A public meeting about manganese in the air in the mid-Ohio Valley was tentatively set for March 24 in Marietta, Ohio, but organizers soon will settle on a date. That date will not be March 24.
The air in Wood County, W.Va., and in Washington County, Ohio, carries high levels of manganese, according to monitoring conducted from April 2007 to March 2008 by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.
Manganese has been identified as a neurotoxin when inhaled.
The monitoring was conducted to help federal agencies determine whether a community-wide health study on inhalation exposure to manganese is warranted.
That decision is up to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Although the decision was expected in June 2008 and again in January this year, the decision may not be made for many months yet, according to Stephanie Davis, an epidemiologist in the ATSDR’s Division of Health Studies.
“We have not gotten the official go-ahead,” Davis said.
“It’s always a matter of the final budget,” she continued. “We anticipate in the next year or so we would probably have a better idea whether that would go forward or not.”
Monitoring was conducted at Boaz and Vienna, W.Va., and at Harmar and Warren, Ohio. It found levels consistently several times higher than the 0.05 micrograms per cubic meter of air guideline set by the EPA for chronic inhalation exposure.
The manganese comes from Eramet Marietta, a France-based metals company that uses manganese to produce metal alloys in Marietta, according to the ATSDR.
There currently is no ambient air quality standard for manganese that would support enforcement actions.
However, a community-wide health study like the one under consideration for the Marietta region would provide the sort of data the EPA would consider in setting an ambient air quality standard, according to DEP Air Toxics Coordinator Renu Chakrabarty.
The March 24 public meeting will present the monitoring results to the public and talk about next steps, Chakrabarty said.
Davis expects ATSDR to release more information about the meeting’s time and location soon.
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