Wilmington Site Put on EPA List

By Ralph Ranalli, The Boston Globe

Apr. 20–The federal government has taken jurisdiction over a major environmental contamination site, adding the 53-acre former Olin Chemical site in Wilmington to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund list, officials said yesterday.

A 3/4-mile plume of pollutants from the former chemical plant reached several town wells in 2002, forcing officials to shut them down and apply for an emergency tie-in to the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority supply.

The state Department of Environmental Protection has been monitoring the site for nearly a decade. DEP officials asked that it be given the Superfund designation after a disagreement over the number of monitoring wells required to test whether the chemicals from the site can easily be removed from the Maple Meadow Brook Aquifer, said Jim DiLorenzo, the EPA’s remediation project manager for the site.

The EPA has more funding for scientific analysis and greater enforcement power to force Olin to thoroughly clean up the site, DiLorenzo said. “I think this is definitely good news for the people in the immediate area,” he said.

Officials at Olin, who have said they’ve spent millions attempting to clean up the site, could not be reached for comment yesterday. The company did not oppose the EPA Superfund designation, DiLorenzo said.

Wilmington residents applauded the move. “It’s what we’ve been waiting for,” said Kathleen Barry, head of the Concerned Citizens Network of Wilmington.

“There’s more than meets the eye to this site . . . and now the whole level of investigation has been bumped up.”

Also yesterday, the EPA announced that it was allocating an additional $8.3 million to clean up the former Atlas Tack Corporation Superfund site in Fairhaven. The new funding brings the total funding for the remediation effort there to more than $10 million, officials said.

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