Only two people attended Monday evening’s public meeting with officials from the Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry. Agency officials didn’t notify the local press of the event, but sent email invitations to about three dozen community members.

 

In an email distributed to those same 36 people on Tuesday, epidemiologist Stephanie Davis apologized for not getting the message out.

 

Contrary to the agency’s statement on Friday that officials were only soliciting questions from the public, in her email Davis said they wanted to update the community on their progress with an expanded air monitoring program.

 

More than three months of data have been collected, and ATSDR is working to ensure that it’s quality data and representative of real emissions, Davis said. She explained that a full year of data would be needed to draw any conclusions. But, so far, unexpectedly higher levels of manganese have been found in the air in Vienna and Boaz. Those results have the ATSDR looking for a secondary source of manganese or fluctuations in wind direction to account for the elevations.