Despite Progress Made, Maine's Toxic Waste Sites Still Face a Lot More Work
Posted on: Saturday, 19 April 2008, 12:00 CDT
By Kevin Miller, Bangor Daily News, Maine
Apr. 19--They are found in nearly every corner of Maine -- hazardous waste sites that threaten the air, water and health of residents.
Some are the unfortunate byproduct of industries that keep Maine's economy churning. Many are simply legacies of a time, not many decades ago, when there were no laws or state agencies in place to protect the environment.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent cleaning up hazardous waste in recent decades. But state officials acknowledge that there is not enough money to address all of the polluted sites.
"Since 1983, the state has spent a little over $21 million from bond issues and General Fund appropriations to clean up hazardous waste sites around the state," said Mark Hyland, director of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection's Bureau of Remediation and Waste Management.
"And we're out of bond money. We have a zero balance right now and that has never happened before," he said.
Hyland said there have been considerable successes, such as the ongoing cleanup of the Eastern Woolen Superfund site in Corinna and the current redevelopment of the Eastern Fine Paper Co. site in Brewer as a Cianbro Corp. facility.
As Earth Day 2008 approaches, the Bangor Daily News takes another look at how much cleanup has been completed at five high-profile industrial contamination sites and how much work is left undone.
HoltraChem, Orrington
As New England's largest mercury polluter, HoltraChem Manufacturing Co. had been in the crosshairs of environmental groups and state regulators for years by the time the company closed its Orrington factory in late 2000.
In the ensuing months, HoltraChem evaporated as a corporate entity -- as did the company's bank accounts -- while debate raged over how to clean up the toxic vestiges of decades of chemical production on the site.
More than seven years later, the 235-acre property looks completely different because of a $35 million cleanup effort financed by another former owner of the chlor-alkali facility, Missouri-based Mallinckrodt Inc. But the hazards are far from gone.
Crews have removed tons of metallic mercury -- a well-known neurotoxin -- and mercury sludge, cleaned and removed dozens of storage tanks and dismantled many of the heavily contaminated buildings.
More than 1,000 tons of building and structural materials have been removed from the site during the first five phases of the voluntary cleanup, Mallinckrodt spokeswoman JoAnna Schooler said.
Mallinckrodt has made "quite a bit of progress" on the surface cleanup to date, said Stacy Ladner, environmental specialist with the DEP. But much larger and more contentious issues loom.
"We haven't really started dealing with the long-term remediation issues like the [contaminated] soil and the landfills," Ladner said. "That is still a major decision and battle to come."
An estimated 370,000 tons of mercury-contaminated soil are buried in landfills and elsewhere on the site. The DEP wants Mallinckrodt to remove the tainted soils to a licensed treatment facility so that Orrington can redevelop the riverside property without fear of lingering toxicity.
But Mallinckrodt officials -- potentially facing a price tag exceeding $100 million for the work -- have instead argued it would be faster, easier and safer to encapsulate the contamination on site.
Those costs would likely pale in comparison to the expense of cleaning up potentially miles of contaminated river bottom, however.
Last month, a federal judge directed a court-appointed research team already investigating HoltraChem-related discharges into the Penobscot River to determine whether it would be better to attempt to remove the mercury or allow the river to naturally flush the pollution.
Regardless, Ladner said the DEP plans to remove the "hottest" areas of mercury contamination in river sites adjacent to the factory. When that will happen, however, remains unclear.
Schooler said, from the company's perspective, the overall picture of what is happening in the river is "incomplete." She said the company will continue to work with state and federal agencies on future cleanup plans.
"We've taken our responsibility to the site very seriously," Schooler said. "We're not done, and there is still much work left to do. But you cannot look at that site without appreciating how much work has been done."
Callahan Mine, Brooksville
In 1880, a clam digger working the low tide on a peninsula just south of Castine stumbled upon pay dirt of a different sort: zinc and copper. Commercial mining continued on Cape Rosier intermittently for the next 90 years.
But intensive extraction didn't truly begin until 1968, when Callahan Mining Corp. dammed the site to create a large open-pit mine in what had been Goose Pond. Today, the former Callahan Mine near Brooksville is one of Maine's newest additions to the federal government's Superfund list.
It is also one of the least studied.
"There hasn't really been a formal cleanup program there yet," said Ed Hathaway, project manager with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "What we have been doing for the past couple of years working with the Maine DEP and DOT [Department of Transportation] is collecting information to understand the site."
Located southeast of Harborside Village in Brooksville, the 320-foot-deep pit is actually under water today because the former owners reopened the dam when operations ceased in the 1970s, according to EPA documentation.
Callahan Mining pulled an estimated 800,000 tons of rock containing copper, zinc, lead and traces of silver from the pit, which the EPA says "was reputedly the only intertidal heavy metal mine in the world at the time of its operation."
The 5 million tons of waste rock was deposited in heaps and in other locations on the peninsula. While chemicals were used to extract the valuable ore from the rock, most of the current contamination comes from the ore itself.
A 1975 study by the state found high levels of lead, copper, zinc and cadmium in marine organisms in Goose Cove, which is connected to Goose Pond. More recent studies found further contamination in samples from other areas of the property.
Cleanup will likely be complicated by the property's intertidal nature, the sheer mass and instability of the rock waste pile and the size of the site. But the deep pit may actually be helping to limit the spread of the pollutants.
"It may be acting as a large sink so that the sediments don't leave the estuary and go out into the ocean," Hathaway said.
The three agencies are now developing a draft report that will be issued to the public. A final cleanup plan could be ready about a year from now, with major work beginning on the site in two to three years, Hathaway said.
Some local residents have recently expressed concerns that contamination from the Callahan Mine could be leading to higher incidences of some types of cancer among local residents. Health officials have not found a demonstrable link, however.
"Right now the good news is we haven't seen any significant [immediate] risks," Hathaway said. "The thing we are worried about is prolonged exposure to the site."
Hows Corner, Plymouth
State and federal agencies along with private parties have spent tens of millions of dollars in recent decades cleaning up waste oil disposal and processing sites scattered throughout Maine. Hows Corner in Plymouth was among the worst.
While much of the surface contamination has been removed, local groundwater supplies will likely be too toxic to use for generations to come.
Between 1965 and 1980, George West Jr. operated a facility affiliated with Portland-Bangor Waste Oil Co. on part of a 17-acre site in the central Maine town south of Newport.
Untold tens of thousands of gallons of used motor oil, industrial oil and other solvents were collected legally from military bases, auto shops, municipalities and other companies and then stored in tanks before being sold as fuel or for dust control on dirt roads.
But thousands of gallons of the oil, degreasers and solvents ended up seeping through fractures in the bedrock, according to the EPA. As a result, local groundwater supplies are contaminated by such probable carcinogenic compounds as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, and tetrachloroethene.
The EPA removed 850 tons of contaminated soil from Hows Corner and installed an alternative water supply for more than 50 homes in the area in the early 1990s. That helped shrink the size of the toxic plume, said Terry Connelly, project manager with the EPA office in Boston.
"From a risk perspective, we're nearly done," Connelly said. "But as for a timeline of when the groundwater will be entirely clean so that the public water system is no longer needed, we're at the beginning."
More than 15 years after work began on the site, the EPA and Maine DEP are still negotiating with more than 100 "responsible parties" who shipped waste to the site on the final plans for a system to treat the groundwater.
The system, which could be installed by spring or summer of 2009, will extract contaminated groundwater, treat it on site and then pump it back into the bedrock.
To date, Maine has spent an estimated $2 million on the site, while the EPA has invested more than $6 million. The responsible parties, meanwhile, are expected to contribute $14 million to $15 million to the total project.
Rebecca Hewett, an environmental specialist with the DEP, said the contamination is several orders of magnitude above healthful levels. Even with treatment, it will likely be 100 years or more before the groundwater is safe again, Hewett said.
Eastern Surplus, Meddybemps
The small Washington County town of Meddybemps, located just south of Calais, has the unfortunate distinction of being home to two related hazardous waste projects.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, state and federal agencies began cleaning massive chemical contamination at the site of Eastern Surplus Co. The 5-acre site, which borders both Meddybemps Lake and the Dennys River, was for decades a depository for military surplus and salvage items. It also has been identified as a historic American Indian site.
In addition to hundreds of drums and containers, the agencies and responsible parties cleaned up an estimated 16,000 pounds of calcium carbide, an irritant that reacts with water to produce flammable gases. The costly cleanup successfully removed most surface contamination.
A groundwater treatment system has been operating on site since 2000 to reduce contamination that seeped into the bedrock north of Route 191, which bisects the property.
"We are containing it," said Connelly, the EPA project manager. "It's not going out into the Dennys River. But the concentrations are so high that we don't expect to meet the cleanup standards for many years to come."
Local wells were monitored for about 10 years but never showed signs of contamination, Connelly said.
Harry Smith Sr. operated the Eastern Surplus site for years. Meanwhile, Smith's son, Harry Jr., has been at the center of another hazardous waste case just down the road.
The Maine DEP removed an estimated 260 tons of soil contaminated with PCBs, more than 10,000 gallons of liquid waste and 123 drums containing "unspecified waste," according to EPA documentation on the so-called Smith Junkyard.
Subsequent studies found contamination problems in on-site groundwater. Additionally, storm water from the site flows into Hattens Brook and then into Dead Stream, which support a valuable fishery and contain threatened and endangered species.
Investigations in the mid- and late 1990s found PCB, pesticides, volatile organic compounds and metals contaminating sediment along Hattens Brook. The contaminants are believed to be affecting both the protected water body and local fishery. The pollution is not believed to be affecting local residents, however.
Kathy Howatt, an environmental specialist with the Maine DEP, said the state has submitted a cleanup proposal to the U.S. Department of Defense for funding. The DEP does not have the money to pay for the project itself.
Realistically, further clean-up on the site is likely years away, Howatt said.
Coal tar plume, Bangor
On warm summer days when the tide is low, toxic ghosts of downtown Bangor's industrial past ooze to surface of the Penobscot River.
Over the course of more than a century, a hazardous byproduct of turning coal into gas flowed in a sewer line that ended at the Penobscot. Figures vary wildly, but recent estimates are that at least 5,000 gallons of coal tar -- a carcinogen -- ended up in the river along what is now the city's downtown waterfront.
In 2006, a federal judge settled a five-year legal fight over who should pick up the anticipated $12 million to $20 million bill to deal with the coal tar plume. Under the settlement, the city will bear 40 percent responsibility. A former owner of the Bangor Gas Works plant, Connecticut-based Citizens Communications Co., will pay the remainder.
The DEP's Howatt said her agency is still gathering information about how to construct a pile wall at the site of the sewer outlet that will stabilize the worst contamination to prevent it from spreading. Construction could begin next summer if parties agree on the plan and other factors fall into place.
The rest of the 10 acres of contaminated river bottom will either be capped to prevent the coal tar from migrating farther downstream or undergo habitat restoration. Removing all of the contamination, Howatt said, is not currently on the table.
"We'd be taking a huge portion of the river bottom, and that is not feasible," she said. "So the focus of the remedy is to control exposure" to the coal tar.
James Ring, city engineer for Bangor, said the parties must carefully weigh the risks of worsening the pollution by re-exposing the buried coal tar. But Ring said he is pleased to see the issue out of the courts and moving forward.
"I think it is important to take the time to do the right thing and make sure it's an appropriate solution to the problem," Ring said.
kmiller@bangordailynews.net
990-8250
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Source: Bangor Daily News (Bangor, Maine)
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