Health Risks of PCB Spills from Electrical Equipment

Alan Q. Eschenroeder, Colleen P. Doyle and Edward J. Faeder

Risk Analysis, 1986, vol. 6, issue 2, 213-221

Abstract: The Southern California Edison Company (SCE) has instituted a series of control strategies designed to minimize human exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in electrical equipment used on its system. This paper describes a method of analyzing PCB risks using conservative estimates of human intake of PCBs originating from accidental spills from electrical equipment. The PCB releases from the Edison system were determined. The fate of these releases in soil, air, and water was analyzed to determine how much material reaches human receptors. The air and water pathways were determined to be the most likely candidates for the exposure and risk considerations. PCB intake via ingestion of soil at the spill site was neglected as an exposure pathway. Equipment spills without controls resulted in at the most 2 ng/day human intake of PCBs via the water exposure pathway. This was determined to be negligible in comparison with intake rates used in conjunction with the setting of food tolerance levels based on fish being the main dietary pathway of human exposure. The inhalation exposure of the hundred or so persons in the immediate vicinity of a spill was determined to equal the PCB intakes of the fish‐eating subpopulation analyzed by the Food and Drug Administration for 2 ppm tolerance standard in the case of no controls or cleanup. Current cleanup procedures assure that even the persons in the immediate area are well below the intake of the subjects in the fish contamination analysis. All exposures were well below a “virtual safe dose” level estimated in the fish tolerance study.

Date: 1986
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6924.1986.tb00209.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:riskan:v:6:y:1986:i:2:p:213-221

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Risk Analysis from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().