Source: http://www.cleveland.com, December 9, 2015
By: John Harper
COPLEY TOWNSHIP, Ohio — A stubby beige brick building sits in the middle of a roughly-paved parking lot near the corner of Copley and Jacoby roads, unremarkable as mid-century strip malls tend to be.
But this innocuous looking place is to blame for one of the most serious environmental disasters in Summit County, one that fouled water ingested by dozens of local residents and garnered the federal government’s top priority for industrial waste cleanup.
Inside the 1963 strip mall, named Copley Square Plaza, a dry cleaner operated for nearly three decades while dumping toxic waste into the basement, filling cement pits not designed to hold such cargo. The cement eventually cracked and leaked, spilling carcinogenic and neurotoxic dry cleaning chemicals into porous soils and shale bedrock, from which locals drew their tap water.
Cleveland.com is examining the legacy left behind by Akron’s industrial heyday, during which the nation’s rubber giants filled local coffers with cash and landfills with caustic wastes.
Danton Dry Cleaners was, in contrast to the major industrial polluters of the 1960s and 1970s, not a very big industrial operation. But a basic lack of care in the construction of the strip mall laundry endangered the lives of thousands of people.
Fortunately for nearby residents, the dry cleaners’ slow bleed of waste chemicals into the soil gave environmental experts time to respond.
In 1990 tenants at Copley Square Plaza complained that the water in their building smelled foul. A grocery store hired a private company to test the water supply.
The tests revealed high levels of dry cleaning solvents and related chemicals — tetrachloroethylene, trichloroethylene, dichloroethylene and vinyl chloride — in the well water. Those chemicals can cause dizziness, headaches, liver and kidney failure and some have been associated with various cancers, according to the U.S. EPA.
At first the EPA found none of the chemicals in the residential wells near the site, but over the next four years a plume of underground chemicals continued to spread. By 1992 at least two homes’ tap water tested positive for the toxic chemicals.
By 1994 the pollution had spread to tap water in 12 nearby homes, including the home of Eugene Smith, who later described the water in his home as “bad, real bad”.
“It was not fit to drink and not fit to take a bath. You just couldn’t use it,” Smith told the Akron Beacon Journal.
With no connection nearby to other water supplies, Smith’s family resorted to using exclusively bottled water for over 17 years, even though the EPA hooked up a filtration system to his water well.
The EPA found the source of the pollution in 1994: eight “homemade” pits in the basement of the strip mall filled with over 8,000 gallons of dry cleaning sludge. The dry cleaning company filed for bankruptcy, and the federal government was left to pick up the tab.
In 1999 the Environmental Protection Agency declared the site remediated, but later tests found that the chemicals continued to slowly leach through the shale underground. In 2005 the site was put on the EPA’s top priority Superfund site list, meaning that resources would be available to restore the groundwater in Copley to drinking water standards.
The EPA chose a plan 10 years later, in July 2015, to inject a combination of combatant chemicals and microorganisms into the groundwater around the strip mall to dissolve the toxic solvents. The plan will cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $4.9 million.