CTS given 30 days to submit cleanup plans

ARDEN – CTS Corp. has until Aug. 11 to submit plans to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for cleaning up polluted springs and a plume of tainted groundwater beneath a former plant site.

The 30-day deadline sent to CTS by the EPA on July 10 follows the agency’s voluntary evacuation of 13 people living near the old plant site on Mills Gap Road because of unsafe pollutant levels in air vapor. The primary culprit was polluted springs downhill from the vacant CTS site.

“It was precipitated by the people having to be temporarily relocated,” said Samantha Urquhart-Foster, the EPA’s remedial project manager for the site. “We want to get them back in their homes if we can. Our primary focus is bringing down the air concentrations at the springs so they can get back home.”

CTS manufactured electronic components at the site for decades before shutting down in 1986. Chemicals used at the facility, including the industrial solvent trichloroethylene, have been found in high concentrations in the soil and groundwater.

TCE is classified as a human carcinogen and can cause damage to the nervous system, liver and lungs.

As far as cleaning up the springs, which are near a home and mobile homes, CTS will have to submit a plan for “a removal action.” CTS has submitted a plan that calls for “extracting contaminated water to draw the water table down so it doesn’t come up in the springs,” Urquhart-Foster said.

“We’ll give them the option of trying whatever techniques they want to try first,” she said. “Also, this plan will require very minimal damage to the area. There are other ideas and techniques to use in the springs, but they cause more damage in the area. Putting in extraction wells would be minimally invasive.”

The EPA’s second request is for CTS to develop a “focused feasibility study” to address the plume of contaminated water beneath the old plant. A company official could not be reached Monday.

CTS has yet to submit any plans, and possible solutions could include an extraction well similar to the springs cleanup proposal, a chemical oxidation technique that involves pumping chemicals into the polluted water that break down the pollutants, or heating up the polluted water to vaporize the chemicals, Urquhart-Foster said.

The EPA will require that CTS continue with additional air sampling, and if it shows pollutant levels have declined to safe level near the springs, residents could return home.

But Urquhart-Foster said all cleanup techniques would involve “years,” not months.

The EPA has put up the displaced residents in temporary housing.

The CTS saga has continued since pollution was first discovered in 1999. Terry Rice, who had to evacuate his home near the springs and is living in a rental house in Asheville, said he remains skeptical about this latest development and call for a cleanup plan.

“I’ve heard ‘30 days’ for the past 10 years,” he said. “I just wonder why the EPA is negotiating with a contaminator. Why don’t they make the contaminator do something to clean this up?”

He said he also believes CTS should clean up the pollution at its source, so the problem with polluted water and air vapor does not recur. Recent testing of the plume found the toxic industrial solvent trichloroethylene mixed with petroleum floating on groundwater under the former CTS plant site.

The springs near Rice’s house are polluted, too, creating unsafe air vapors that permeated the house where he’s lived since 1984.

“I don’t want to be going back and forth into my house and then have to move out,” Rice said. “If the air levels get to where I can go back in, I’d like it to stay that way.”