Superfund site flashbacks

Watching CBS This Morning and this story about groundwater contamination gave me flashback chills of another site I had worked on top of without a clue

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/seeking-to-solve-a-pediatric-cancer-mystery/

The Brio Site, near Friendswood,TX came to light in the mid 80’s. The power crews I worked on set poles and then the underground grid, in more often than not muddy conditions. I recall pulling tar and foul smelling dirt away from the auger and shoveling it back in as we set poles. We all looked at each other wondering what was happening. Several of us had rashes, flu like respiratory issues and headaches following each work session but never related it back to working in Southbend Subdivision. I then often returned as a two man service crew to hook up new homes, including my sister-in- laws around 1982,I think. Putting a shovel in the ground always produced a foul odor and often very black tarry soil.
I left Houston about time this all started to come to light. Read some again after my then adult son talked about as teens hanging out in abandoned subdivision and knowing my former sis- in- law had been bought out.
Hurricane Harvey, along with other big rain events have often flooded this area as well. Pretty somber reading that put a knot in my stomach this morning seeing the mothers in this CBS story in Indiana and knowing there are a lot of hidden ones still.

A few links to Brio:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brio_Superfund_site

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/08/us/southbend-journal-fear-eats-away-ideal-neighborhood.html

http://southbelthouston.blogspot.com/2015/01/brio-superfund-south-belt-ellington.html?m=1

This was our neighborhood paper as I lived close enough to know where that abandoned refinery was before the building boom made it next door

I saw it as well Steve. Unfortunately there are many places that should have been taken care of. While some will do as they want, no matter what, it would be nice to see Human Authority Figures make it easier for the general population to “do the right thing”.
A small fire at a barn turned into something hard to imagine when the homeowner mentioned that a mercury thermometer had perished in the fire.
OM

There was a small EPA Superfund site here in our city. There had been a dry cleaners a building for decades and they had been pouring used chemicals out the back door. You wouldn't think much of it, but I worked for a HVAC company and we worked on some of their heating equipment and saw some of the results first hand. They had built a steel building covering the 1/4 city block just so they could work through out lovely north Dakota winters.

The company doing the recovery had many wells dug, just a few feet apart. There were huge electrodes shoved down the wells that line voltage was run through then the ground water would boil. The company would collect the steam generated, and distill the water and other chemicals. The water would go into the city sewer and they collected the rest. I don't know how much they recovered but I remember asking one of the workers and he showed me a collection of 55 gallon drums that he said were full of chemical.

Also the EPA paid us to install an air exchanger, HRV in a house just across the alley from the site. I remember looking into the sump pump pit and I could see a haze of chemical floating on the water in the pit.

The one thing that was crazy is the family that owned the house had an offer from the EPA to buy it at a more than fair price and pay all their expenses to move. As I recall the homeowners got greedy and demanded a lot more than anyone though was reasonable and as far as I know they still live in the house as negotiations fell apart and stopped. Personally, I would have moved in a heart beat. How would you like to disclose on a home sale that there was an EPA superfund site 50 feet away?

It mentions here there was 5,100 pounds of chemical recovered

https://bismarcktribune.com/news/state-and-regional/epa-suing-over-former-west-fargo-drycleaning-site/article_9ce9412f-a91f-5c31-9008-67e84531b2d3.html

In one of the pictures on this web sight you can see the wells, just a few feet from the home I mentioned.

https://www.cascade-env.com/projects/camelot-cleaners-superfund-site/

There are so many sites all over North America, the Argentia US military site is one here.

Here is a site remediation going on in my town: https://www.eveningtribune.com/stor...ormer-hornell-mpg-site-set-to-begin/42493305/

It is the site of an old "manufactured gas plant." In the old days, before natural gas fields were discovered and put into play, and gas pipelines, small towns and cities would manufacture gas out of coal and sometimes oil. Environmental practices were loose or non-existent and the by-products toxic. There are a lot of these sites scattered across the country.

Harry

The city here had to deal with one remains of those coal gas plants a couple years ago. Xcel Energy was aware of the site, but when the city was doing road and sewer improvements there was more discovered. The construction ground to a halt and the city engineers were called. Nothing on that block but a park at this time. I wonder if they will ever allow building on the site.

More here,
https://www.xcelenergy.com/staticfiles/xe/PDF/ND-Fargo-Manufactured-Gas-Plant-%20Project-Info-Sheet.pdf

What happens this time of year during active remediation in both NY & ND? Looks like a lot of digging in NY!

Their was a huge tin smelter near Galveston in Texas City we as kids thought was a giant rusting hulk of cool as we drove past it twice a weekend. Years later we saw this come to light. I remember an RV park on adjoining property that was new and busy and years later had plastic covered piles and nothing but old streets and salt air destroyed signage. First time I ever heard the term Superfund and maybe along timeline of Love Canal. Also wondered what happened to the people living in RV park.

http://www.texascity-library.org/page/history.tc.tin_smelter

https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.cleanup&id=0602105

The Solution to Pollution is Dilution, and it happens all the time, Just mix enough polluted water with good water and it is now good enough to drink!!

The Houston-Galveston area has a high proportion of Superfund sites; lots of reasons behind that including having the nation's largest petrochemical complex for so many decades. Many of the contaminants are legacy issues as you describe, due to lesser standards and practices that were common prior to the Clean Water Act. Some of my graduate research 20 years ago was to provide data toward cleanup targets for one legacy site along the Houston Ship Channel.

You can locate superfund sites (along with a number of other information) on the EPA's My Environment page. Enter your zip code, click on "MyMap", and use the "select Map Contents" feature. If you expand the layer titled "land", it has a "superfund sites" sub-layer that will locate them on the map for that zip code.

The map is a pretty handy tool, and I have my students use it in one of my environmental science classes at the college.

Just got word my former brother in law just diagnosed with CML leukemia. Early diagnosis and promising prognosis at age 64.
My daughter said all his kids have a trust set up from Brio settlement for future health issues. Not sure about him. You don’t have to stretch to think there’s a link to his living there.

henzilla said:

Just got word my former brother in law just diagnosed with CML leukemia. Early diagnosis and promising prognosis at age 64.
My daughter said all his kids have a trust set up from Brio settlement for future health issues. Not sure about him. You don’t have to stretch to think there’s a link to his living there.

Click to expand...

No doubt about it. That was a particularly insidious one due to the groundwater contaminants in that clay. Lots of opportunity for exposures over a long time.

PoorUB said:

The city here had to deal with one remains of those coal gas plants a couple years ago. Xcel Energy was aware of the site, but when the city was doing road and sewer improvements there was more discovered. The construction ground to a halt and the city engineers were called. Nothing on that block but a park at this time. I wonder if they will ever allow building on the site.

More here,
https://www.xcelenergy.com/staticfiles/xe/PDF/ND-Fargo-Manufactured-Gas-Plant-%20Project-Info-Sheet.pdf

Click to expand...

More than likely there is a restriction on the property deed prohibiting any future construction on the site. In recent years (prior to 2016) the EPA has had what is called a brownfields program and they help communities by giving grants to cities and towns to clean up the sites so that they can be safely used by the public. Those are sites that have been taken from a brownfield status to a greenfield status. The cleanup has to adhere to certain cleanup standards and the sites are often done in an effort to take a neighborhood that is blighted and help it to get turned around so that it becomes useful, used positively, and helps it become desired again. I imagine it also ends up taking property that is costing a community money and getting the area to start generating tax income for the city/town.

Louise