Gov’t still undecided on PCB lawsuit

Gov. Pedro P. Tenorio yesterday said the CNMI government has yet to decide whether to seek legal action following disclosure that some residents of Tanapag have high levels of polychlorinated biphenyl contamination in their body.

He said he is more concerned over the safety and health of the people, which both local and federal agencies must address to ensure that the villagers are protected from harmful effects of the contamination.

“I don’t know whether [legal action] will come later, but what we are concerned of is the health of our people,” Mr. Tenorio told reporters in an interview. “That is most important.”

Some CNMI lawmakers and island leaders have been urging the Tenorio administration to file lawsuit against those responsible for the contamination in an effort to seek compensation for affected residents and facilitate cleanup of the area.

The Attorney General’s Office has hired legal and environmental consultants to advise officials on issues concerning PCB contamination. AGO has yet to come up with its study.

Mr. Tenorio welcomed efforts by federal and local officials in reaching out to Tanapag residents to personally inform them of the results of the blood tests and overall health evaluation conducted a few months ago.

A team of medical doctors from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry began yesterday a series of meetings with the villagers, including 17 people who were found to have high levels of PCB contamination in their body.

This is the first time officials have divulged their findings as the Tanapag Action Group, an organized community group on the PCB problem, has stepped up pressure on the government to tell them the results.

While the U.S. standard considers 200 to 300 parts per billion level of PCB contamination in the body as dangerously high, the results of the medical evaluation among them revealed that their exposure to the toxic chemicals is still far lower than that.

Some 1,000 residents from the northern Saipan village who had undergone medical evaluation have been informed of their schedule to meet with Dr. Farhana Habib and Dr. Brostrom.

“The federal agencies and our [Commonwealth Health Center] are working together to indemnify the level of PCB contamination,” said the governor.

“We are trying our best to [ensure that the residents are] being treated and we would like to see that the community is fully informed of what is going on and what CHC [and] federal agencies are doing in order for their livelihood to be protected,” he added.

PCB contamination in the village began when an unknown quantity of capacitors containing the highly toxic chemical were shipped to Saipan in the 1960s. The Division of Environmental Quality was only notified about their presence in Tanapag in 1988.

In recent months, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have cleaned up Cemetery 2 which was found to have the highest concentration of PCB in soil. At least 18 more sites in Tanapag are expected to undergo cleanup in the next few weeks, but the treatment of the soil will only begin early next year.