>> Community members share Clark County barrel fill cleanup concerns with EPA
During operations from 1976 to 1979, it’s estimated about 51,500 drums with 1.5 million gallons of hazardous waste and 300,000 gallons of liquid industrial waste were disposed of at the site , which threatens a nearby aquifer that provides drinking water to tens of thousands of area residents.
Marilyn Welker, one of the founders of People for Safe Water, a citizens group, said she and others started it in 2012 at the suggestion of former geology professor Peter Townsend when she was at an Occupy Springfield event that encouraged people to look for things in their communities that required action.
Welker said the group replaced the former CF Water group that started in the 1980s but had become defunct. The new citizens group has helped achieve a lot since 2012, including encouraging modification of dangerous cleanup plans and bringing the community together.
“People do feel like they’re powerless in too many situations, particularly in the political realm, and this barrel fill site has been a shining example of the fact that we as citizens can make a big difference,” Welker said.
Larry Ricketts, of People for Safe Water, became aware of the issue in 1984 in his role as Clark County disaster services coordinator when Laura Kaffenbarger, a co-founder of CF Water, approached him. In an Oct. 25, 1984, memo to then-county administrator Darrell Howard, Ricketts shared that Ohio Environmental Protection Agency district geologist Jim Pennino had written that the site “should never have been chosen for a chemical waste disposal.”
Ricketts told the News-Sun that he and his wife moved to California in 1989 but always came back to visit and stayed up-to-date on the barrel fill. He said about 10 years ago when he was in Washington, D.C., lobbying against the Keystone Pipeline in his role an environmental consultant, a friend connected him with Welker.
>> Tremont City Barrel Fill timeline: How it started and what is next
He began Skype calling with the group once a month, and he and his wife decided to move back home about eight years ago after she retired, Ricketts said. Once he was back in Clark County, Ricketts said he became fully involved in advocating for the cleanup.
“If you think about it, around 1984 is when we first started talking about it, and it is a lifetime,” Ricketts said. “My driving force has always been ... this aquifer is one of the absolute best aquifers left in the country. Some of the other aquifers have been decimated by pesticides, or PFAs are a real problem.”
Ricketts said about two years ago he convinced his daughter, her husband and their kids to move to Springfield from Los Angeles.
“Our daughter was born here but our son-in-law had never been out of California,” Ricketts said.
Ricketts told them water was going to be a key issue for the future, “and we’ve got this great source back here.’”
Workers from the potentially responsible parties and the U.S. EPA will be at the site next week to begin the pre-planning process in order to do the cleanup safely.
Most important issue
Ricketts said Mark Allen, who retired from Ohio EPA and died at the end of May, helped People for Safe Water for a long time with research and advocacy related to the site.
Allen was a willing resource, giving people access to files related to the site and background information, Welker said. Allen helped people understand the issue.
Gordon Flax, a Clark County commissioner from 1988 to 1996 who died in 2018, saw the barrel fill cleanup as one of the most important issues for the county, Melanie Flax Wilt, Flax’s granddaughter said.
Flax Wilt now serves as a county commissioner herself, and she said when she told her grandfather she was considering running for the seat in 2016, the first thing he said to her was “Good; you need to make sure that that dump in Tremont City gets cleaned up,” which has stuck with her throughout her seven-year term.
“He would have loved to see it go away in his lifetime,” Flax Wilt said. “Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, but he did dedicate time and energy to getting things going in the right direction.”
The commissioner said she was born in 1977, so the issue has been around her entire life. She said four generations of her family have been around for the barrel fill.
Flax Wilt said her children were 11, 10 and nine when she was elected commissioner and now they are around the same age she was when her grandfather was working on getting the waste cleaned up.
Shift in approach
The way in which activists have approached the issue has shifted over the years, Flax Wilt said.
“Instead of it being kind of a Greenpeace-style of activism, the citizens have evolved to take a very practical, pragmatic approach to how they’ve worked with EPA,” Flax Wilt said. “It’s evolved from more of a black-and-white, you’re on this side, I’m on this side, to a partnership recognizing that this will never change if we don’t work together.”
Flax Wilt said she grew up on a farm and as a result has always been interested in land use, the environment and how natural resources are protected for future generations.
Credit: Bill Lackey
Credit: Bill Lackey
A lot has happened
Charlie Patterson, who became the county health commissioner in 2000, said he has prioritized the cleanup of the barrel fill since the start of his term when it popped up on his radar.
“Within your first week or two, you have constituents coming to you and telling you that they’re concerned because Springfield does not have fluoridated water, and then they come to you at your first board meeting and say, ‘There’s this big issue of this landfill and this barrel fill out near Tremont City and it’s got millions of gallons of hazardous waste.’”
Patterson said when he first heard this, he found it hard to believe but discovered it to be true when he researched it.
“There can’t be too many things in our community more important than 1.5 million gallons of potentially hazardous waste,” Patterson said.
The health commissioner’s own life has changed in his time in office and working on the barrel fill, with his youngest child being born at the end of 2008.
He said the county and the world have also changed drastically since the dump became an issue in the late 1980s and 1990s.
“The one thing that’s changed ... is that I had hair when this thing started,” Patterson said. “Lots of water under the bridge, so to speak, since then. We’ve been through two pandemics, we’ve been through 9/11 — a lot of things have happened.”
The Clark County Combined Health District has been committed to addressing the issue and will continue to be forever, Patterson said, but it has really been the citizens encouraging the EPA to act and doing a lot of hard work.
“I’m happy to still be here at this point because there were times that I did not think that it was going to happen during my career,” Patterson said.
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