Source: http://www.freep.com, December 8, 2014
By: Keith Matheny
A 5-acre former chemical burning pit is the latest focus in the decades-long cleanup of Velsicol Chemical’s toxic legacy in St. Louis, Mich.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has established a new Superfund site at the burn pit, now part of a golf course in the city of about 7,500 residents.
The site is across the Pine River from the old Velsicol site, where more than $100 million has been spent cleaning up contaminated river sediments and yards in nearby neighborhoods over the past 30 years.
The burn pit site features soil contaminated with 1, 2 dicholoroethane and benzene — both toxins — but no threat to human health exists at present, according to EPA officials.
The proposed $23-million cleanup will use a process to heat the tar-like pollutants in the soil, then capture and properly dispose of the liquid and vapor pollutants that result through a vacuum system.
Groundwater also is contaminated from the pollutants under and near the site, and is heading toward the Pine River, but is still far from it, said Donald Bruce, remedial section chief for the EPA’s Region 5 that includes Michigan.
“We hope to address the groundwater contamination more fully after we complete this initial phase,” he said.
Among the ongoing cleanup work is a new collaboration on a water system with the neighboring city of Alma, which will obtain water from upstream wells not threatened by Velsicol contamination. Nine homes near the burn pit cleanup site will be attached to the new water system, Bruce said.
For residents, any new efforts to chip away at the contamination Velsicol left behind is welcomed. It’s a place where birds literally drop from the sky, convulse and die from having fed on bugs and worms poisoned with insecticide DDT and PBB, a flame retardant, left behind in nearby soils from the factory’s pollution.
Velsicol signed off on a consent agreement with the state and the EPA in the early 1980s as it went bankrupt, leaving only about $20 million for cleanup. But the true cost of remediation — including the former factory site itself, where contamination was simply capped and fenced — may be nearly $500 million. And that cost will be borne by taxpayers.
“The company managed to reorganize itself, and all of the assets built up in the decades before they shut down have been privatized,” said nearby resident Ed Lorenz.
Compounding the problem, Lorenz said, is that Congress years ago ended a tax on corporations that helped fund the EPA Superfund. That leaves large cleanup projects like Velsicol coming from general funds that are increasingly scarce.
The burn pit site is expected to take up to three years to remediate, EPA officials said. Ongoing removal and replacement of contaminated yard soils in the neighborhood near the old Velsicol site should be completed next year, they said.
The new water system for the area is slated to go online by 2016. And the major cleanup of the factory site could start by 2016, a cleanup that’s expected to last a decade and cost $100 million, with potentially hundreds of millions of dollars more in ongoing costs.
When and whether the work gets done is all dependent on a National Priorities committee prioritizing the funding.
“The profits went to the last generation, even a little bit of our generation, and our kids and grandkids are paying for the cleanup,” Lorenz said.
Nearby resident Jane Keon, a past president of the Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force, questioned the EPA’s choice to go with the $23-million cleanup proposal at the burn pit site.
She and other task force members preferred a cleanup that would remove more of the materials that are the source for the contamination, but the EPA said that would cost $116 million.
“Our community was told back in the late ’70s, early ’80s that the plant site cleanup they did back then was permanent,” she said. “We’ve seen what ‘permanent’ looks like, in terms of impermanence. That site leaked very quickly.
“We’re interested in true permanence, true long-term effectiveness.”