Source: http://www.democratandchronicle.com, May 5, 2015
By: Steve Orr
Hey, here’s progress — a sizable cleanup action has begun at the site of a notorious chemical spill south of Rochester.
And it only took 45 years to get off the ground.
The spill, which occurred during a train derailment in December 1970, deposited roughly 30,000 gallons of toxic solvents into the soil and groundwater of rural Le Roy, Genesee County.
The history of the government response to the spill — one of the largest trichloroethylene releases on record in New York state — has a torturous one filled with long, long delays and missteps.
Two of them stand out: Crews who responded to the derailment used a fire hose to “wash away” the spilled TCE, which simply pushed it into in the groundwater and caused it to spread quickly to nearby drinking-water wells.
Not long thereafter, county, state and federal environmental officials simply lost track of the spill site until they stumbled on it again in 1989.
Eventually, polluted private wells were replaced by public water and homes were outfitted with special ventilation systems to protect occupants from toxic vapors. Those two measures should keep residents from any further exposure to the chemicals.
But actual clean-up of the TCE, which spread through porous underground rock through parts of Monroe, Livingston and Genesee counties, was repeatedly deferred.
Then, in early 2012, celebrity environmental activist Erin Brockovich took an interest in the spill site, centered on Gulf Road several miles from the village of Le Roy.
In remarks to reporters and on a national television broadcast, Brockovich suggested a link between the TCE spill and a strange, highly publicized outbreak of twitching and other neurological symptoms among more than a dozen students at Le Roy’s high school.
Any connection between the spill and the students’ illness was quickly and firmly debunked. Experts concluded the outbreak had nothing to do with environmental contaminants but was attributable to conversion disorder, a term that describes physical symptoms with a psychological origin.
But Brockovich’s erroneous statements did focus new attention on the spill site. Within days, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency arranged for trucks to haul away drums filled with tainted rock that had been languishing on property along Gulf Road.
And studies were ramped up, with more testing conducted, and that led to the soil clean-up beginning now.
“They’re mobilizing at the site. They’ll be drilling and doing work over the next two months to get the site ready,” said Michael Basile, a spokesman for the EPA, which has placed the Gulf Road spill on its national Superfund list and is overseeing work there.
When everything is in place this summer, a contractor will begin pulling gaseous TCE from the soil with vacuum pumps at a heavily contaminated ³/₄-acre spot where the derailment occurred. “Within maximum two-year period, they’re hoping they’ll be able to remove all the TCE via this operation from the soil,” Basile said.
The work is being paid for by the corporate successor to the Lehigh Valley Railroad, which operated the freight train that derailed near Gulf Road in 1970. The railroad itself ceased operations in 1976.
Once the so-called soil vapor extraction is completed, that still will leave a much larger quantity of TCE that has migrated with groundwater through the unusually porous limestone that underlies that area.
Solvents from the derailment have been detected over a 4¹/₂-square-mile area in the towns of Le Roy, Wheatland and Caledonia. It was believed that the TCE had never spread east of a creek in the village of Caledonia about four miles east of the spill site — but as the Democrat and Chronicle pointed out in a 2012 story, testing had never been done to verify that theory.
Further testing found no TCE east of that creek, Basile said.
He said a work plan for addressing the TCE that spread through the water table likely won’t be developed until next year. When remedial work would begin, if it does, is not known.