The effort cost

Environmental Protection Agency project cost nearly $30M

nearly $30 million and lasted more than 20 years, but now the EPA says a Superfund pollution site near Sanford is finally cleaned.

A Superfund pollution site west of downtown Sanford was declared Monday as cleaned up at a cost of nearly $30 million.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency more than 20 years ago took control of what it labeled the Sanford Gasification Plant Site. Industrial chemicals there had contaminated nearly 10 acres in a historically black area of Sanford south of State Road 46 and west of U.S. Highway 17, or French Avenue.

“The work is done on this property,” said Franklin Hill, EPA’s Southeast director for the agency’s Superfund program, which focuses on the most hazardous U.S. pollution messes.

City and federal authorities say the land is available for residential or commercial development.

The source of pollution was a demolished chemical factory that from the late 1800s through the 1950s used coal as an ingredient in manufacturing a synthetic version of natural gas for cooking, heating and lighting.

The waste material from manufacturing gas was coal tar, a heavy and toxic liquid that sank into the site’s sandy soil.

Downtown Orlando had one of the operations, although its coal tar drained into a well that funneled the poison to the top portion of the region’s water supply, the Floridan Aquifer. The EPA also is in charge of that Superfund project.

In Sanford, the poisonous liquid did not sink as deeply as the Floridan Aquifer, but it did threaten to flow along a creek into Lake Monroe.

“They did a massive surface soil removal,” said Shelby Johnston, EPA’s project manager at the Sanford site.

The project involved trucking away 27,000 tons of contaminated soil and then injecting a cement-like material deep underground to solidify 142,000 cubic yards of soil.

By 2011, most of the work had been completed, including the drilling of wells to watch for lingering contamination.

No coal-tar pollution reached Lake Monroe, Johnston said.

The cleanup has been paid for privately, including by Southern Gas Co., and by the city of Sanford, which had an ownership stake in the plant.

“This process literally took years of negotiation, planning, legal work and a lot of hours by all of those involved,” said Greg Corbett, environmental director for Southern Gas Co. “There are about 3,000 of these manufac-

tured-gas plants around the country in various states of cleanup. I’ve personally managed 46 of them in five states.”

He said the Sanford cleanup focused on turning the ground into a slab that encases any remaining coal tar. “The science basically put a concrete monolith under the ground,” Corbett said.

While the cleanup work was largely completed several years ago, the reason for Monday’s event was to broadly advertise the accomplishment, participants said.

“When the good news penetrates the community, it will eliminate the fears and decrease the concerns as it relates to health,” said Sanford Commissioner Velma Williams, whose district includes the former plant site.

Hill, EPA’s Southeast Superfund director, said the cleanup declaration stems from his agency wanting to draw attention to its renewed commitment to the nation’s top pollution sites.

“For too long, we’ve cleaned up sites and walked away,” Hill said.

Since the late 1990s when the Sanford pollution site drew the EPA’s attention, the agency has been run by over a dozen permanent and acting administrators.

EPA officials previously have said the agency’s current administrator, Scott Pruitt, has prioritized the Superfund program for the “core mission” of protecting human health and the environment.

In office for about a year and now embattled, Pruitt faces several investigations for allegations of inappropriate spending and travel as well as ethics concerns.

Taking part in the Sanford announcement, the EPA’s Southeast, Region 4 administrator, Trey Glenn, explained the magnitude of Superfund’s challenge. “We have over 250 Superfund sites in Region 4. That means there are 250-plus areas where citizens, where businesses, where the great people of this country are exposed to air, land and water contamination that we need to take care of,” Glenn said.