Source: http://www.salina.com, March 24, 2017
By: Tim Horan

Officials with Dragun Corp. say the plume of chemical contamination under what once was Schilling Air Force Base in west Salina is the largest they have seen.

“There is a lot of TCE here on the former air force base,” said Matt Schroeder, senior environmental engineer for Dragun, the company hired to map contamination on the site and find a way to clean it up.

Dragun provides expert environmental peer review services for U.S. and international manufacturers, chemical companies, municipalities and other industries.

Schroeder said he hasn’t experienced a chemical cleanup the size of Salina’s.

“This is a pretty big site across the country. There aren’t a lot of sites of this magnitude anywhere,” he said Friday.

“We understand the extent. We have identified 11 different plumes,” said Mike Sklash, program manager with Dragun.

Trichloroethylene, or TCE, was used by the military as a degreaser from 1942 to 1966, when the area that is now Salina Regional Airport was an air force base.

Several cleanup options

Dragun officials Friday presented several examples of how to remove the contamination from the ground and groundwater to the public and to representatives of the Salina public entities — city of Salina, Salina Airport Authority, Kansas State University Polytechnic Campus and Salina School District, which own property affected by the plume.

One method is to apply heat and suck the chemical up with a vacuum. Another is to treat the area using chemical oxidation.

“The next step is to take all the data from the pilot tests to see which one gets us to the end point, at a cost we can afford,” Schroeder said. “There is not going to be any one thing that fixes everything. Part of the reason is that we have a variable geology. Some parts of the site have a lot of clay; other parts of the site are fairly sandy. Dealing with those type of changes across the site means we are going to have to have a combination of remedies.”

Schroeder was not ready to commit to how the site will be cleaned or how much it will cost.

Following a settlement, current costs are being paid 90 percent with federal funds and 10 percent with money from the local entities, which own the land.

“We’re just starting that feasibility analysis where we will weight each one of them out and look at costs, and how easily implemented,” he said.

People not at risk

Dragun continues to test the site on a regular basis, looking for movement and changes.

“Thus far, things have been relatively stable,” Schroeder said. “We did a risk assessment, an analysis of all the data we have collected. How are people being exposed to this and is that on a level that would be unacceptable as for as making them sick, and have longterm effects? Right now people are not at risk to these chemicals,” Schroeder said, indicating the chemicals were still two miles from a city water supply.

Sklash said the company bored 388 soil samples, the equivalent of 3 miles.

Collected were 2,353 soil, groundwater, surface water, sediment and air samples.

David Meyer, environmental specialist with Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said the next step is to develop a draft corrective action decision, which is expected by December.

Cleanup is expected to start in March 2018.

Other areas affected

He said ground and groundwater became contaminated across the county with the same chemicals.

“It’s either chemicals related to fuels or metal cleaning because everybody used it,” he said. “Nobody understood what the implications were back in the ’40s, ‘50s and ‘60s.”

Schroeder said the cleanup will take some time.

“How fast can we make it happen?” he said. “We are looking at ways to not make it a 100-year cleanup. Can we take it down to a 15-year cleanup or a 10-year cleanup?”