Toxic Superfund sites await EPA aid.
The new head of the federal Environmental Protection Agency swears he’s going to get lingering environmental disasters called Superfund sites cleaned up for good and off the books.
How cool for Central Florida, which has nine toxic catastrophes, including six of the 1,342 nationwide that are considered the worst. One is slap in the midst of downtown Orlando, and two have been on the list since 1983. That’s no typo. We did say lingering, remember?
Take Tower Chemical, for example, which is due for a fresh five-year cleanup plan in March. For 34 years, the EPA has been fighting Tower’s slew of toxins, mostly forms of the banned pesticide DDT, which today are still polluting groundwater at the site just north of State Road 50 in Clermont. Meanwhile, subdivisions have grown up nearby.
Tens of thousands of Central Floridians live near these chemical meltdowns in Orange, Seminole and Lake counties and they don’t even know it. Typically, the sites aren’t marked, and a few even have businesses operating atop them, which is the agency’s goal.
The EPA says none of these toxic spots are dangerous for people — but stay behind the fence and don’t drink the water. That was not an attempt at humor. At a number of the sites, including Tower, one of the “solutions” is to connect nearby homes and businesses to public water supplies because the groundwater is poisoned. That’s the best that can be done at places like Tower because DDT’s harmful components do not break down, possibly for hundreds of years.
President Donald Trump said in May he plans to cut 31 percent of the $8.25 billion allotted to the Superfund, which was created in 1980 to reverse the nation’s most harmful environmental calamities. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt testified before the House of Representatives over the summer that he could get those forgotten sites restored faster and with less money.
“It’s more about decision-making, leadership and management than money,” he declared.
Um, OK. Go for it, dude! Pruitt could start with the nine in this area. Let’s take a look: The Orlando Gasification
Plant operated between the 400 and 600 blocks of West Robinson Street in downtown Orlando from 1887 to 1960. Coal was heated to produce gas used for cooking, lighting, home heating and industry. Now the soil and groundwater are contaminated with coal tar and 15 other toxins ranging from arsenic to compounds called benzopyrenes, which cause cancer. The property is fenced, and the EPA says the pollutants haven’t invaded a nearby wellfield for the public water supply. The EPA approved a plan for cleanup in 2013, but work hasn’t started. Chevron Chemical, 4.39 acres at 3100 N. Orange Blossom Trail, is now a grassy field that remains
fenced after the buildings and a water tower were torn down and concrete at the site broken and hauled away. Chevron had used unlined ponds until 1976 to wash and rinse containers at the chemical blending facility. The company disposed of 18,236 tons of pesticide-contaminated soil during the 1990s after tests found concentrations of six pesticides and a heavy metal. Monitor wells show that even now, the toxins “are not fully contained,” according to the EPA website. Karl Wilson, the site’s remedial project manager, said 11 underground walls that act as filters for the tainted soil may not be enough, and Chevron may install two more.
Operators of City Industries, a Winter Garden waste management firm for paints, solvents, plating wastes and ink, intentionally dumped chemicals and abandoned the site in 1983, leaving 1,200 barrels of hazardous waste and thousands of gallons of toxic sludge in holding tanks. The state Department of Environmental Protection almost immediately removed drums of goo, and a year later, the EPA trucked 10 tons of the most toxic soil to a hazardous waste landfill. After that, the agency removed and heattreated 1,670 tons of less-contaminated soil and returned it to the 1-acre site. Tainted groundwater has been pumped and treated since the mid-1990s, and the plan is to keep it up until the contamination vanishes. The site is on Forsyth Road bordering Costco Wholesale. General Dynamics and Sprague Electric, a combined 22 acres next to one another in the 1300 block of North U.S. Highway 17-92 in Longwood are treated as one single fiasco. At some point, the Sprague pollution “merged” with that from General Dynamics, which is downhill from the electric company. General Dynamics manufactured printed circuit boards that were cleaned with a degreaser containing the solvent TCE, a “known human carcinogen” that preys on the liver and kidneys, according to the National Toxicology Program. The Seminole County plant closed in the early 1980s and remains empty; some offices are snapshots in time from when the last employees left. The EPA is still negotiating with General Dynamics over how it should be cleaned up and who should do it. The site was added to the Superfund list in 2010 after TCE was found in the Floridan Aquifer beneath the plant. More than 114,800 people in the four miles around it drink from a municipal well a quarter-mile from the plant. Mercury, silver, arsenic and lead are among the other contaminants.
The 57-acre Zellwood Ground Water
Contamination site in northwest Orange County is where, beginning in 1963, an unholy combination of chemical companies, drum recyclers and fertilizer users dumped tainted wastewater into unlined ponds and open ditches along Jones Avenue. After digging out the soil, a container company
scraped it into an underground pile and combined it with concrete to hold the toxins in place, then planted grass atop the “monolith,” said the EPA’s Wilson. However, the pollution in some monitoring wells is actually increasing, and the agency is working with the companies to find the source, he said. The EPA isn’t certain whether its “cleanup approach continues to protect people and the environment from remaining site contamination,” according to the website. So the agency has given itself 18 months to figure it out.
Sanford Dry Cleaners is on an acre between 113 and 121 S. Palmetto Ave. in downtown Sanford. All three buildings on the site are empty. A plumbing business, restaurant, art studio and wine and pottery shop border the site. Soil outside the building was excavated and carted to a hazardous-waste facility. Contaminated groundwater was injected with microbes to degrade the solvents, and the EPA is monitoring it. Nothing is posted on the buildings to indicate there is any problem.
The former Spellman Engineering property, 722 Brookhaven Drive, is less than a mile from both Lake Highland Preparatory School and Fern Creek Elementary in Orlando. The company cleaned parts for NASA using a solvent later found in groundwater by the Orlando Utilities Commission, which has a maintenance facility next door. Orlando volunteered to clean it up “to prevent it from being added” to the National Priorities List of the nastiest disasters, EPA documents say. Oh, dear! We can’t tarnish our shiny city with a toxic dump! In March, the city sampled air in businesses above the plume of underground water contamination for hazardous gasses. “No unacceptable risk” was found, but more sampling is expected.
And finally, there is the Tower Chemical site. Men in “moonsuits” first came in 1983 from the EPA for an emergency cleanup of 1 million gallons of DDT-laced water Tower owners — its president was chairman of the Lake County Pollution Board at the time — had dumped into an unlined pond that overflowed into a wetland and through a drainage ditch into Lake Apopka. Workers unearthed 72 leaking barrels of chemicals and carted away 3,800 cubic yards of heavily contaminated soil. In 2010, the agency returned to dig out another 45,000 cubic yards of tainted soil and sediment. Currently, EPA project manager Wilson said, the agency is trying to decide whether to excavate soil where a form of DDT continues to migrate into the groundwater, mix it with concrete and pour it back underground in an attempt to keep the pesticide on the site and to stabilize the pollution. This project would take place beneath an asphalt-covered parking lot where RVs and boats are stored.
So there, you have it: four of nine toxic sites were uncovered in the 1980s but still need work. Two are from the 1990s, and three from 2010. That’s hardly a stellar track record. Here’s hoping Pruitt gets it done.