New funding for Superfund sites
Cleanups in Lansdale, Salfords, Berks see funding boost from bill
The federal Environmental Protection Agency has announced a new round of funding for cleanup of Superfund sites across the country, including several in Montgomery and Berks counties.
“After three rounds of investments, EPA is delivering on President Biden’s full promise to invest in cleaning up America’s most contaminated Superfund sites,” said EPA Deputy Administrator Janet McCabe in a statement.
“This final round of Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding has made it possible for EPA to initiate clean-ups at every single Superfund site where construction work is ready to begin. This is an incredible milestone in our efforts to clean up and protect communities, deliver local jobs, enhance economic activity, and improve people’s lives for years to come.”
The third and final wave of more than $1 billion for cleanup projects at more than 100 Superfund sites across the country is part of President Biden’s Investing in America agenda. This funding is made possible by the President’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and will launch new cleanup projects at 25 Superfund sites, including four in Pennsylvania, according to the EPA.
The new round of funding will allow for the start of two projects in Montgomery County:
At the Salford Quarry site in Lower Salford, EPA will be working to contain buried waste that has historically impacted groundwater using a perimeter wall below the surface and an impermeable cap. In 2022, EPA officials said work would start on the site in 2024 and would involve the cleanup of waste from as far back as the 1950s, when a waste disposal business used the quarry as a dump for industrial, commercial and residential waste, then a tile manufacturer used the quarry for the disposal of glaze wash-up sludge, settling pond sediment, and fired and unfired scrap tiles through roughly 1980, according to MediaNews Group archives.
At the Baghurst Drive site in Upper Salford, Montgomery County, funding will be used to conduct remediation of contaminated groundwater. At that site, the Montgomery County Health Department found a plume of contaminated groundwater in the late 1990s, and the site was added to the federal Superfund list in 2014, at which time local officials said roughly 40 homes were receiving water from alternative sources due to contaminants including trichloroethane, dicloroethene, trichloroethylene, vinyl chloride and 1.4 dioxane in the groundwater. According to the EPA, the cleanup technology will heat up the soil and bedrock to a temperature that will volatilize and capture contaminants. This will remove the source of contamination in groundwater and be the first step in restoring groundwater to drinking water conditions.
In addition to new cleanup efforts, the EPA funding will also support continued construction at several Superfund sites across Pennsylvania:
At the North Penn Area 6 site in Lansdale, initial BIL funding was used to complete the excavation and disposal of contaminated soil, place new clean backfill, and restore the JW Rex property in just over one year. Ground was broken in the summer of 2022 on a cleanup project at the North Penn site, located at the J. W. Rex property on Squirrel Lane near Eighth Street, after a public meeting in the borough on that project in 2018 and a funding announcement in 2021. The North Penn site received $4.9 million from the federal bill to remove and replace industrially contaminated soil at that time, according to MediaNews Group archives, and EPA said this week that the continued clean-up work at the JW Rex property will help to accelerate the total remediation efforts at the North Penn Area 6 site.
At the Crossley Farm Superfund site in Hereford Township, Berks County, funds are enhancing groundwater treatment, according to EPA. The funding involves pumping contaminated groundwater to a treatment plant on the site, and improvements to the current plant. The water that will be treated is from a highly contaminated area known as the source area. At that site, the dumping of 55-gallon drums of trichloroethylene started on the Crossley Farm at least 50 years ago, and in the 1960s and ’70s, at least 1,200 drums of the cancer-causing industrial solvent and degreaser were taken from Bally Case & Cooler Co. and buried along with household garbage in a pit on the 209acre dairy farm owned at the time by brothers Harry and James Crossley; EPA began installing water treatment systems in homes there in 1997, and EPA said in 2021 that a round of funding awarded at that time would go toward cleanup efforts.
“Accelerating these cleanups will improve the environment in Pennsylvania and restore economic vitality to the communities where these sites are located,” said Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection Interim Acting Secretary Jessica Shirley. “The infusion of resources from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will further eliminate the legacy pollution at these sites and make these communities whole, resulting in healthier communities and a better Pennsylvania.”
For a list of the 25 sites to receive funding for new cleanup projects, visit EPA. gov/Superfund.