[CPEO-BIF] Woburn, Massachusetts PCE vapors

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

EPA testing water after some contamination found

By Kathie Ragsdale
GateHouse News Service/Woburn Advocate (MA)
January 12, 2011

Woburn, MA - Twenty years after the residents of one Woburn neighborhood 
were assured their homes were safe to live in, the Environmental 
Protection Agency is finding signs of an all-too-familiar problem in the 
vicinity - water contamination.

The EPA is asking a handful of residents in the Dewey and Olympia Avenue 
neighborhood of east Woburn for permission to drill in their basements 
after discovering slightly higher-than-acceptable levels of PCE, or 
tetrachloroethylene, in the groundwater there.

The EPA characterizes the tests as "precautionary."

PCE is one of the contaminants implicated in the cluster of childhood 
leukemia deaths in Woburn in the 1980s that led to the book and movie "A 
Civil Action." The neighborhood abuts the W. R. Grace and Unifirst 
building sites that were partly blamed for the pollution.

While residents of the neighborhood do not rely on the groundwater for 
drinking - they get their drinking water through the Massachusetts Water 
Resources Authority (MWRA) - the EPA wants to make sure potentially 
harmful vapors are not being created by the chemical.

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.wickedlocal.com/woburn/news/x471104642/EPA-testing-water-after-some-contamination-found

--


Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org



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