ENVIRON to begin full-scale tests

All eyes will be on ENVIRON at Monday’s City Council meeting as the firm presents a rundown of the work they will conduct on Marco in the coming weeks.

While the three scientists will not be able to present any data on their findings so far, they will be explaining the work they anticipate doing.

“They won’t give any data until they could sit in a courtroom and give the data without a reasonable doubt,” said city Public Information Coordinator Lisa Douglass.

The specialists have been on the island sampling ambient air for the presence of hydrogen sulfide, which is released from ground water pumped above the surface during construction.

Public health scientist Tim Varney, one of the experts contracted through ENVIRON, declined to comment through Douglass, citing a desire to provide Monday’s presentation publicly first.

However, Douglass noted, “if they saw numbers that were a risk, they would advise us to immediately shut down.”

But the city’s efforts at caution — meetings with health and environmental officials, changes in the dewatering process and the hiring of ENVIRON — have done little to tamp down the outrage of citizens who have been crying foul on the dewatering for nearly two months.

Residents have come forward at previous City Council meetings to plead with the councilors to stop dewatering until testing is concluded.

“But if you stop, you don’t have any way to resolve all of the questions that are being raised around this,” Douglass said. “We’ve got to ask, how can we do what we’re trying to accomplish at the lowest risk to every aspect of our environment?”

Some residents have gone so far as to purchase their own instruments to measure for hydrogen sulfide.

Godfrey Davies, an opponent of the city’s Septic Tank Replacement Program who has been keeping a close eye on the dewatering program since concerns started to arise, conducted his own tests during a four-day period last week.

He said his readings taken near dewatering sites were off the charts, around 150 parts per million, and that they went down as he moved away from discharge points. But even then, he said, the readings were still in the 40 to 60 ppm range.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration sets its limit at 20 parts of hydrogen sulfide per million parts of air, while the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health suggests limiting exposure to 10 ppm for no more than 10 minutes in a workplace.

Long-term exposure is generally held to a lower threshold, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states that “typical environmental concentrations” are .00011 to .00033 ppm.

However, Public Works Director Rony Joel called into question the accuracy of resident-gathered measurements, stating that the instruments used by residents are often bought online, and not from the manufacturer. He said those devices are usually not as sensitive or as finely calibrated as those obtained straight from a manufacturer, like those used by specialists from ENVIRON.

But Davies insists that the device he used, bought from a Massachusetts-based company named PID Analyzers, has the ability to run its own diagnostics and was calibrated by the manufacturer.

Davies has since stopped his monitoring, deterred by what he says is a decline in health precipitated by his exposure to the gasses.

But city officials say that beyond the hiring of ENVIRON, there are numerous other checks in place to keep hydrogen sulfide levels under observation.

“If it was 10 ppm every day and a worker was experiencing that every day, I’m sure OSHA would shut it down,” Douglass said of the regulations governing workplace safety.

While ENVIRON gears up for long-term testing on the island, Joel and his department have been seeking new ways to cut back on the gasses released into the air at residents’ doorsteps. He maintains that the gas is not a danger to residents, but concedes that it is a nuisance.

The latest approach is the use of an “air stripper,” a large wooden contraption resembling a chimney, which Joel designed and city workers built.

Water from dewatering sites is pumped into the stripper, sent down a ramp where the water is bounced around to aerate it, and if it works as intended, release the gasses residents blame for causing health problems on the island.

It’s a change from the original method of pumping into the city’s swales, which allowed the water to sit and gave the gasses plenty of opportunity to escape into the air.

In theory, with gasses released from the water as it goes through the air stripper, they are sucked out of the machine’s chimney and released at a higher elevation.

“We’re trying to remove more gas, dilute it, and get it away from the breathing zone where it would potentially become a nuisance to a person,” Joel said.