Besides the general weakness of the market, maybe this piece of news has something to do with it. But I won't be too worried about it as VTI tends to perform based on news which is why I always believe it is still highly speculative. Meanwhile, nothing has changed really as the test is progressing well other than the slight delay.
Eight weeks after the start of a $1 million test of an acid-rock drainage cleanup product at an Interstate 99 construction site, state officials said Thursday that a potentially toxic compound has been found leaching out of the test area into a treatment pond.
The head of U.S. operations of the product's manufacturer said later Thursday that the concentrations of the compound are so small that it is not an issue -- "a tempest in a teapot."
The discovery of hexavalent chromium in leachate from the cleanup product Bauxsol prompted the state Department of Transportation to halt the Bauxsol application for three workdays last month to test samples and to check groundwater monitoring wells.
No traces of hexavalent chromium were detected in the wells, Gary Byron, assistant director of the state Department of Environmental Protection's 14-county northcentral region, told other state officials Thursday.
The leachate samples tested by PennDOT environmental consultant Skelly & Loy found 50 parts per billion of hexavalent chromium, less than the DEP's maximum contaminant level for drinking water of 100 parts per billion, said Randy Farmerie, DEP hydrogeologist.
The DEP and federal Environmental Protection Agency's maximum contaminant level is the maximum permissible level of a contaminant in water that is provided to a user of a public water system.
Hexavalent chromium is a naturally occurring metal that the DEP lists as a primary contaminant, meaning that it can impair human health in concentrations above the maximum contamination level.
The EPA says that chromium in drinking water can cause skin irritation or ulceration when people are exposed to it at levels above the maximum contaminant level for relatively short periods of time.
The Bauxsol application was permitted to resume in part because the test area is on the Bald Eagle Creek side of Skytop, where the pollutant limits in the runoff are not so restrictive as on the Buffalo Run side. The DEP considers Buffalo Run a higher quality stream than Bald Eagle Creek and requires more restrictive standards of protection from contaminants for it.
Before the Bauxsol testing moves to the Buffalo Run side of Skytop, Byron said, PennDOT will have to modify its permit through the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System to set forth discharge limits for hexavalent chromium.
"The reason it's an issue is that it's a constituent of Bauxsol that we didn't know was there," Byron said.
Neil Bardach, North American director for Bauxsol's Australian manufacturer, Virotec, said the amount of hexavalent chromium in Bauxsol is four one-thousandths of 1 percent, less concentration than is present in everyday concrete.
"It's a lot more dangerous to be around concrete than to be around Bauxsol," he said.
Bardach said about 300 tons of Bauxsol has been applied so far to the first test site, an area of the I-99 construction site where huge quantities of pyrite-laced rocks were used to shore up the mountainside and separate the north- and southbound lanes of the interstate. He said the use of several hundred more tons is anticipated.
Bardach dismissed the significance of the work stoppage, from Thursday, Sept. 22, to Tuesday, Sept. 27.
"It must not be an issue at all because PennDOT told us to go ahead and get back to work," Bardach said. "They asked us to go forward on precisely the same basis that we were before."
Farmerie said the treatment pond that contains the leachate at the I-99 construction site has not yet filled up, and therefore, nothing has discharged out of it yet.
He said a limit of 180 parts per billion -- less restrictive than the drinking water standard and "well above what we are seeing" in the hexavalent chromium samples -- has been suggested for the discharge when it does occur.
It is less restrictive than the drinking water standard, he said, because no one will be drinking the water that runs out of the treatment pond.
Chromium, which is used to make stainless steel and other products, has two forms, trivalent and hexavalent, referring to the three-unit or six-unit capacity of an element to combine with another. The hexavalent version has the greater potential to be toxic.
VTI Price at posting:
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