Good morning and welcome to DKos Adheville. This is the weekly DKos Asheville open thread where we try to get together every Saturday, and then drift in and out throughout the day. Sorry we missed you last week. We hope this group serves to reinvigorate us locally and regionally here on Daily Kos, building on the sense of community that's grown through our online engagement. DKos Asheville can give us all a better sense of connection, a better understanding of who these people are that we stand with, work with, and share with in the political process. We hope, through this community, that we can do a better job of leveraging our orange passion for progressive politics to help elect more and better Democrats.
Jump below the fold for recent TOXIC news.
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Asheville has been struggling to find a solution to a terrible toxic Superfunded site that has been plaguing us for decades. In spite of a strong and continuing effort to address the issue, Asheville and the Mills Gap neighborhood it impacts, still face a long battle to get anything done.
Asheville Supreme Court News
WASHINGTON – U.S. Supreme Court arguments about CTS Corp.'s liability for contamination at its old Asheville-area plant quickly centered Wednesday on Congress' purpose behind amendments to a landmark environmental law.
The justices heard oral arguments in the case of CTS Corp. vs Waldburger, named after Peter Waldburger, one of the 25 residential landowners whose property is on the 53.5 acres where CTS manufactured electronics and electronic components from 1959 to 1985. CTS sold the land in 1987 to Mills Gap Road Associates.
At issue is whether 1986 amendments to the federal Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act override North Carolina's "law of repose," which limits liability for environmental contamination to 10 years after a property leaves a company's control.
Asheville's Toxic Plume better defined this week.
ASHEVILLE – The first phase of testing performed in preparation for a Superfund cleanup revealed a plume of the toxic industrial solvent trichloroethylene mixed with petroleum floating on groundwater under the former CTS plant site.
The new information will be useful as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency determines the best methods to remove the contamination, said Samantha Urquhart-Foster, remedial project manager with the agency.
It was already known that there is massive groundwater contamination from trichloroethylene, or TCE, a chemical used by CTS for nearly three decades in the manufacturing process before the plant shut down in 1986.
"The sampling we did shows us how deep and wide the most concentrated contamination is so that we can develop a cleanup plan for it," Urquhart-Foster said. "We expected to see the plume there. We didn't expect to see the TCE and the petroleum