EPA schedules public meeting

BY MIKE HELENTHAL

HEGELER May 06, 2009 10:09 pm

— A mountain of toxic slag at the abandoned Hegeler Zinc property won’t be going anywhere soon.
But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is reporting progress on a number of fronts in the effort to clean it up.
“There’s a lot of updating we need to provide to the community,” said Colleen Moynihan, EPA remedial project manager in charge of the cleanup.
“We have been moving forward.”
How far and how fast will be the topic of daylong informational meetings with area residents May 28 at Westville High School.
According to Maggie Carson, a spokeswoman for the Illinois EPA, officials will hold an “informal open house” in the school district’s board room to meet one-on-one with residents from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and will make a formal presentation in the school cafeteria from 6-8 p.m.
Carson said the meeting is not an official public hearing within the toxic-property cleanup process.
“It’s more informal than a hearing,” she said. “It’s more of an opportunity for people to ask questions and get answers.”
Moynihan said EPA officials will be sharing initial soil- testing results with residents near the affected site, and asking them to allow another round of testing to determine the full extent of off-site contamination.
“At our initial first look we didn’t have enough (information),” she said. “We only tested in one area of their yards.”
Environmental officials have monitored the Hegeler site for at least the past 10 years, identifying it two years ago as a Superfund toxic site that should be cleaned up.
The plant, first developed as a zinc manufacturer in 1906, is located just south of Tilton in unincorporated Danville Township on a parcel of property near KIK Manufacturing.
While no dangerous levels of toxins have been found, samplings in and around the site show lead and other metals have been leaching from the slag pile since it was abandoned more than 50 years ago.
A preliminary report prepared in 2007 by the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services Public Health Service indicated years of testing has shown toxins do indeed exist on the property, including lead, arsenic and zinc, which led to it being fenced off from trespassers the same year. They also say nearby Grape Creek doesn’t carry high enough lead levels from the Hegeler site to cause a danger, and the water that eventually runs to the Vermilion River would be filtered out before it reached public drinking supply intakes. No local municipality uses Grape Creek as a municipal water supply and the report found no nearby wells that might contain lead.
“The Illinois Department of Public Health concludes that the site poses no apparent public health hazard,” the report concluded. “Currently, no one is being exposed to chemicals at levels that would be expected to cause adverse health affects.”
The EPA’s Moynihan said the actual cleanup process has been slowed somewhat due to the finding of and negotiating with PRPs, or Principal Responsible Parties. She said on the Hegeler site there is more than one party expected to foot cleanup costs. To further complicate the process, one of the PRPs recently claimed bankruptcy.
Once those details are finalized, officials can proceed with a feasibility study, the first step towards a cleanup. Moynihan guessed such a study wouldn’t start until at least 2011.
Outgoing Danville Township Supervisor Roger Boen, who lives just three blocks from the site, said he is interested in seeing the EPA’s ongoing sampling information to find out just how many toxins have been released into the nearby environment.
He said his yard and others in the area (one EPA report says almost 250 people live within a half-mile of the site) have been undergoing testing for at least the past 18 months.
“I know they found some toxins in my yard, but the levels were pretty low,” he said.
Boen, who attended a similar EPA meeting two years ago in Tilton, said he is interested to see what progress has been made in the interim and when the cleanup stage would start.
“They know it’s highly toxic and (the slag pile is) huge,” he said. “They’ve got this huge slag pile that’s going to have to be removed eventually, I guess it’s just a question of when.”
Tilton Mayor David Phillips said removal is also his wish, though he has not received any details from the EPA concerning the upcoming meeting. Outside of the environmental concerns, the mayor said a cleanup could lead to further commercial development on the site.
“Basically, it’s in the way,” he said. “We would like to make it where you could actually build something on it.”
And in the short term, Phillips said there is the possibility of jobs being created with the cleanup.
Phillips said, to his knowledge, the testing program in the area, and of Grape Creek specifically, has been ongoing.
“I know they’ve done some water testing, but I don’t think they’re all the way there yet,” he said. “I can’t tell you how many people have been exposed over the years.”
To Phillips, a cleanup of the site would eliminate the final environmental blight in Tilton. Officials recently celebrated the cleanup of an abandoned gas station near the G Street exit and are now finalizing plans with owners to have another abandoned station’s pumps at Illinois Route 1 and Keegan Avenue removed.