Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division recently approved a new hazardous waste cleanup permit for the General Electric Medium Transformer Plant that includes some improved monitoring and reporting of contamination at the site in West Rome. The changes to the permit came about as the result of the Coosa River Basin Initiative’s efforts to get the state agency to require GE to provide daily reports on groundwater elevation levels surrounding a landfill at the site that contains PCBs and other hazardous waste, said Joe Cook, Advocacy & Communication Coordinator at CRBI.

EPD was previously requiring GE to report groundwater elevations only twice a year even though the company had monitoring wells that provided daily groundwater elevation data.

EPD agreed to the suggested changes in the permit, and GE did not object to the additional monitoring and reporting. In an Oct. 14 letter to CRBI, EPD notified the organization that “GE will be required to report to EPD the daily water levels collected by the transducers located in the recovery wells at Landfill A.”

“This is a small but important change to the permit,” said Cook. “The data was already there, it just wasn’t being made available. This information will give EPD and the Rome community greater assurance that GE’s cleanup plan is working like it’s supposed to.”

Since 2001, GE has operated a groundwater extraction system that pumps groundwater from around the contaminated landfill, removes contaminants and then releases the treated water to the City of Rome’s sewage treatment system.

The goal of the program is to prevent groundwater from reaching a height where it comes in contact with toxic landfill material and keeping the groundwater from moving off the site where it could contaminate residential and other well water. Cancer-causing chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and other toxic substances are known to exist in the landfill.

The group also asked EPD to require GE to beef up its program to identify local residences contaminated by PCBs, but that request was denied because the voluntary residential testing program is not part of GE’s hazardous waste permit.

Between 1952 and 1969, GE sold PCB-containing oil to employees who used it as termite treatment, dust suppressant and other uses in and around their homes. During the plant’s 44 years of operation some 5,000 people worked at the plant.

Additionally, between 1967 and 1972, an untold number of residents used PCB-contaminated sludge from the Rome sewage treatment plant as garden fertilizer at their homes.

Though there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of contaminated homes, GE has investigated just 103 properties, conducted soil testing at 65 properties and initiated cleanups at 19 sites, Cook said.

“The residential testing program should be mandatory. It should be incorporated into GE’s hazardous waste permit,” Cook said. “The company should be required to complete a comprehensive investigation of potentially contaminated sites in this community.”