition to EPA’s prioritization or expansion of the North Birmingham Superfund site.

After lunch we all traipsed over to EPA’s stately Headquarters Building and up to a conference room. The community reps and CHEJ staff were ushered into a paneled conference room and seated at a long table. We were soon joined by Steve Cook, the head of the Superfund Task Force, and Peter Wright, Assistant Administrator of the EPA. Cook ran the meeting and did most of the talking for the government. Arrayed around the outside of the room were about a dozen EPA staffers, who spoke only when Cook directed a question to them or referred one of us to them for later follow-up. 

After introductions, Lois gave an overview of a report that CHEJ had released that morning on Superfund in the Trump era, and described legislation that CHEJ is supporting to reintroduce “polluter pays” fees to refill the Superfund Trust Fund. 

Next, each community representative got 10 minutes to speak. I re-introduced myself and handed around paper copies of the Green Acton statement and AWD letter. I gave our statement as approved by the GA Directors, except that because I had a little more time than planned for, I also showed a map to demonstrate how close together the Superfund sites are, and pointed out on the map where the Assabet and School Street well fields are. When I got to the bullet points of our ask at the end of the statement, I also used the map to emphasize that the sampling for 1,4-dioxane had been spatially sparse and the extent of the contamination was not well defined. 

Cook asked a lot of questions. Given that there are 1,300 Superfund sites, he seemed to know more than I would have expected about our particular site. He must have been well briefed, based on the list of attendees and associated Superfund sites that Lois had sent in advance.

First, he said that emerging contaminants 1,4-dioxane and PFAS are on their radar screen on a nationwide scale, and that they are working toward a Superfund-wide way to handle these contaminants — but that would take time.

Then he asked if I had seen the recent Five-Year Review Report for the WR Grace Site. I said that I had, and that Green Acton, represented by myself as Water Committee Chair and one co-President, had provided stakeholder input into the Five-Year Review earlier this year. In our stakeholder interview, we asked for more-active communications with the community, and for the ROD to be reopened and 1,4-dioxane to be added to the remediation plan. The Acton Water District also provided stakeholder input and said the same thing. Moreover, the AWD had formally requested reopening of the ROD and remediation of 1,4-dioxane twice previously, as detailed in the letter I had just given to the EPA officials. But we had gotten no traction from any of this and no response to our stakeholder input — so here I am at EPA headquarters making the same request at a higher level.

He said that we may have had more traction than we knew, that they were aware of our request at EPA’s Region 1 [New England region], and Region 1 had spoken to Headquarters about this. He then said something that really surprised me: that there might be a simpler way to handle this than reopening the ROD, that this one contaminant could perhaps be handled without all the paperwork and bureaucracy of reopening the ROD. He said that we should talk to Region 1. I said we would.

He then said that he understood that there had been some attempts to remediate 1,4-dioxane at the site. I said yes, a secondary treatment system had been added to the existing WR Grace treatment system to try to treat for 1,4-dioxane, but that it wasn’t working. I noted that in the Five-Year Report, WR Grace said that the system was ineffective and asked to discontinue it. The data from the most recent annual report show that in some sampling periods the 1,4-dioxane concentration in the effluent was higher than in the influent, apparently because some water evaporated even as VOCs were volatilized in the treatment process, leaving the non-volatile contaminant even more concentrated. Then it was time for the next person to speak.

In the end, Cook didn’t actually say “yes” on the spot to any of the asks, although he did commit to visit the Birmingham site. However, two of the groups that were represented had participated in previous CHEJ quarterly meetings with EPA, and had seen positive action in follow-up to those meetings. The West Virginia group had had its Superfund site moved onto the National Priorities List, and the North Carolina group has seen EPA stabilize and remove some toxic chemicals from its site. So action is possible. In our group debrief over beers afterwards, Lois said that EPA never actually says “yes” during these meetings. Positive action comes — if it comes — in the follow-up. I’ll write about the WR Grace follow-up in a future post. 

In reflecting on this experience, I am struck most strongly by the passion, commitment, and accomplishments of the other community representatives. Some of their stories were heartbreaking. Hearing these stories helped put our situation here in Acton into perspective and made me feel glad I live where I do. 

Speaking as someone who researches how humans think and learn about the Earth and environment, I also feel awed at the Herculean learning accomplishments of the other meeting attendees. I have a PhD in science, for heaven’s sake, and decades of experience looking at data and reading technical literature — and I find this Superfund stuff to be challenging to get my mind around. One of the other representatives had a geology degree, but the rest were more or less self-educated in environmental science and policy, with lots of mentoring from CHEJ’s policy and science experts. The woman from North Carolina, for example, is an elementary school librarian, and she went toe-to-toe with Steve Cook, exhibiting complete mastery of the nuances of data, the site history, and the legal and policy ramifications of her site. To climb this huge learning curve strikes me as the cognitive equivalent of the parent who lifts a car to save a child pinned underneath. Humans are amazing. With minds and resolve like those of the grassroots representatives I met in DC, we should be able to think and collaborate our way out of our current set of environmental problems.