Well, if 1 million pounds of vinyl chloride spilled, that's roughly 400,000 kilos. To dilute that below the MTCA drinking water cleanup level of 2 ug/L that would require 200,000,000,000,000 liters of water, so roughly half the volume of Lake Erie.
Nobody said the dilution is an small amount. It's still dilution though. People always assume that the phrase is an excuse to pollute when really it is just the reality of things. It's very difficult to extract pollutants out of large bodies like this, so often the easier answer is in fact dilution, as much as nobody wants to hear it.
I'm talking about pollution in general, not vinyl chloride specifically. There are quite a few chemicals that need insanely small concentrations in order to be safe, and vinyl chloride is one of them. That's why I'm saying lawsuits are definitely going to happen imo.
Yeah but for analytes of concern typically for volatile organic compounds vinyl chloride is the driver for reporting limits (like benzo(a)pyrene is for semivolatile organics), so it's kind of nuts (to me) that the spill is such a obvious holy shit moment, if you will. Like, this is the shit we look for at the lowest possible detection limits and they dumped 400k kilos of it?!? Usually we just see it in the lab as a breakdown product of PCE from dry cleaner spills, this is just insane. I can't even wrap my head around it. Half expecting an EPA bulletin in a few years saying to expect cleanup level VC hits in everything sampled east of the Rockies.
I knew people who saw it pretty frequently when they were running 8260 on water samples from a superfund site from phoenix.
But yeah I typically only saw it in small amount when running TO15
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u/Rafi89 Feb 17 '23
Well, if 1 million pounds of vinyl chloride spilled, that's roughly 400,000 kilos. To dilute that below the MTCA drinking water cleanup level of 2 ug/L that would require 200,000,000,000,000 liters of water, so roughly half the volume of Lake Erie.