Gas additive's seeping scourge/Nothing seems the same in a small town overcome by toxic threat from underground

By Dan Fagin, Staff writer Copyright 1998 Newsday, Inc. August 24, 1998

Glennville, Calif. - On lazy afternoons, the lunchtime crowd used to gather around the Formica tabletops at Grizzly's Cafe, the only restaurant in this tiny town in the Sierra foothills, and sip tall glasses of iced tea.

Schoolkids would be at Grizzly's, too, gulping down the soft drinks that waitress Betty Honor used to serve them with plenty of ice after their short, hot walk up Highway 155 from Linn's Valley Elementary School, which is too small to have its own cafeteria.

Today, those afternoons seem impossibly far away to many residents of Glennville, population 131 and falling. People pass the luncheon hour in solitude, now that Grizzly's and most of the other businesses have shut down. And when the locals do meet, instead of talking about how many rodeo fans will come to the annual Glennville Roundup, the conversation is often about a toxic chemical that until last year no one in town had ever heard of.

Nothing in Glennville has been the same since October, when state officials told its astonished residents that the water they were drinking at Grizzly's and in many of their own kitchen taps contained startlingly high quantities of MTBE, a gasoline additive that reduces air pollution but is contaminating drinking water in communities from Santa Monica to Montauk when gasoline leaks out of buried tanks and pipelines.

"It's like a funeral around here, everything's gone: our property values, our water, our businesses - everything," said Freda Kubas, who moved to Glennville seven years ago and thought she was giving her seven grandchildren a safe place to play in the hills. Instead, she was serving them water from a backyard well that contained 20,000 parts per billion of MTBE; the current federal guideline is a maximum of 20 to 40 parts per billion.

"The worst part is, we don't know what risks the children in this town are facing because they drank this water," said Kubas. "That's hard to live with."

Glennville is one of the worst examples of MTBE contamination in the nation, but it is hardly the only one. As its use in gasoline has sky-rocketed because of federal clean-air mandates, MTBE has been increasingly turning up in Long Island water wells, Nevada reservoirs and even in raindrops. Meanwhile, its noxious smell and affinity for water is spawning a loosely organized opposition that is one of the largest grass-roots movements against a single chemical since the insecticide DDT was banned a quarter-century ago.

Those activists, and a growing number of scientists, too, worry that there will soon be many more Glennvilles now that MTBE - methyl tertiary-butyl ether - has become a major component of gasoline. Unlike benzene and the other hazardous chemicals in gasoline, MTBE has some unique characteristics that make it extremely difficult and costly to clean up if it spills and reaches water.

Almost 20 years after MTBE was first introduced into gasoline, researchers still have not answered basic questions about how dangerous it is. The federal Environmental Protection Agency - the same agency that has aggressively promoted MTBE's use in gasoline to reduce air pollution from cars and trucks - classifies it as a possible human carcinogen because laboratory rats and mice that breathe or drink it have developed lymphoma, leukemia, testicular tumors, thyroid tumors and kidney tumors.

And while there are uncertainties about MTBE's long-term health risks to humans, there have been widespread reports of headaches, nausea and other short-term symptoms among drivers and mechanics who breathe its strong-smelling vapors.

"I think it is the environmental epidemic of the decade," said Barry Groveman, a Los Angeles attorney who won a $ 50 million settlement from major oil companies after leaks from gas stations and pipelines polluted Santa Monica's water supply with MTBE. "This is going to be a pervasive water-quality problem for many years to come."

On Long Island and in southeastern Queens, where the sandy soil and shallow aquifers are particularly vulnerable to contamination, MTBE has quickly become one of the most frequently detected toxic pollutants because it can travel far by water in spills and by air in car exhaust.

Water from the private wells that are still common in eastern Suffolk is especially susceptible to MTBE because backyard wells are shallow and aren't regularly tested or filtered to remove toxic chemicals, unlike the public wells operated by water companies.

But experts also worry that the long-lasting chemical will increasingly penetrate more deeply into the aquifer system and turn up in more of the deep public wells that supply most of the region's drinking water. The tests and filters used by water companies on public wells aren't foolproof, and regulators worry that MTBE will be more likely to end up in tap water as the number of unfinished cleanups of gasoline spills continues to build.

"We're seeing more and more of it. It moves in the aquifer, it's in the streams, and now there's a realization that it's an airborne contaminant," said Joe Baier, director of environmental quality for the Suffolk Department of Health Services.

Already, in hundreds of Long Island and Queens neighborhoods, MTBE has intruded into the lives of families who had no idea that underground gasoline plumes were seeping beneath their homes until they smelled MTBE's turpentine-like odor in their backyards or basements.

On the North Fork, for example, the water wells of two homes were ruined by MTBE, apparently after someone dumped a few gallons of gasoline onto the ground. Cleaning up that mistake cost $ 50,000, state officials say.

In Queens, a crisscross of intersecting plumes now lies beneath residential areas near trucking depots and gas stations. "You're going to see MTBE in any gasoline spill around here," said Randall Austin, who runs the state's spill response unit in New York City.

Gasoline spills constitute about half of the approximately 5,000 fuel spills reported to the state every year in Nassau, Suffolk and Queens. Leaks from heating oil tanks make up much of the rest.

Then there's the story of the Rudz family of Lindenhurst, who were shocked when in May they were told by Nassau County health officials to evacuate the home they rent because of pungent fumes from an underground MTBE plume that came from a nearby gas station.

"It hit me like a hammer in the head," said Marion Rudz of the order to evacuate his home.

Sixteen days later, after a contractor hired by the state installed an emergency pumping system to reduce the odors, the Rudzes were allowed to move back. But the odor still permeates their home and so does the noise from the pumps, which whirr all day and night like a vacuum cleaner that's never turned off.

For the Rudzes, there are no more backyard barbecues, no more Saturday afternoons working in the vegetable garden. Orange cones and piles of construction material cover much of the lawn, but the family can't spend much time outside anyway because of the stench. And Marion Rudz wonders what the fumes, which he first faintly smelled two years earlier, have done to his family's health.

"This is no way to live," he said, shaking his head.

Used sparingly as an octane-booster for 20 years, MTBE in the 1990s has become the nation's third-ranking organic chemical product, after ethylene and propylene. The change came after 1992 when major refining companies led by Arco Chemical Co. discovered they can make a profit and meet federal Clean Air Act mandates by synthesizing MTBE from refinery waste products and then blending it with conventional gasoline to produce cleaner-burning "reformulated" gas.

Today, about one-third of the gasoline sold in America, including every gallon pumped in downstate New York, is 11 percent to 15 percent MTBE, and annual production of the chemical has skyrocketed to more than 70 billion barrels per year.

MTBE isn't a new chemical. Relatively small amounts have been used in Europe since 1972, and in the eastern United States since 1979, as an octane booster in unleaded gasoline.

The additive really started catching on in the winter of 1992-93, when the EPA mandated the use of cleaner-burning oxygenated fuel in 39 metro areas - including downstate New York - to control carbon monoxide. A few refiners chose ethanol, made from grain, as their oxygenator. But the industry's overwhelming choice was MTBE, which could be made from two by-products of the natural gas-refining process, isobutylene and methanol, that the refining companies would otherwise have to get rid of in some other way. The new gas cost about 5 cents more per gallon, and reduced gas mileage by about 2 percent, the EPA later found.

Almost immediately after the new gasoline was introduced, people began to complain about the strong odors they smelled at the gas pump. A few states, including Alaska, North Carolina and New Jersey, became hotbeds of MTBE complaints, with hundreds of consumers reporting headaches, nausea and other symptoms. Many joined local chapters of a new, loosely organized, anti-MTBE group called Oxy-Busters, which now has chapters in 15 states and five countries. In North Carolina, the state health department ran radio advertisements warning motorists to pull over if they felt faint after pumping MTBE, and Alaska even defied the EPA and banned MTBE in the state.

But the EPA continued to endorse the chemical and in 1995 mandated the sale of year-round reformulated gas in about a dozen metro areas, including New York and Long Island. Again, most refiners chose to use MTBE and began selling a 12-month gasoline blend that contained 11 percent MTBE, instead of the 15 percent in the winter fuel.

The incident that transformed MTBE into a national issue came in 1996, when city officials in Santa Monica, Calif., discovered that leaks from gas stations and pipelines had contaminated most of the water supply for the glitzy beachfront community of 86,000 people. Other California cities began looking for MTBE in their water and quickly found it.

Researchers discovered that through evaporation, MTBE was even ending up in snow and rainfall. Goaded by talk-radio hosts and by Oxy-Busters, which circulated petitions that so far have attracted more than 120,000 signatures, many California politicians started pushing for a ban in the state Legislature and even in Congress.

Today, most California gasoline still contains MTBE, and talk of a ban is on hold while the state mounts a full-scale health and environmental study of the chemical. But officials from the MTBE industry, which has spent about $ 7 billion in the 1990s to retool gasoline refineries to produce the chemical, acknowledge their investment is in danger as reports of water contamination spread around the country.

"People are certainly attempting to raise a lot of questions, and we're trying to answer them," said John Kneiss, director of health sciences and product stewardship for the Oxygenated Fuels Association, the Virginia-based trade group for MTBE manufacturers.

Fueling the attacks on MTBE are studies suggesting the chemical, once touted for its ability to reduce carbon monoxide pollution from cars and trucks, is less of a pollution-fighter than the EPA had hoped. A study last year by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy found that using MTBE gas during the winter months, when carbon monoxide tends to be at its worst, reduces emissions of that pollutant by only zero percent to 10 percent, not the 25 percent to 30 percent the EPA had touted.

Since then, the EPA has switched gears and started to emphasize that MTBE gas cuts total releases of toxic chemicals from car tailpipes by 22 percent, although the agency acknowledges that emissions of one particularly hazardous gas - formaldehyde - increase with the use of MTBE gasoline.

"Yes, the models we used did seem to overpredict the carbon monoxide benefit. But we still believe the benefits of the reformulated gas program outweigh any of the risks we've seen to date, considering all the uncertainties that still exist about health effects," said Lori Stewart, an EPA staffer who focuses on MTBE. "Gasoline has just been considered an essential commodity in this country, and there's an awful lot of health testing that's still needed."

Despite MTBE's status as one of the most widely used toxic chemicals in America, there has been very little progress toward resolving major uncertainties about its health risks and corroborating the tests on rats and mice that suggest it causes cancer.

More than 20 years after it was first added to gasoline, and a decade after it began turning up in water supplies, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency hasn't even completed a "research strategy" to map out a comprehensive testing plan, the first step toward establishing a safety standard for MTBE in air and water.

Right now, the EPA's only standard for MTBE is a nonbinding "taste and odor" advisory that sets a limit of 20 to 40 parts per billion in drinking water. California, which is developing its own health standard, is considering limits as low as three parts per billion. But in New York, the state has no plans to change its MTBE standard of 50 parts per billion, a limit that the state uses for any volatile organic chemical for which an individual limit hasn't been set.

"Ten years ago these studies should have been done," said Jim Landmeyer, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey and an expert on MTBE contamination of groundwater. "Right now everybody's running around saying the sky's falling, yet the health toxicity work is still not done."

Laboratory studies have found that MTBE can cause lymphoma, leukemia, testicular tumors, thyroid tumors and kidney tumors in rodents. Two of MTBE's metabolites, compounds that are formed when the long-lived chemical finally does break down in water, also cause tumors in lab animals. And studies suggest MTBE may cause other long-term problems, too, including nerve damage, but the evidence is sketchy because there has been virtually no health testing of MTBE for anything but cancer and effects such as headaches.

With so much uncertainty about MTBE's health effects, its critics and advocates look at the same studies and draw opposite conclusions. Industry officials argue that the cancerous tumors that have appeared in laboratory rats and mice exposed to MTBE are irrelevant to humans because rodents don't metabolize the chemical as humans do, and because the relative doses the animals inhaled or drank were much higher than what a person would experience while pumping gas or from drinking mildly contaminated water.

"If I felt it was a real true-world risk, then I wouldn't pump gas with my son in the car. At the exposure levels you or I would get, I don't think the risk is there," said Kneiss, the industry scientist.

But the special task force convened by the White House to study the MTBE issue found that the rodent tests were indeed relevant. The 1997 report, which summarized research into MTBE's benefits and risks, concluded that MTBE "is carcinogenic in rats and mice at multiple organ sites . . . There is sufficient evidence to indicate that MTBE is an animal carcinogen and to regard MTBE as having a human hazard potential." The same report declared that the headaches and nausea that many drivers blame on MTBE fumes "cannot yet be explained or dismissed."

The key point, MTBE's critics say, is that the chemical shouldn't have been introduced into society before its risks were better understood. "The studies are supposed to be conducted before a product is put into commerce, not afterward when the experiments are conducted on human beings," said one of the most prominent anti-MTBE crusaders, Myron Mehlman, an adjunct professor of toxicology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan and a former director of biochemical toxicology for the federal Food and Drug Administration.

Actually, it's no revelation that gasoline can cause cancer. One of its principal ingredients, benzene, has for years been classified by the EPA as a known human carcinogen. Another ingredient, toluene, is considered a probable carcinogen. And as MTBE advocates and EPA officials point out, alternative gasoline oxygenators, including ethanol and methanol, have been tested even less than MTBE. "We really have more data on MTBE than on most of the other fuel additives that are out there," said the EPA's Stewart.

What's different about gas that contains MTBE, experts say, is that it's more likely to trigger headaches and other effects because it is so strong-smelling, and is much more likely to contaminate water supplies. "It doesn't really biodegrade and it doesn't absorb to the soil, so it gets into groundwater and moves fast," said environmental engineer Don Darmer, the state conservation department's chief MTBE expert.

Public officials and private contractors say MTBE spills are exceedingly difficult to clean up because the chemical doesn't stick to soil, can remain in groundwater for years without breaking down into harmless components, breaks through well filters, and - most importantly - readily mixes with water. That means underground plumes of MTBE, unlike heating oil or conventional gasoline, spread quickly and can stretch for thousands of feet in whichever direction groundwater flows.

Some experts now warn that unless MTBE plumes are caught fast and cleaned up quickly, many may be impossible to eliminate. Already, the discovery of more and more MTBE plumes is putting new pressure on the state's spill fund, which pays for cleanups when tank owners can't be found or won't cooperate. MTBE is consuming 30 percent of the spill fund on Long Island, and the percentage is rising every year, state officials say.

"Petroleum does degrade, and at some point natural processes take over - except with MTBE," said Karen Gomez, the chief spill engineer in the Long Island office of the state Department of Environmental Conservation. "It has definitely made our job a lot more difficult."

Of all the different types of communities where MTBE is now being used, the places where the chemical is likely to cause the most trouble in drinking-water supplies are densely populated areas that rely on underground aquifers for drinking water, said John Zogorski, a hydrologist at the geological survey.

In other words, places like Long Island.

No one is sure exactly how widespread MTBE contamination is in Long Island and Queens. Some water districts, mostly in Nassau County, have been testing for it for only a few months.

The U.S. Geological Survey finds it in about 10 percent of the groundwater samples it collects on Long Island, almost always at low levels, and the chemical's prevalence in drinking water wells is about the same. In Suffolk, for example, MTBE was found in 125 of the 1,100 private water wells tested for the chemical last year, including three that were over New York's limit of 50 parts per billion. It was also found in about 50 of more than 500 public wells operated by water companies, including one well in Montauk that was over the state limit and was consequently shut down. And in Queens, a water well in Cambria Heights had to be closed earlier this year after it was tested at 300 parts per billion of MTBE.

"It's a concern because it is showing up in some of our samples," said Don Speiss, director of water supply protection for the Nassau County Health Department, which reports that MTBE has been found in the wells of 11 water districts so far, at levels from 0.8 to 15 parts per billion.

Water officials say the public is being adequately protected because wells are either closed or filtered if MTBE is consistently found in them at levels above four or five parts per billion. "On balance, the testing program has been effective, because the overwhelming majority of detections are below 10 parts per billion," said Paul Ponturo, a drinking water supervisor at the Suffolk County Department of Health Services.

But local water officials acknowledge that many private wells, most of which are in eastern Suffolk, still aren't regularly tested for MTBE or any other contaminant. And they're concerned that MTBE has become so common so quickly in groundwater.

"We have some real concerns that we're going to see a lot more MTBE" in water wells, said Joseph Haas, an engineering geologist at the state Department of Environmental Conservation's Long Island office.

Their biggest fear is that MTBE, like the dry-cleaning compound perchloroethylene and a few other industrial solvents, will prove to be so long-lasting in groundwater that dozens or even hundreds of MTBE plumes will penetrate into the deepest aquifers that are the Long Island region's dominant source of drinking water. Testing and filters aren't foolproof, and water rates can soar if tainted wells have to be abandoned or deepened to reach cleaner parts of the aquifer.

It may be years, critics warn, before anyone knows whether their fears will be realized. In Glennville, Calif., they already know.

All of MTBE's unique problems and controversies converge in Glennville, where 131 people live in modest ranch houses and trailers scattered along a half-dozen picturesque Sierra hillsides, about 30 miles north of Bakersfield.

The trouble began in 1985, when a leak was discovered at what was then the town's only gas station, about 150 feet from the front door of Grizzly's Cafe. The station's then-owners hired a contractor to dig up the decayed tank, and paid for the installation of a pumping system that was supposed to remove the underground plume.

At first, Kern County health officials tested the surrounding groundwater for benzene and other components of traditional gasoline. Then they stopped testing at all.

Finally, in July, 1997, the California Regional Water Quality Control Board moved ahead with a long-planned follow-up study. It found MTBE at levels above 500 parts per billion in more than a dozen wells serving three homes, four businesses and three livestock pens. In Angel Creek, several thousand feet away, the reading was 120 parts per billion.

"We moved up here to get away from the pollution and the smog, and look what we got in return," said Freda Kubas.

She wonders whether the high levels of MTBE in her drinking water caused her migraines, seizures and stomach problems, as well as her husband Jim's emphysema and the rashes that three of her granddaughters would get when they visited. Betty Honor, who worked at the cafe, wonders what caused the bladder cancer she has been battling through repeated surgeries.

By October, after the test results were reconfirmed, the state was supplying Glennville with truckloads of bottled water, and the residents were hiring a lawyer. In April, they filed suit against eight major MTBE producers. "We feel they put a dangerous chemical into commerce without proper warning," explained the lawyer, Edward L. Masry, who is representing 72 Glennville residents.

However, water officials, while acknowledging they were slow to monitor the old gas leak, say the MTBE contamination they found last year may have come from a more recent leak. Claims that Glennville residents have been drinking MTBE-laced water for a decade or more "are coming from people who are looking to enhance their lawsuit," said Jeff Whitaker of the state water board, the agency responsible for monitoring the spills.

That charge enrages Kubas and other Glennville residents, who say they've suffered emotionally, physically and even financially because of the spill. Kubas recently had her house reassessed, and was told it was worth $ 28,000, not the $ 81,000 it was worth two years ago because of the contamination.

More than anything else, residents worry about the kids from the elementary school who drank tainted water at Grizzly's, and in some cases in their homes, too.

"People are scared," said Honor, who gave many of those kids their sodas when she worked at the cafe. "It's hard to believe this really happened to us."

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