After more than a month of surprising revelations about heavy metal emissions at Portland art glass factories, state officials offered some very unsurprising findings today: Once factories ceased burning cadmium, arsenic, and chromium, the carcinogens ceased to register at eye-popping levels.
For the second week in a row, officials at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and the Oregon Health Authority sat down with reporters this morning to share what they say is heartening news. Last week, they reported soil near Southeast Portland’s Bullseye Glass presents few health concerns. Now, the agencies say additional monitoring shows air near Bullseye and another art-glass factory, North Portland’s Uroboros Glass, is safe, and that what little soil there is in Uroboros’ industrial neighborhood is not, on average, contaminated.
“It’s another important step in understanding the impact heavy metals released by glass companies have in neighborhoods,” said Lynne Saxton, director of the OHA.
The air monitoring data shared this morning isn’t without caveats. Many of the samples officials reported showed levels that are still higher than the state’s ambient benchmark concentrations for cadmium and arsenic. But most were far closer to those standards—which officials have repeatedly painted as very conservative, aimed more at spurring further research than denoting a problem—than earlier readings.
October 2015 monitoring found air around Bullseye had cadmium levels that were 49 time the state benchmark of 0.6 nanograms/cubic meter, and levels of arsenic that were 159 times the benchmark of 0.2 nanograms per cubic meter. None of the findings presented today—taken during the second half of February, when neither Bullseye nor Uroboros was burning cadmium or arsenic—approached anything near those levels. And they were well under a new “Oregon 24-hour screening level” officials unveiled recently. Here are two graphs shared this morning:
The cheery soil news the state presented today also didn’t come without questions. The DEQ took soil samples from three areas near Uroboros Glass, and concluded that “ongoing emissions from the Uroboros facility are not resulting in harmful impacts to the soil,” according to DEQ manager Keith Johnson. But the graphs presented today showed samples from all three sites exceeded Oregon guidelines for chromium 6 in the soil, and three of those samples were above what Johnson terms “DEQ screening levels” (the distinction between those two yardsticks wasn’t made clear). None approached CDC guidelines for chromium 6 in soil. Here’s the graph (all the graphs are available here):
The news comes as the DEQ’s wrestling with one of the glass factories over its emissions. While Uroboros has agreed to filter its smokestacks, Bullseye is putting up more of a fight. The company says there’s no proof that safe chromium 3 can become highly hazardous chromium 6 during the heating process, something DEQ is worried over.
DEQ Interim Director Joni Hammond said this morning that she expects Bullseye to continue its moratorium on chromium, arsenic, and cadmium, though she acknowledged there’s nothing legally stopping the company from using the metals. The DEQ has proposed rules that could place requirements on the use of those metals, but they were delayed earlier this week, amid concerns that the public hadn’t had adequate input.
“Our expectation is they’ll install pollution [control] equipment prior to using those metal,” Hammond said of Bullseye this morning.
Now satisfied that the public’s not in “urgent or immediate” danger from soil and air contamination, DEQ says it’s shifting its focus to figuring out if there are long-term exposure risks near the glass factories. That means monitoring air around them for 24 hours at a time, rather than 12. The state plans to post that air monitoring data on its website every week, according to OHA Toxicologist David Farrer.
Agencies will also complete two public health assessments about risks near the factories, which should be available by the fall, Farrer said.