Health officials have doubts on proposed cleanup plan

Twenty-five years have passed since the Monroe County Health Department found polychlorinated biphenyls, called PCBs, contaminating Bennett’s Dump, a quarry-turned-landfill on the North Park development in northwest Bloomington. Since that discovery, the site has been linked to lawsuits and expensive cleanup procedures, but the new plan to decontaminate groundwater at the site has local environmentalists questioning the thoroughness of the Environmental Protection Agency’s actions and proposed procedures.\nThe newly amended, 836-page, court-approved consent decree outlined the final decontamination procedures for Bennett’s Dump, Lemon Lane Landfill and Neal’s Landfill, three Bloomington sites on the EPA’s “Superfund” national priorities list of uncontrolled hazardous waste sites designated for cleanup. All three Bloomington sites contain PCBs, federally regulated substances proven to cause cancer.\nAt Bennett’s Dump, electrical capacitors that Westinghouse Plant dumped on the property in the 1960s caused the contamination, said Monroe County Public Health Specialist Dennis Williamson. Williamson was part of the original health department discovery team in the 1980s and has been dealing with the problem since then.\n“Eight years ago, we cleaned up all the soil and the capacitors that were in the ground or on the surface,” Williamson said. “The problem now is with the groundwater because material leaked back into the ground. Our next step is collecting and treating that water.”\nThe dumps were untreated for so long that groundwater seepage carried PCBs through the rock into two underground springs that surface at the Bennett’s Dump site to merge with Stout’s Creek, said Tom Alcamo, EPA remedial project manager. . The new consent decree requires that Bloomington, Monroe County, the EPA and Westinghouse (now CBS) collaborate to decontaminate the water. Williamson said procedures include treating the groundwater from the springs and diverting clean water from a higher elevation away from the contaminated water.\nCBS will fund the entire cleanup process and will pay nearly $2 million to the U.S. for natural resource damages, according to the consent decree. The plan requires “a phased approach in which portions of the site remedy will be constructed, then the results will be studied and the information used to complete the design and construction,” Alcamo said. \n“Long-term monitoring will continue after construction completion,” she said.\nAlcamo said fish are the main concern at the site right now for both people and “ecological receptors.”\nSome fishermen might catch and consume contaminated fish from Stout’s Creek, he said, and part of the project’s goal is to prevent that from happening.\nAdditionally, the EPA’s procedures include implementing “institutional controls,” regulations on what type of construction may occur at the site. Alcamo said most of the site’s soil has been cleaned thoroughly enough to meet EPA commercial standards, but the construction of houses on the site is still restricted. The groundwater cleanup could create the possibility of future residential construction on-site, he said.\nBut a local environmentalist organization called Protect Our Woods opposes development of the area and has been engaged in a lawsuit with CBS Corp. and the EPA since 1999. The group, led by Sarah Elizabeth “Libby” Frey, contends that the EPA has irreparably harmed the local environment and public by failing to completely decontaminate the sites in the past 25 years.\n“EPA leaves the public out in the cold, and people should be concerned about it,” Frey said. “We need to keep attacking EPA because we consider their cleanups (insufficient) from a scientific point of view.”\nBut the dumps are old, Alcamo said, and federal law does not require a protective bottom liner to prevent further toxic runoff. \nInstead, the Bloomington sites have been capped to prevent further contamination of water flowing into the area. At Bennett’s Dump, however, “the residual PCB levels are very low and do not require a landfill cap or a bottom liner,” Alcado said.\n“They want everything cleaned up to zero, and that’s just never going to happen,” Williamson said in response to the protestor’s claims. “No matter what we’ve tried in the past, they were just never satisfied.”\nThe EPA claims to have “worked hard in the community to try to come up with remedies that we feel are protective,” Alcamo said. “I would not characterize the entire community as behind that lawsuit.” \nAlcamo declined to comment further on the protestors’ positions.\nThe amended consent decree will be available for public viewing and comment through March 26. The document and instructions for commenting are on the Web site www.copa.org.