by Evan Brandt, The Pottstown Mercury
LOWER POTTSGROVE -- Contaminated well water from the Superfund cleanup site at the old Occidental Chemical Plant would be dumped directly into the Schuylkill River after it is treated under the terms of a request filed recently with the state.
Currently that water, which is contaminated with heavy metals and at least two carcinogenic chemicals -- vinyl chloride and trichloroethylene -- is treated onsite and discharged into the sewer system that feeds into the Pottstown Wastewater Treatment Plant. The treatment plant discharges its effluent into the Schuylkill -- a drinking water source for more than 1 million people.
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In an advertisement published Jan. 13 in The Mercury, Glenn Springs Holdings Inc., with an address listed at 375 Armand Hammer Boulevard, gave notice of the request it had filed with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
That company’s relationship to OxyChem -- which closed the plant last March, putting nearly 200 people out of work -- is unclear. A message left at the phone number in the advertisement was not immediately returned.
DEP spokesman Dennis Harney said the application to amend the site’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit was deemed incomplete, so it has not even been processed yet.
Once the application is deemed complete, Harney said the state will begin a technical review of the proposal and decide whether or not there will be public hearings. Hearings are not required, but they can be held "if it’s determined that there is significant community interest," said Harney.
The Alliance for a Clean Environment is already interested.
On Jan. 17, ACE, which has a technical expert advising them on the Superfund site through a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, dashed off a letter to Joseph Feola, DEP’s southeast regional manager -- a copy of which it forwarded to The Mercury.
In it, ACE President Lewis Cuthbert called the notice "woefully inadequate and deceptive," and that "it was unacceptable that the name Occidental Chemical didn’t appear anywhere in that notice."
He argued that ACE’s familiarity with the site alerted them to the move, but "how would the affected public know this notice was about Occidental’s groundwater that was so contaminated EPA didn’t expect it would be cleaned up to drinking water standards for 100 years?"
Cuthbert’s letter noted that last month ACE met with the EPA and the contractors conducting the cleanup at the site and further urged that the two landfills on the 267-acre site be added to the Superfund cleanup.
"Both landfills are located in the 100-year floodplain of the Schuylkill River, which floods its banks periodically," Cuthbert wrote. Rainwater has entered those landfills, causing further leachate, and thus further contamination of the groundwater, that requires additional pumping and treating, he wrote.
When the plant was still operating, the groundwater pumped from the site was used, after treatment, in part of the chemical processing at the plant. But now that the plant is closed, it is simply being fed into the Pottstown sewer system once it is treated -- a disposition that incurs a cost.
"Especially because Occidental has closed, this issue needs to be fully investigated by EPA as part of Superfund," Cuthbert wrote. "Until that comprehensive investigation is completed, there should be no permits issued and no permit changes allowed concerning groundwater at the Occidental Chemical Superfund site."
