Residents and environmental activists in a West Virginia community believe a tank used to store industrial waste is buried beneath contaminated soil in their town, but a spokesman for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says the EPA never approved the area as a chemical disposal site.

The land — a residential neighborhood near a whitewater rafting company —sits in Fayetteville, a south central West Virginia town of fewer than 3,000 that is a destination for rafting and outdoor recreation.

EPA agents took samples of soil and groundwater from the Fayetteville site on June 6, 2017, in connection with testing being done about eight miles south in the town of Minden, West Virginia, where a mining company — the Shaffer Equipment Co. — left sites contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyl, or PCBs.

All major national and international health agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, list PCBs as a “probable” human carcinogen, meaning there is limited, but not conclusive, evidence that it can cause cancer in humans. PCBs were produced by Monsanto in the United States until 1979, when federal law banned their production.

In a July 25 EPA report on the testing in Minden, published lab results of samples taken at the Fayetteville site showed levels of PCB contamination below the measurement that requires EPA action.

While the EPA had not officially validated the report as of Sept. 14, the Beckley, West Virginia, Register-Herald obtained a copy from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection under the Freedom of Information Act.

“PCBs were detected at low levels in some of the soil samples,” EPA Region 3 Press Officer Roy Seneca said via email. “The levels of PCB detected in these samples were below levels that would trigger EPA taking action.”

Brandon Richardson and Susie Jenkins, members of the local environmental rights group Headwaters Defense, had escorted EPA agents to the Fayetteville site in June after hearing citizens’ reports that a “tanker” containing PCBs had been moved there during a previous EPA cleanup effort of PCBs at nearby Minden.

Seneca said the EPA has never approved the burial of an underground storage tank — or UST — in Fayetteville and has no records of one being stored at the site but said the underground object detected by EPA crews in Fayetteville in June is a “suspected UST” at this time.

While federal regulations are in place to prevent these tanks from leaking, it is unclear if a leaking UST would be the cause of PCB contamination at the Fayetteville site.

Fayette Commission President Matt Wender said Friday that the EPA has not yet notified county officials of the suspected UST or the PCB contamination levels near the Fayetteville site.

Wender declined to speculate on whether PCB contamination had migrated to additional sites in Fayette County.

“I would’ve told you a week ago that I don’t think there was any possibility that they could be in Fayetteville,” he said. “I think it is rather bizarre that they have turned up in Fayetteville, especially when nobody knows how they have gotten here.”

“I think we can be relatively certain that the origin of these PCBs is Minden, at the Shaffer plant,” he added. “It’s hard to believe somebody would just dump these things somewhere on the side of the road. How some rogue operator may have decided to dump some of this cleanup material is very troubling.”

In 1989, environmental activist group Greenpeace identified Minden as one of the most contaminated towns in America, following the discovery of PCBs at the Shaffer site in 1984.

WVDEP officials are researching state records to determine whether the state had ever approved the location in Fayetteville as a PCB disposal site, a WVDEP spokesman said.

Details for this story were provided by the Beckley, West Virginia, Register-Herald.