The health threat from a 20-year-old underground gas tank spill that spread from Prince George’s County into Northeast Washington is slowly dissipating, but the risk to Riggs Park residents of cancer from other contaminants is surprisingly high, a new study finds.
Solvents, including cancer-causing perchloroethylenes, or PCEs, most often associated with dry cleaners, were found at concentrations well into the dangerous range, according to the 2008 study performed by S.S. Papadopulos & Associates Inc.
The D.C. Department of the Environment will install vapor extraction systems in at least 45 Riggs Park homes, that showed an “unacceptable risk” of contamination from either PCEs or gasoline remnants, said DDOE Director George Hawkins. The systems cost about $2,500 each, he said, and there will be an attempt to recoup that money from the parties responsible for the contamination.
“If we had the data indicating there was a risk, we will seek the remedy,” Hawkins said.
In 1989, the gasoline that leaked from a tank beneath a Chillum Chevron station was thought to be contained in Maryland by a pump and treatment system. Not until 2001 did anyone realize the vapor “plume” had migrated from Riggs Road in Prince George’s, across
Eastern Avenue and into D.C.’s Riggs Park neighborhood.
The latest round of sampling inside, beneath and outside more than 100 Riggs Park homes found no residences with gasoline remnants at concentrations at or above cancer risk levels. The review “demonstrated that the gasoline plume is much less of a problem than we thought it was,” Hawkins said. The components in gasoline, he said, degrade over time.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency took over the Chevron spill investigation in 2002. Repeated EPA and Chevron testing has shown little risk to D.C. residents from the gas plume — outside of roughly three homes.
“We’ve promised the community we’re going to go over and above what the EPA has ordered,” said Ward 4 D.C. Councilwoman
Muriel Bowser. “We said we’re not going to go with what the feds said.”
The D.C. Department of Health is expected to conduct a health study of Riggs Park neighbors to determine the health effects of the gas plume and PCEs that have migrated through the soil, groundwater and air for over two decades.
“We have cancer clusters throughout the whole community where people have died,” said Cleo Holmes, a Riggs Park resident who lives in the path of the plume. “What you have there is just a starting point.”
