Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO), March 27, 2015
Posted on: http://envfpn.advisen.com
Ameren Missouri has joined a group of companies that are keeping chemicals from polluting St. Charles’ drinking water wells.
The utility settled a lawsuit last month with several companies in charge of cleaning up contamination at the nearby Hayford Bridge Road Superfund site. Those companies — Pfizer Inc., Mallinckrodt LLC, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. and Findett Real Estate Corp — sued Ameren in late 2012, accusing it of not paying its fair share for a cleanup in the area.
Findett Corp. ran a chemical manufacturing site at Elm Point Road and Governor Drive, and it started working with the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up volatile organic chemicals and polychlorinated biphenyls in 1990. In 2007, the other companies joined in the cleanup effort because of chemicals they sent for disposal or treatment at the Findett site.
Their lawsuit accused Ameren’s Huster Road substation of causing a separate plume of groundwater contamination a half-mile to the northeast and that they had paid to clean up Ameren’s contamination.
Terms of the settlement were not disclosed. Representatives for the plaintiffs did not respond to inquiries by deadline.
In an emailed statement, Ameren said the settlement allows it to focus on cleanup. It had reached a separate cleanup agreement with EPA shortly after the other companies sued it.
“A groundwater containment system has been installed at our Huster Substation in St. Charles, Mo., and we are implementing a variety of treatment technologies that are successfully accelerating the degradation of the solvents, which were discontinued more than 20 years ago,” the utility said. “We are pleased with the results and anticipate that the majority of cleanup activities will be completed this summer.”
According to court filings, Ameren’s containment system was installed a year ago. Monitoring had identified chemicals such as 1,2-dichloroethene and trichloroethylene in the groundwater near Ameren’s substation, EPA says.
St. Charles was forced to shut down one drinking water well years ago because of contamination, and it stopped using another because of mechanical issues.
No chemicals have been found in the city’s functioning four wells, St. Charles Public Works Director Jerry Hurlbert said.
“We continue to monitor and we don’t see any problems coming from the Hayford site,” he said.
As recently as May 2014, the EPA had warned the contamination from the Ameren site was moving toward city wells in the Elm Point Wellfield, which provide roughly 40 percent of St. Charles’ drinking water. It gets the other 60 percent from St. Louis.
Originally, the companies planned to build new wells for St. Charles. Those have been put on hold in recent months. Ameren’s involvement appears to be helping contain and remove the contamination to the northeast of the Hayford site, Hurlbert said.
“As long as the monitoring shows there’s no contaminants coming in, then there’s no reason to build the wells,” Hurlbert said.