More than 50 people attended a meeting with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday night to share concerns regarding the cleanup such as potential toxic exposures to residents and farmers when the barrels are removed from the ground, spills in the transportation of hazardous waste and wanting to stay informed.
The cleanup is expected to take several years, with workers starting planning at the site the week of June 19, Adrian Palomeque, EPA community involvement coordinator, said during the meeting at Northwestern High School.
Bob Rule, a representative for the potentially responsible parties, told community members work will “continue until it’s done” under the consent decree, even if they get to a point where the cost exceeds $26 million.
Rule said the information learned in the first five to six weeks at the site will “steer the design work,” with workers figuring out what they need to build, how best to pull the barrels out and more. He said one of the first steps will be evaluating utilities in the area in the area to make sure workers don’t dig up or drill through phone lines or anything like that.
The actual cleanup of the site will not start until the predesign process is completed in a few years, Jenny Polster, EPA remedial project manager for the site, said.
Waste will be excavated, characterized and disposed of properly. She said liquid waste will be shipped off site, and solid waste will go into a landfill that will be built to replace the current one on the site. It will be the most protective type of landfill that the EPA can require.
What happened
The 8.5-acre Tremont City Barrel Fill site in German Twp. is a closed industrial waste landfill. During operations from 1976 to 1979, it’s estimated about 51,500 drums and 300,000 gallons of industrial liquid waste were disposed of at the site, which threatens a nearby aquifer that provides drinking water to tens of thousands of area residents.
The site contains an estimated 1.5 million gallons of hazardous waste buried in the ground.
The waste includes glues, resins, paint sludge, paint scraps, soap, shampoo, detergent, asbestos, oils and other industrial compounds. Food industry sources also disposed of items like margarine and corn syrup.
The disposal stopped in 1980, and soil was later placed on top of the waste cells. Seventeen years later, the U.S. EPA began an investigation into the barrel fill and found some leaks from waste cells. An investigation by the potentially responsible parties in 2005 found most of the waste cells were intact, but showed high levels of contaminants at the barrel fill site.
Contaminants include elevated levels of volatile organic compounds, such as xylenes, ethylbenzene, toluene and methylene chloride. Metals such as chromium and arsenic were also detected in the liquid and solid waste.
In October, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio approved the cleanup plan after it granted the motion to approve a consent decree signed in April 2022 by all parties to begin the process of cleaning up the landfill.
In the court order, all responsible companies said they acknowledged they have waste in the landfill and are responsible for the chemicals. They entered into the federal agreement — a Superfund Alternative Approach Agreement — and signed the decree that they will clean it up and shoulder some of the financial burden to do so.
Cleanup concerns
Mark Sanders, who lives about a mile east of the landfill, said he is concerned about accidents with the transportation of hazardous waste following the East Palestine disaster in which a Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous materials derailed and spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemicals into the air and water in February.
“You got residents and children and stuff like that; the last thing we want to see is an overturned truck with hazardous material in their front yard,” Sanders said.
Rule told Sanders that once work progresses to transporting hazardous waste, a trucking firm with experienced commercial haulers will be selected and specific needs will be addressed.
Polster said the EPA and potentially responsible parties will consult with the community to figure out the routes these truckers will take to avoid certain roads or areas if necessary.
Workers will drill borings into the ground to evaluate the soil and see exactly where the barrels are located to avoid breaking them open, Rule said. He said he expects they will find some empty barrels and will monitor the surrounding air and soils to contain and avoid leaks.
“There’s going to be drums that we pull out that are actually not intact that will probably leak a little bit as we pull them out before we get them into our containment,” Rule said. “After the fact, we’ll go through and monitor what has gotten there and we’ll remove those soils to make sure that we’re clean. Those soils will then go into the completed cell.”
Credit: Bill Lackey
Credit: Bill Lackey
Rule said the plan is to build the new containment cell as the drums are removed and placed in a secure place rather than sitting out in the open.
Farm field worries
Some community members expressed concern regarding the safety of farmers and their crops being exposed to toxins with several farms located around the barrel fill. Rule said that he does not foresee farming being interrupted, and the air and ground will be monitored for toxins to allow work to cease or be adjusted as needed to stop leakage.
“Typically our alarm levels are way below any health threshold for that reason, so if our alarms go off we know that there’s an issue and we need to either address the issue or shut down,” Rule said.
Scott Glum with the Ohio EPA said all dust created by the project will be slightly watered down, both to avoid it from being released into the air and from turning into runoff.
The county, EPA and potentially responsible parties are working with first responders to develop plans for evacuating and alerting residents in the off chance that there is a plume from the site, Clark County Health Commissioner Charlie Patterson said.
“If something happened and there was a plume, we’re able to figure out what that plume is, where it could go, how fast it’ll travel — we’re able to go on a computer and draw out an area that might be affected and immediately have a one-call system, put a message to those (affected) individuals,” Patterson said.
Polster said the EPA is developing a list of questions people ask that cannot yet be answered on its website. She said once these answers are discovered, the EPA will share them. Anyone with additional questions can email or call Polster or Palomeque using the contact information on the EPA’s website.
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