Seeing the last of PCBs?

Critics worry that planned cleanup still won’t be enough at Bennett’s Dump, other site

CleBack in 1983, Dennis Williamson saw for himself the mess that was Bennett’s Dump, a quarry on the north side of Bloomington where Westinghouse Electric Corp. had ditched old electrical parts in the 1960s.

“It was trashed out with a lot of capacitors and oil stains and stuff like that,” said Williamson, an environmental sanitarian — now environmental health specialist — for Monroe County. “It was pretty nasty.”

The dump turned out to be more than nasty. It was downright toxic, contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which have been linked to cancer in animals and humans. Williamson reported the discovery to the Environmental Protection Agency, and a decades-long process of decontamination began.

Twenty-five years later, the site still isn’t free of PCBs. Surrounded on all sides by the proposed North Park commercial/residential development along Ind. 46 on the way to Ellettsville, it’s targeted for what government officials hope will be the last in a series of cleanup operations to rid it of toxic levels of PCBs.

Longtime local activists believe the measures proposed won’t do the job. They say nothing short of complete removal of PCB-contaminated material will. But that’s not in the plan.

The cleanup is part of an agreement among EPA, city and county government, and Westinghouse — now CBS — to clean up six major PCB-contaminated sites in Monroe and Owen counties. Three of those sites have been cleaned to the satisfaction of the parties in the consent decree. The other three — Bennett’s Dump, Lemon Lane Landfill and Neal’s Landfill — still harbor unacceptable levels of PCBs and are included in an amended agreement recently approved by CBS, EPA, the city and the county.

CBS would clean up the sites during an 18-month period at an estimated cost of $5 million. The public has 30 days to comment on the 836-page document, with comments postmarked by March 26. The plan will then go to federal court for final approval some time after that.

The Bennett’s Dump plan

At Bennett’s Dump, the proposed actions are to install drainage systems around the site’s quarries, construct a trench to collect underground water and build a treatment system to remove PCBs from water that bubbles up from several springs before it can flow into Stout’s Creek and down on into Bean Blossom Creek and the White River. Deed restrictions would prevent residential development, deep excavation of the former quarries and placement of drinking water wells. The EPA would continue to monitor the site to make sure human health and the environment were protected.

PCBs were excavated from soils at the site in 1999. The level of PCBs remaining already is acceptable for industrial or commercial development, said EPA remedial project manager Tom Alcamo, and once the proposed remedies take place, the site theoretically might be clean enough to build houses directly on the former dump.

“At the end of the day, after the remedy at Bennett’s Dump is implemented, it will be protective of human health and the environment,” Alcamo said. “It will be stopping releases coming from that site. There will be no releases going into Stout’s Creek.”

Monroe County Surveyor Kevin Enright is less optimistic. Enright, along with Sarah Elizabeth “Libby” Frey and the environmental group Protect our Woods, filed suit in April 2000 against the EPA and CBS, saying they hadn’t adequately cleaned up Bennett’s Dump and Lemon Lane and Neal’s landfills. Enright isn’t satisfied with the further cleanup in the proposed consent decree amendment, either.

“The EPA’s just making another Love Canal there,” he said. “We’re dealing with much more than just PCBs. There were a slew of industrial chemicals dumped there. The contamination is beyond the arbitrary borders they’ve drawn, and the extent of the contamination is greater than they have tried to define it. All of this is to minimize the cost of the plaintiff (CBS) trying to clean up the problem. With Bennett’s, if they’re planning to develop it, there’s a large amount of money at stake. It shouldn’t be developed on.”

More time needed?

Enright’s attorney, Mick Harrison, said the proposed amendment isn’t enough to take care of any of the three contaminated sites. PCBs are still present in the air, the ground and the surface water at Bennett’s Dump, he said, and the unstable karst limestone topography makes their existence even more dangerous.

Harrison argues that the only reasonable solution for the three sites is to conduct a formal Remedial Investigation/Impact Study, which has not been done, before determining how the cleanup should be conducted. Otherwise, he said, it’s impossible to know for sure whether the sites meet safe standards for PCBs and other contaminants.

“You can’t rely on a local limited-risk assessment to tell you everything is good,” he said. Since PCBs are a global hazard that accumulate from numerous environmental sources, the best approach is to eliminate them one source at a time.

“Ethically, we need to do our job and take care of our source,” he said.

Harrison contends local government is more concerned about protecting itself from economic liability than protecting public and environmental health. And he said the public needs more than the allotted 30 days to look at the document.

“It’s a complex issue,” he said. “The parties (to the agreement) take all the time they want to work it out in private. They expect us to digest it in 30 days.”

Williamson, with the county health department, said there’s a safety net built into the agreement in the form of a five-year review period.

“I think we ought to try what they’ve proposed and see if it works and go from there,” he said.