MOULTON - Federal officials will test the blood of up to 200 Lawrence County residents for potentially toxic chemicals placed on fields by Decatur Utilities, an Environmental Protection Agency official said Monday.

Glenda Dean, an official with Alabama Department of Environmental Management's water division, said concerns about the same perfluorinated chemicals also mean the Hillsboro landfill must obtain a discharge permit, which should include a plan to reduce the chemicals discharged at the Moulton wastewater treatment plant. This duplicates a requirement ADEM imposed on Morgan County Area Landfill earlier this year.

Lifetime exposure

EPA officials said they also are planning to release a new health advisory that considers lifetime exposure to the chemicals through drinking water. Gail Mitchell, deputy director of water protection, said the standards are scheduled for finalization in about a year.

She said DU, 3M, Daikin America, Toray Fluorofibers and Synagro have tested an additional 12 private wells since June, and none had PFC levels as high as the current health advisory, adopted in January, which assumes exposure for only two years.

Thomas Meadows, a Lawrence County resident with a private well near a PFC-contaminated field, said his family has been drinking well water for a lifetime. He said he took little solace in the fact his well tested below the current health advisory.

The information came during a public meeting in Moulton. About 120 residents attended the meeting, along with about 15 officials from DU, EPA, ADEM and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Free fertilizer

For 12 years, DU got rid of sludge from its wastewater treatment plant by distributing it as free fertilizer to area farmers. The biosolids ended up on 5,000 acres of land, 90 percent of it in Lawrence County.

Mitchell said EPA knew of the possibility that PFCs contaminated the sludge because of tests 3M performed beginning in 1979. What it did not realize until 2008, she said, was that DU was putting the sludge on farmland. She said Daikin America notified EPA in 2008 it had inadvertently discharged large amounts of the chemicals into DU's wastewater treatment plant. It was only then the agency discovered DU was using Synagro South to distribute the biosolids on farms.

DU discontinued the practice in November 2008, after EPA shared test results showing high PFC levels in sludge-treated soil.

In response to a question about how long EPA has known that PFCs cross the placenta, Mitchell said 3M studies in 1999 alerted them of the danger to laboratory animals. Studies on the chemicals' impact on humans have been less clear, she said.

She said EPA recently conducted additional tests of five area public water supplies. The only samples that had detectible levels of PFCs came from West Morgan-East Lawrence, and those levels were well below EPA's health advisory.

Department of Agriculture official Kerry Dearfield said his agency decided samples taken from cattle slaughtered near contaminated land were safe for consumption.

He said, however, that USDA tested only muscle meat, and its testing methodology could detect only levels 50 times the health advisory for drinking water.

In humans, PFC levels tend to be highest in organs like the kidneys and liver. Dearfield said the agency did not test these organs, even though it took organ samples from the cattle it slaughtered.

"Our studies suggest people don't eat kidney and liver like they used to," he said.

Tests of the slaughtered cattle's blood had levels of PFOS, a particularly toxic PFC, at levels as high as 500 times the EPA health advisory applicable to drinking water. 

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