Chemical Contamination
State environmental investigators estimate it will take more than 30 years to clean up one of Michigan's most contaminated sites, where one carcinogen is found at 25,000 times the EPA's legal limit.
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| Kristin V. Johnson |
For more than 30 years, the Americhem Sales Corp. of Mason, Mich., polluted the environment by releasing cancer-causing chemicals into the ground.
Now, after eight years of investigation and cleanup operations, the oil and chemical storage facility is still one of the worst cases of environmental contamination in Michigan.
"It’s definitely one of the examples we use," said Kathy Shirey, the assistant district supervisor for the Lansing district of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s Remediation and Redevelopment Division.
“We’ll take people there and show them the sludge we are pulling right out of the groundwater," she said. “It’s very visual."
After years of oil and other chemicals seeping from storage tanks on the corporation’s property, at 340 North St., a mass of liquid waste has penetrated down to the bedrock beneath the building.
According to the department’s annual report on the site, “free product" more than 9 feet thick is in some of the monitoring wells that ring the property. Free products are hazardous chemicals that have not yet mixed into the groundwater and may be recovered using skimming pumps.
This state is recovering as much of this waste as it can, but the report estimates there may be as much as 90,000 gallons of the waste still beneath the property. Because of the amount of contamination, the report estimates cleanup completion in 2035.
When owner Bruce Whetter bought the company in 1988, he knew the cleanup was going to be an ongoing struggle. While Michigan law requires the original polluter, not the current owner, to cover cleanup costs, Whetter set aside a trust fund to help offset part of the cost.
And according to Americhem technical services manager Jim Nelson, “This would be a brownfield now; but he bought it, and we got to keep our jobs."
The fund set up by Whetter has been depleted, so unless the original polluters can be found viable, the state will be footing the bill for the next 30 years.
More dangerous than the free products, a plume of partially dissolved contaminants has leached into the groundwater and spread as far as 2,000 feet from the buildings.
Engineers from Weston Solutions Inc., an environmental consulting firm in Okemos, Mich., discovered the plume after the state contracted the company to investigate the site.
The state environmental department tracks the plume with monitoring wells and is developing plans to contain it.
“That’s our biggest concern," Shirey said. “The plume has moved to the north, following the Mason esker."
An esker is a geological formation of porous stone and sediments, which allows for freer movement of groundwater, according to Shirey. A report given to the department by Weston in 2003 said the plume had migrated within 500 feet of one of the city’s public wells. Three other municipal wells are within one-half mile of the toxins.
The report also listed the specific chemical concentrations found in the slowly expanding plume. One of the chemicals, tetrachloroethylene, was found in the groundwater in doses exceeding the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum accepted levels by 20 times.
The chemical is a carcinogen and leads to the development of another toxin found in the plume, vinyl chloride.
“That’s a real hot potato," James Tiedje, a crop and soil sciences professor at Michigan State University, said. “It’s known to cause cancer in humans. It is certainly a major concern."
He said there is a well-documented case of vinyl chloride contamination that caused leukemia in children from a town in Massachusetts.
Divinia Stemm, a state toxicologist, said most cases of vinyl chloride poisoning were found in chemical manufacturers and laboratory animals.
In both cases, the result was a “significantly elevated risk of liver cancer," Stemm said in an e-mail. The possibility of Mason citizens being exposed to that level in their groundwater, she said, is unlikely.
According to the Weston report, levels of vinyl chloride in the plume were recorded at 50,000 parts per billion, or ppb. The EPA Maximum Contaminate Level is set at 2 ppb — 25,000 times less than Mason levels.
Tiedje said that vinyl chloride is a byproduct of tetrachloroethylene, and due to the large concentrations of that chemical, more vinyl chloride can be expected as the tetrachloroethylene continues to break down.
To protect the citizens of Mason, the city has stopped using the two wells closest to the plume, except for emergencies, Shirey said.
“We test those wells regularly, and so far there has been no sign of contamination," she said. “There is a worry that if used regularly the plume would get sucked closer toward the wells."
The plume also comes within 1,000 feet of two residential wells, one of which is located at 972 Mason St.
Ronald Wright, the owner of the property, said the state has been testing his well regularly for years, and he has no reason to be worried.
“I get a report from them about every three months," Wright said.
“They have a test well drilled down the road from me. If there was a problem, they’d tell me."
It takes green to be green
While fewer than 8 percent of Michigan's most contaminated sites were treated last year, funds meant to continue the massive cleanip efforts continue to dwindle.
 Kristin V. Johnson Endangered cleanup funds Source: Patty Brandt/Department of Environmental Quality |
About $38 million in state funds was spent in 2005 to clean up environmental contamination in Michigan, and officials say the money is running out.
Michigan maintains 217 sites across the state, where environmental workers clean and monitor pollution that poses a direct threat to the environment. But now these cleanups are in jeopardy.
The sites are known to have released hazardous contaminants into the environment. The cleanup funding comes from the Clean Michigan Initiative Act of 1994. Funds have been slowly draining out of the fund for years, and now workers in the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, have started the search for more money.
“We have very little left for new projects in ’06-’07,” said Bob Reisner, chief of the Funding and Support Unit of the department’s Remediation and Redevelopment Division. “It’s a big need we currently have.”
Reisner said the division’s funding has all been allocated for the next fiscal year at a cost of about another $38 million.
“After that, we just don’t know,” he said. “We’re trying to put all this together right now to see where we’re at.”
Although the money is rapidly disappearing, there is an ever-growing number of contaminated sites being discovered in Michigan.
According to the draft, “Since 1995, the reporting of new sites has exceeded the closure of sites by approximately 50 per year.”
As state funds run dry, the department will have to make tough decisions on which projects to continue. The budget shortage means new sites identified as problematic may only be cleaned at the expense of shutting down existing operations.
Deciding what sites deserve funding, however, is nothing new. There are currently more than 2,800 sites on the state’s list of contaminated areas. Of those, 217 were chosen to receive state funds in the last fiscal year.
The decision to invest taxpayer dollars on environmental cleanup is a complicated process, said Kathy Shirey, the assistant district supervisor for the Lansing district of the state environmental office. First, a site gets a preliminary investigation, which results in a site score. Scores are based on imminent danger to the environment and public health. These factors are combined to give each site a numerical rating from zero to 48.
Still, a high score does not always guarantee money will be allocated, Shirey said.
“Scoring is one of the factors,” she said. “We also look at the possibility for redevelopment and if there is a liable party willing to do the work.”
The chance for redevelopment carries a lot of weight, Shirey said, because part of the Clean Michigan Initiative is written to give priority to sites with a higher chance of redevelopment. The idea is to promote cleanup at sites that can contribute to the state’s economy.
Having a liable party interested in helping with the cleanup is also a great help because they shoulder some of the financial burden, she said.
Patty Brandt, a contaminated site program specialist, said the public is only responsible for a cleanup if the party responsible for causing the contamination cannot be contacted or the government cannot collect the funds from them.
“Because of this provision, the vast majority of the state-funded sites are sites where no liable party can be identified,” Brandt said. “Or the liable party is no longer viable. Like in the Americhem case.”
For this reason, sites with no liable party are termed “orphaned,” she said. For high-risk sites with a liable party that has a limited ability to pay for cleanup, public funding is provided after the liable party’s “ability to pay” is exceeded.
The department is now trying to put together proposals for future appropriations to replace the money that has been drained from the initiative. The initiative, a ballot proposal passed by Michigan voters in 1994, created a one-time bond fund of $675 million. Of that money, $335 was supposed to go to response activities, according to a spending proposal for 2005.
The rest of the money covers both administrative fees and activities not directly linked to cleanups, such as the piping of city water to replace contaminated water or covering contaminated soil with clean soil to minimize the risk of human contact.
Brandt has been helping the department assess how much is left in the fund and when the division will run out of money.
“We have about $38 million committed now and allocated for the next year,” she said.
She said the department only has preliminary budget information right now, but is hoping to put together an information packet and start generating proposals to secure funding soon. An early draft states that appropriations have dropped in the last several years and predicts future funding will be a small percentage of this year’s $38 million.
“We’re going to send something out at some point soon,” Brandt said. “We’ll probably have to stop working on some of the sites.”
Once completed, the department’s plan for stable funding sources and prioritization of cleanup sites will be presented to legislators in charge of state appropriations. Drafts are not yet available to the public.
Unless the department can secure a new source of revenue, many of the site cleanups across the state will be stalled, possibly causing further damage to the environment and greater risk to public health.
“We’re looking now to secure stable funding for the next 20 years,” Shirey said. “We need to find a chunk of money to assure we can continue to do these activities."
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