PCB Chemicals Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Fayette County Flood Stirs Up Long Held Concerns On Cancer-Causing Oil Site

This story was updated on June 16, 2020, at 4:50 p.m. to include a statement from the Environmental Protection Agency.

The rain poured down for hours on Sunday, slamming the valleys of Fayette County with water. As the earth became saturated, local streams swelled.

Minden resident Marie Collins said the water washed out the underpinning of her house.

“We had to sleep in the car last night,” Collins said on Monday.

Weather experts estimate nearby Oak Hill received roughly 5.5 inches of rain in six hours. Minden is just a few miles away and lies in a valley.

“I was too scared to come in the house, because I was afraid my house would come off the foundation,” she said.

The next day, several feet of water surrounded the Collins home. Marie Collins said she noticed an oily substance floating on top that she could smell from inside her home.

Minden has a history with Polychlorinated Biphenyl, or PCB, a known cancer-causing chemical that electrical company Shaffer Equipment Company started storing in a nearby dump site back in the 1970s. The chemical waste site was discovered by the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources in 1984. After years of requests, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2019 added the Minden site to the National Priorities List of Superfund sites.

PCB has contaminated the soil in Minden, the EPA has said, and residents fear that the chemical is flushed out every time it floods, much like Sunday night.

“I’m scared of [the] water now. I’m just so scared,” Collins said. “And then I have got three boys, a 13-year-old, an 11 and a seven-year-old. I don’t want them to have cancer.”

The floods on Sunday, June 14, in Fayette County washed out the underpinning of the Collins’ house in Minden.

On Tuesday, the EPA said initial inspections “indicate no significant damage” to the cap structure encompassing the dump site, or other structures the EPA has put in place to separate PCB oil from the Minden community.

“There is no indication that capped site material was transported away from the site,” the EPA stated in a press release.

Gov. Jim Justice issued a state of emergency for Fayette County Sunday night, deploying state highway workers to the area to free up debris from the roads and begin repairing some of the more long-lasting damage.

A local state of emergency from the county commission that afternoon specifically named Oak Hill, Scarbro, Minden and Whipple.

Justice said in a virtual press briefing Monday morning there were no known deaths or injuries from the flooding. There were, however, nearly 20 home and car rescues by the local swiftwater rescue team.

A rescue boat in Minden, W.Va., helping people with the aftermath of Sunday’s flooding.

Not A First-Time Flood

Annetta Coffman, another lifelong local, recalled a disastrous flood to the area 19 years ago. Every time the water levels rise for smaller, more regular floods that happen every summer, Coffman said residents are afraid to drink locally sourced water or do much outside.

“With oil, it travels because it attaches to mud. Right now, it’s mud and sand everywhere, so it’s hard to tell exactly what the people right now are walking in,” Coffman said of the flood damage Sunday night.

Coffman’s home also flooded several feet high Sunday night, but she said it wasn’t as devastating as the flood in 2001, when she lost her first home and all of her possessions.

“You work so hard. It’s a poor community anyway, and you work to try to have things, and then, something like that can be gone within 30 minutes,” she said.

In addition to the oil, and the expensive loss of having to repair one’s home or find a new one, Coffman said flooding also tends to free up raw sewage.

“And so that now is in our homes,” she said. “People are trying to figure out how to clean up their home. You take the risk of getting Hepatitis A.”

Minden and the surrounding area has also been ravaged by sewage contamination, which the EPA addressed in 2016. According to the report, this was the result of failing and downright non-existent systems to manage human waste. In 2017, a $23 million sewage and water drainage project began in efforts to prevent future contamination by flooding.

But Coffman said many of her neighbors’ houses were flooded with at least two feet of contaminated water Sunday night.

A Developing Response

The Division of Highways entered Fayette County Sunday evening, and will continue working from the area for the next week and a half. Deputy State Highway Engineer Greg Bailey said Monday staff are prioritizing repairs in areas where there are no alternative routes.

“We’re focusing a lot on areas where people are completely blocked and don’t have a way out,” Bailey said Monday.

During his virtual press briefing, Gov. Justice said he anticipated the DOH will have most repairs finished within a week and a half.

Warm Hands From Warm Hearts, a local outreach ministry operating the Center of Hope in Oak Hill, has set up cots in case anyone needs a place to stay. Director Mike Bone said the center also has a shower and a kitchen for anyone in need.

The Red Cross and Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, or VOAD, were gathering buckets of cleaning supplies to donate Monday morning, and assessing the best way to provide assistance, given restrictions from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

As for Marie Collins, whose home sustained permanent damage in 2001 and now again Sunday night, she said she plans to eventually use lime, a powder chemical for flooding, to help battle the smell of oil and sewage in her front yard.

“I’m just so ready to move,” Collins said. “If I had the money to move, I would move.”

Emily Allen is a Report for America corps member.

This story is part of West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Southern Coalfields Reporting Project which is supported by a grant from the National Coal Heritage Area Authority.

EPA Proposes Listing Minden on Superfund National Priorities List

The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to add areas near the Fayette County town of Minden to its list of the most serious hazardous waste sites in the country.

In a news release Tuesday, the agency said it has determined the Shaffer Equipment site, as well as parts of nearby Arbuckle Creek, should be added to the Superfund National Priorities List.

“Today, we are proposing to add the Shaffer Equipment/Arbuckle Creek Area Site in Minden to the National Priorities List,” said EPA Mid-Atlantic Regional Administrator Cosmo Servidio, in the press release. “This is part of EPA’s continuing effort to conduct a thorough study to evaluate the contamination issues in the community and develop a remediation plan that will protect human health and the environment.”

In the 1980s, the EPA found that a local company was responsible for contaminating the town’s soil with a harmful chemical called polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs. The agency spent millions of dollars on a cleanup, which included removing more than 5,000 tons of contaminated soil.

Residents have been concerned PCB contamination is ongoing and leading to high rates of cancer. They asked the EPA for additional testing and for financial help for additional cleanups.

Lawmakers, including Sen. Joe Manchin (D) and Gov. Jim Justice (R), have written to the EPA urging the agency to place Minden on the Superfund National Priorities List.

In a statement, Justice, who sent a formal letter to EPA last month, praised the agency for taking this step.

“After several decades we have now gotten to the point where this is finally getting addressed,” he said. “It has always been my intent to make sure that this be done for the citizens of Minden.”

EPA says it found elevated levels of PCBs in sediments taken from Arbuckle Creek up to one mile downstream from Minden. The creek often floods the community, which the EPA says has spread the PCB contamination.

By placing the Minden area on the Superfund National Priorities List, the site would be eligible for long-term cleanup paid for by the federal government.

EPA will accept public comments on the proposed listing for 60 days, beginning Sept. 13.

How Toxic is My Town? Fayette County Teens Conduct Year-Long Science Project

Three high school students in Fayette County have devoted the past year to researching Minden’s possible soil contamination and the history of the Environmental Protection Agency’s involvement in the Shaffer Site. Their project involved collecting soil samples at the former site of the Shaffer Equipment Company, which in the 1970s was in the business of repairing, building, and disposing of various types of transformers from coal companies. The company leaked polychlorinated biphenyl — more commonly known as PCB— into the soil.

Marcayla King came up with the idea to study the PCB contamination in Minden as part of a year-long research project.

She lives just down the road from where the EPA discovered the highest concentration of PCB in this community more than 30 years ago.

“This affects me too because I live here. Some of the water may come down to my area,” said King. “I feel like I want to know more about my community. I want to help us out because we’ve been fighting for awhile.”

King is an upcoming Junior at Oak Hill High School. She’s 15 years old and is doing this research project as part of a program called Health Sciences & Technology Academy, or HSTA. It’s a mentoring program for high school students, intended to increase the number of minority and first generation students that go on to pursue science and health in college.

Oak Hill High School student collecting soil samples from Shaffer site in Fayette County

“Each year they have to choose a topic to do a year-long research project,” said King’s mentor in the HSTA program, teacher Brandy Cook.

“It has to be something connected to their community. They do all the research they do the data collecting.”

For this project, Cook is helping King and her two classmates collect soil samples at the Shaffer site, to test how much PCB contamination may be left in the dirt. King said she was worried about getting close to some potentially dangerous chemicals in the process.

“Yeah, but I’ll take that risk. I want to find out more about it.”

Even though she’s lived here her entire life, she says she didn’t know much about the history of the Shaffer company, or the PCB contamination. She’s been four-wheeling here for years, and she said, she never realized the EPA had been involved in cleaning up this site.

Her classmate, Rose Gayhart, doesn’t live in Minden, but she said she thinks it’s important for young people to learn about issues like this in their area.

“We’re the next generation. If we don’t do something, who knows if someone will.”

Small drainage ditch on the Shaffer site in Minden, W.Va.

We reach a swampy area where an orange flow of water seeps through the forest. Old rotting leaves clog the top of the small stream. The Shaffer Equipment company actually stood on top of a former coal mine site. According to one researcher I spoke with at the West Virginia DEP, Minden sits on top of multiple abandoned mine sites, criss-crossing and running beneath the ground for miles.

The students hypothesize that soil samples here in Minden will test higher in PCB levels, compared with those in the nearby community of Oak Hill

All of the sampling and testing is done on site, along the creekbed. The students are able to determine the results in about 20 minutes.

After awhile, the color of the mud in the test tube changes to a greenish brown color. On the instructions they match the color with the level of PCB, less than 50 parts per million— probably not high enough for alarm, at least not because of PCB.

Checking the color of the soil sample after it’s gone through a chemical process, to determine how high the level of PCBs

But the water doesn’t look entirely safe either.

There’s an eerie orange tint to the water that is most likely due to acid mine drainage from one of the abandoned mines that lies underground here. No fish or tadpoles are swimming, and there’s a noticeable gassy smell bubbling up from the creekbed.

This test the students use is not as sophisticated as what the EPA uses. Maybe with a more expensive test, they could get a more exact figure of the level of PCBs in the dirt, or a better idea of what other contaminants may also be in this water.

King said she’s not surprised to learn the PCB isn’t very high. After all, this backs up what the EPA has reported in recent findings. But, she adds, any contamination at all, no matter how small, is alarming.

“I’m just now finding out about this. And it’s just kind of mind blowing because I didn’t know, this stuff has been happening for years.”

The hands-on experience getting out into the field and testing the dirt near her home has made her even more convinced that this is the type of work she’d like to study in college and go on to do as an adult. At least, she feels confident that some type of health science is in her future, maybe something where she can help people like her neighbors in Minden.

Later, when the students compare their test samples with the ones they collect in Oak Hill, they find them to contain similar levels of PCB. However, they later learn that the sample site they chose in Oak Hill was the site of a car crash. The accident may have caused PCB to leak into the soil, so they plan to repeat the experiment again next year.

King said she’s interested to find out what the EPA reports later this year when they release the results from their tests from Minden. The EPA has said most of the samples they collected in Minden in 2017 have contained less than 2 parts per million PCB, far under the levels that would pose serious risk to human health, according to officials.

There was one result that came back at 6.2 parts per million and another at 50 parts per million, but they are resampling that area again to find out if there is indeed a high enough risk to justify placing this site on the Superfund National Priorities List.

This story is part of an episode of Inside Appalachia about Minden and the EPA’s Superfund Program. Click here to listen to the full episode.

EPA to Hold Public Listening Session in Minden

The Environmental Protection Agency will hold a public listening session next week in the town of Minden, which is seeking federal help due to hazardous waste contamination.

EPA’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Administrator Cosmo Servidio will be on hand to hear resident’s input next Thursday, June 7 from 7:00 – 8:30 p.m. at the New Beginning Apostolic Church in Minden. The agency said it will also provide a brief update on recent testing.

But local residents are concerned PCB contamination is ongoing. They’re asking the EPA to place the site on the Superfund National Priorities List, which would make it eligible for longterm cleanup paid for by the federal government.

In a press release, the EPA said there is currently not enough data to determine if the site qualifies for the National Priorities List, but assessments are ongoing.

Community Says PCBs are Causing Cancer 'Clusters' in Minden

UPDATE 6/1/18:

After this story was published, resident Annetta Coffman sent West Virginia Public Broadcasting a list including an additional 89 names of people in Minden who have had cancer or died of cancer. West Virginia Public Broadcasting reported earlier that according to an unofficial list compiled by community members, about 152 people have had cancer or died of cancer in this community of 250 residents.

Original Story:

In the community of Minden, West Virginia, where about 250 people live today, lifelong resident Annetta Coffman points to each home along the small, two lane road

“The man that lived there, he died of cancer,” she said. “And then the little blue house that’s there – it’s just an old little shack now – that man died of leukemia. The orange house, the Bruhelahans, both of them died of cancer. Then Tom Brown moved in. He lived in Minden his whole life, but he bought that house and he died of cancer shortly after moving in there.”

Coffman believes that contamination from polychlorinated biphenyl — more commonly known as PCB — is causing a cancer cluster in Minden.

PCB is a toxic chemical manufactured from the late 1920s to 1970s for hundreds of industrial and commercial applications.

A cancer cluster is a high number of cancer cases in a particular population over a brief period of time. Minden has been identified by the EPA as a location contaminated by PCB’s. Yet it would be hard to prove that Minden has a cancer cluster.

“Cancer has multi-factor etiology,” said Sarah Knox, professor of epidemiology at West Virginia University who specializes in cancer.

Meaning there are many, many things – including diet, exercise, smoking, obesity, diabetes, genetics, lifestyle and, yes, environmental contaminants – that contribute to whether a person gets cancer.

Many of these factors, including cancer rates, are elevated in the Appalachian region.

“You find cancer health disparities in Appalachia and between Appalachian states and non-Appalachian states, and even within states, between Appalachian counties and non-Appalachian counties,” said Knox. “So you find cancer clusters by looking for them.”

Like the rest of West Virginia, Minden struggles with high levels of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and hypertension, which all can play a role in cancer.

Fayette County, where Minden is located, also struggles with high unemployment and poverty. While poverty in and of itself isn’t a risk factor for cancer, poverty is associated with behaviors that put one at risk for cancer such as smoking and obesity. Additionally, poverty is associated with being medically underserved or having less access to care, meaning if you’re poor and get cancer, you’re more likely to die from it.

It’s tough to know exactly where Minden stands economically. The U.S. Census doesn’t have income or poverty information for this particular community. About 20 percent of the people who live in Fayette County, where Minden is located, are living in poverty, compared to 12.7 percent nationally, according to the census.

Cancer rates in Fayette County are high, but close to the state average of about 469 cases per 100,000 residents, slightly higher than the national incidence of 439.

Residents of Minden, though, say their cancer incidence rates are four times that amount.

They point to an unofficial list that residents have compiled of cancer deaths. From 1983 to 2004, about 152 people have died of cancer in this community of 250 residents. Because historical population data is lacking in Minden, it’s impossible to say whether this translates to an elevated rate of cancer. But it certainly feels that way to residents, and to at least one local medical professional.

Ayne Amjad’s father was an oncologist who served the community of Minden. He died in 2017 before finishing his goal of compiling a “cancer registry” to count the number of cancer cases related to Minden.

“He was seeing a large amount of people who had, yes, cancer coming from Minden,” said Amjad, who is an internist in Beckley, WVa. “A lot of lymphomas — a blood disorder type of cancer. And he thought it has to be related to the environment, because it was a small group of people who lived in a small tiny town who were coming in, so he was convinced that there was some relationship.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, further research is needed to determine if there are adverse human health effects to low-level environmental exposure to PCBs. But in animal studies, PCB exposure can cause a whole host of issues, including death, body weight loss, cancer, fatty liver, neurotoxicity, and thyroid hormone-level alterations.

“Because there are different physiological processes involved in cancer and different factors that affect these things,” said Knox, “you have to really do a strict methodological study over a period of time to try and differentiate the clusters from the non-clusters and to see if the clusters are just chance, which they can be.”

Finding funding to study cancer in Minden is almost impossible — cancer research funds tend to go to bigger projects with broader impact on more people. Knox says in order to substantiate the Minden community’s claim, they would need to secure federal research funds – it’s way too expensive for the state to take on. And until that happens, if ever, it’s just citizens saying, “Please pay attention — something abnormal is happening here.”

This story is part of an episode of Inside Appalachia about Minden and the EPA’s Superfund Program. Click here to listen to the full episode.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Marshall Health, Charleston Area Medical Center and WVU Medicine.

EPA Testing for 'Possible' Carcinogen PCBs in West Virignia

The Environmental Protection Agency is conducting a month-long sampling of water and soil for PCB chemicals in West Virginia.

The testing in Minden until Friday is for polychlorinated biphenyls, which were commonly used as an electrical equipment insulator. The EPA lists PCBs as a “possible” carcinogen and in 1977 banned their used except in totally enclosed systems.

Local physician Dr. Hassan Amjad says the EPA is afraid of its mistakes and that several of his patients died of cancer.

In the 1980s, EPA officials told residents the Shaffer Equipment Company wasn’t a health threat although they returned in 1992 to tear down the site and construct a cap over it. EPA documents say Shaffer used the abandoned mines to dump electrical equipment and contaminated oil.