Using a GEANT macro provided by Jan, I looked to see how many radiation of lengths of material there are in front of the BEMC. In the below plot, the red (black) line represents the amount of material between the vertex z=0 and the radius of 200 (220) cm as a function of eta from -1.1 to 1.1 in the y2006 geometry.

The next plot has the geant model of the y2006 geometry with lines at eta = 0.9, 0.95 and 1.0. It looks like the TPC readout contributes a lot of material toward the outermost eta bins.