A House committee is demanding to know why federal regulators failed to assess potential public health damage from extremely high levels of a toxic industrial solvent found in Southern California drinking water before the mid-1980s.

Trichloroethylene, widely used in the defense industry, was discovered in aquifers under the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys, which supplied drinking water to nearly 2 million residents. Across the nation, the chemical is one of the most widespread water contaminants.

A letter sent today to the chief of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry by the House Energy and Commerce Committee said the agency failed to conduct the recommended health evaluations in communities across the nation, an apparent lapse that went unnoticed for more than a decade.

“We are concerned that the agency has failed to complete or act on health recommendations and studies,” Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), ranking member of the committee, wrote to Julie Louise Gerberding, administrator for the agency.

Trichloroethylene, or TCE, is classified as a carcinogen by California’s Environmental Protection Agency and some international agencies. It is suspected that residents of dozens of Southern California communities from Burbank to West Covina were exposed for an unknown number of years to levels of TCE hundreds or even thousands of times above the current federal drinking-water standard of 5 parts per billion.

By the early 1990s, the California Department of Health, working jointly with federal authorities, recommended that a health assessment be conducted to measure whether past contamination had significantly affected the health of residents, according to a series of documents unearthed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Barton’s staff believes that an exhaustive health review could alert residents who might have been contaminated to get annual health screening and that early medical intervention could save significant numbers of lives.

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta — the main federal agency for epidemiological studies of diseases in the general public.

“The most important recommendation was to minimize exposure, to make sure people had safe water,” said agency spokeswoman Dagny Olivares. “Because exposures were reduced or eliminated as the contamination was found, [the agency] felt that public health was being protected.”

Any retrospective examination of health damage would be difficult, she said. Barton’s office, however, said the toxic-substances agency is conducting a multiyear program to assess the health of veterans who served at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, where tens of thousands of Marines were exposed to TCE. It has found evidence of elevated instances of leukemia.

If the agency can do that for the Marines and their families in North Carolina, Barton’s staff believes that it should also be conducting such assessments for other military bases and civilian populations.

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