Inside Building 130 at Anniston Army Depot, where Stanley Dulaney worked for 14 years, the acrid air stung his nasal passages. His nose ran constantly. It felt like he had just eaten a spoonful of horseradish. "You walked in there and you'd get a head rush," said Dulaney, 57, a retired machinist.
When Dulaney worked in Building 130 from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, it was one of the biggest users of trichloroethylene, or TCE, at the hardworking installation. Dulaney spent about half of his career inside the building, modifying engine blocks on 12-cylinder combat vehicle engines.
And he worried every day about whether the air he was breathing in that building was making him sick, he said. But, Dulaney added, he still has his health after all these years.
The Army depot continues to look for ways to reduce its TCE use, but the facility has no plans to phase out the chemical completely.
As with drinking water standards, air standards are based on prolonged exposures to chemicals by huge groups of people. So the risk one person faces in that crowd is extremely low.
Still, Dr. David Ozonoff, a TCE expert at Boston University, said, "Whatever exposure that's going on now with workers, there shouldn't be. There's no excuse for someone to be exposed to TCE right now."
Certain portions of the 600-acre industrial area lying in the southeast corner of the depot pose dual TCE-related hazards to employees.
Although all other military installations have phased out using significant amounts of TCE, the Anniston depot continues to use the virulent chemical in large amounts in some of its cleaning and degreasing operations. That puts workers at risk of inhaling and touching TCE.
Employees also face the threat of breathing in toxic vapors from TCE dumped into the ground up to six decades earlier.
The depot is working to alleviate both threats, Army officials say, but they have a long way to go, compared with similar installations.
The only military facility that still uses enough TCE for it to appear on the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory, the federal government's annual pollution report, is the Anniston Army Depot.
Full Story: http://www.annistonstar.com/showcase/2008/as-open-0903-0-8i02x3927.htm
