Union Pacific is installing the plastic in crawl spaces under seven houses in the Trainsong neighborhood this week to stop any fumes from polluted groundwater from rising up into the homes.
In August, the railroad’s tests found solvent vapors — trichloroethylene or tetrachloroethylene — in, under or around 31 homes in the neighborhood.
But the railroad and the Department of Environmental Quality concluded that the vapors at 24 of the tested homes was from some other source and the railroad should not be responsible for protecting those neighbors.
“We’ve got a reasonable basis now to identify specific homes,” said Greg Aitken, cleanup manager with the DEQ. “We’re feeling pretty good about what we think is happening out there, but, more importantly, we know what Union Pacific is prepared to do about it.”
As the pace of cleanup work at Lane County’s largest polluted site quickens, the state environmental agency and the railroad are redoubling their efforts to communicate their view of the problem and to reassure politicians and homeowners that no one is in immediate danger from toxics in the water or the air.
Neighbors, meanwhile, are asking for more testing and more information. And some of them want help to move away from the railroad’s wide, underground pollution plume that’s under as many as 250 properties in the Trainsong and River Road neighborhoods.
“If there’s no risk, we’d like to have that concrete information and not just their word they don’t think there’s a risk. We really need to have that in black and white,” said Jolene Siemsen, co-chairwoman of the River Road Community Organization. Crews working for Union Pacific, meanwhile, crawled under Trainsong neighborhood homes this week installing black plastic sheeting and, in some cases, ventilation fans, to clear out any solvent fumes.
Some homes required considerable preparation before the work began. At some, pest experts were called in to trap rats.
At one, crews had to dig to make 18 inches of clearance under the house, up from about 5 inches when they started.
At Joanna Larson’s Haig Street home, the workmen cleared piles of old lumber from under the house and then poured a new concrete supporting wall to shore up the fireplace before they could begin installing the sheeting.
“I’m just kind of taking it in stride,” Larson said. “I figure there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ll end up with a better house. Maybe.”
Union Pacific also will test a soil solvent extraction system in the Trainsong neighborhood near the corner of Bethel Avenue and Haig Street. It’s designed to lessen the concentration of solvents under residents’ homes and should be in place by the end of the year, Aitken said.
Union Pacific and the DEQ also have stepped up their public communication efforts, following criticism earlier this year.
A railroad cleanup consultant is now submitting monthly reports on current and upcoming cleanup plans to Eugene Mayor Kitty Piercy.
“It clearly means they understood there wasn’t enough communication going on,” Piercy said.
The railroad and the environmental agency mailed a flurry of letters to homeowners that reported results of past and current environmental testing on their properties.
And the DEQ has organized a Nov. 1 meeting in the Trainsong neighborhood to provide information, interpretation and answers to the public’s questions.
“I’m hoping in the public meeting to try to persuade folks that we understand what’s going on out there and can rule out unacceptable exposure (to solvents),” Aitken said.
Aitken’s message: “Solvent levels are very low and will not result in acute health effects.”
Information about chronic — as opposed to acute — health problems, however, will have to wait until late October, when an Oregon Health Division epidemiologist finalizes her report on the railroad pollution.
Also, Aitken said, residents of the River Road neighborhood — on the northeast side of the rail yard — should not worry about solvent vapors in their crawl spaces, such as those found in the Trainsong neighborhood on the southwest side of the rail yard.
The solvents in the chemical plume under River Road homes are less concentrated than under Trainsong, Aitken said.
Lower solvent levels in the groundwater 10 feet below a crawl space mean less chance of the chemical making it to the surface because the pollution dissipates up through the soils, he said.
“You have to have a certain amount of mass in ground water to be able to detect it in the crawl space,” Aitken said.
“Solvent levels in groundwater (under the River Road area) consistently fall below levels that indicate the possibility of detectable vapor intrusions” into homes, Aitken said.
The agency also has finalized its controversial decision that River Road well water is safe for about all outdoor uses — except drinking. The agency has decided that acceptable uses include placing a baby in a kiddie pool full of the mildly contaminated water.
“We’re clear that there is no unacceptable risk to children in the outdoor swimming pool scenario,” Aitken said. “We don’t believe it’s necessary to recommend limitations on that.”
Still, about a dozen residents in the River Road neighborhood want the railroad to test their wells and crawl spaces to prove there’s no danger from solvent fumes.
The DEQ’s reckoning is insufficient, said Siemsen, the neighborhood leader, who’s also a nurse practitioner.
“They have an obligation to reassure us there is no risk. I would like to see evidence to support that reassurance. Go out and test and prove to us there’s nothing there,” she said.
But, because of the lower concentrations of pollutant in the ground water, the state can’t compel the railroad to test the air in crawl spaces in River Road homes, Aitken said.
“We have to have some technical basis to require them to go testing, and we had that for the Trainsong neighborhood, and we didn’t have that in River Road,” he said.
In the Trainsong neighborhood, meanwhile, the railroad and DEQ determined that 24 of the tested homes are not eligible for the railroad’s help because the solvents at their properties are from other sources.
The ambient air in the Trainsong neighborhood contains traces of solvents, Aitken said. However, they’re not higher than what’s found in many urban areas, including Portland, he said.
“There’s dry cleaning going on, or meth production,” he said.
“All that goes on sporadically.”
DEQ records show there are a number of hazardous waste sites around the Trainsong neighborhood.
The Oregon Toxics Alliance is urging the DEQ, and other government agencies, to establish ongoing monitoring of the air in Trainsong and more generally west Eugene.
“We feel they are in a sense writing off the whole neighborhood as being polluted,” said Lisa Arkin, executive director of the Eugene-based nonprofit organization. “We have to get a handle on why there is a high level of toxics in the air.”
The city is creating an advisory committee to work on Trainsong’s problems. The city staff will report to the mayor on other ways the city can assist residents, Piercy said. “We have a responsibility to help them however we can. Nobody should live in a place that’s unsafe,” she said.