Since last December, however, two wells have had TCE as high as 40 ppb - eight times the EPA standard - prompting the corps to install a filter on one well. Aeration at the city's water treatment plant broke down the TCE and made it undetectable in the city's drinking water, said plant manager Bud Spillman. TCE was first detected in the city wells in the 1990s but levels mostly remained below the EPA's drinking water standard of 5 parts per billion. The wells are located within an unusually large, eight-mile-long plume of TCE within the Ogallala Aquifer. The city of Cheyenne has been using four water wells about 10 miles west of town and eight miles east of the second ICBM site that was built in the American heartland. "If the TCE plume gets to the river, it will be a dangerous chemical pollutant that the water providers have to deal with," said Gary Wockner with. The FUDS program gets $306 million a year for cleanup work at more than 9,000 former defense sites nationwide that is projected to cost $17.8 billion, Walters said. "They don't look too hard for new contamination because if they do, they have tell people they have to clean it up," said Lenny Siegel, executive director of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight at the Pacific Studies Center in Mountain View, Calif. One advocate for more aggressive cleanup of TCE said the FUDS program is too underfunded for the corps to look harder for the chemical. "As new contaminants are identified, then we have to go back and look at some of the sites we have and say, 'Ooh, maybe this is something we should be looking for,'" Walters said. Environmental Protection Agency adopted a drinking water standard for the chemical in 1989. But the corps didn't identify TCE as a high priority until the U.S. The corps has evaluated a total of 395 former ICBM and Nike missile sites since the Formerly Used Defense Sites, or FUDS, program began in the early 1980s. TCE may have polluted many more missile sites than the corps is aware. TCE also may cause cancer, other government agencies say. Long before environmentalism went mainstream, the men who maintained the missiles didn't think twice about dumping used TCE into the silos' blast pits.Įxposure to high concentrations of the chemical could cause nervous system problems, liver and lung damage, abnormal heartbeat, coma and death, according to the Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. The problem is a chemical called trichloroethylene, or TCE, which was used to keep missiles clean and ready to rumble on short notice. Total cleanup costs are projected to cost $400 million, according to corps spokeswoman Candice Walters. California, New Mexico, New York and Texas have one contaminated site each. The missile sites include 14 in Kansas, 10 in Nebraska, seven in Wyoming, seven in Colorado and two in Oklahoma. To date, the corps has spent $116 million at 44 former Atlas and Titan intercontinental ballistic missile - or ICBM - sites and 19 former Nike anti-aircraft missile sites from the early Cold War.
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