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The Cleveland Plain Dealer
www.cleveland.com
Pollution case goes to attorney general
By
JAMES LAWLESS
Thursday,
November 02, 2000
PAINESVILLE
TOWNSHIP - Frustrated at the lack of cooperation from "responsible" polluters,
the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency has asked the Ohio attorney general to
see if she can get them back to work.
EPA’s
frustration is with Chemical Land Holdings Inc., a successor to Diamond
Shamrock Corp., the company that produced chemicals on its lakeside facility
for 65 years until it was closed in 1976.
Five
years ago, Maxus Energy Corp., the predecessor to Chemical Land, and 18 other
responsible parties agreed to a process that would first determine what waste
and how much of it was buried on the site and how best to clean it up.
Yet
today, with the investigation of what and where still going on, EPA’s Frances
Kovac, an agency lawyer, said Chemical Land had essentially just stalled or
ignored the steps it needs to take.
Paul
Dugas, senior environmental engineer for Chemical Land Holdings, could not be
reached for comment for the second day.
Kovac
said Chemical Land was given a plan to proceed with a second phase of the site
investigation, which it was supposed to respond to. She said the company never
responded.
"They
bluntly refused," she said.
Several
months later, EPA issued orders for the polluters to proceed with the
investigation, which included sampling the residue of the demolished main
manufacturing plant and what is left of the former coke plant.
"The
Ohio EPA director issued these orders and they did not comply with them. He
asked us to make them comply," said Jennifer Detwiler, an EPA spokeswoman.
Ohio
EPA’s Teri Phillips, the Diamond site coordinator, said, "Our orders laid
out the work for them to do, and they refused to do it."
Kovac
said Chemical Land officials first claimed they did not get the orders and when
she said they had signed for them, they said they lost them.
Both
said they were very disappointed with the turn of events because the parties
have been working on the project for nearly a decade.
They
also said they believe Chemical Land has backed away from its agreement with
the Lake County Utilities Department, in which it agreed to pay costs of a
cleanup of hexavalent chromium, a hazardous waste found by a contractor trying
to replace a sewer force main.
Cost
of the project was $132,000 to remove 42,000 gallons of liquid and 571 tons of
dirt contaminated by hexavalent chromium, a cancer-causing chemical from the
site.
Phillips
said she was disturbed to discover that the underground pollution from the site
goes right up to Fairport-Nursery Rd., which she had never been told. That is
where the county’s contractor dug into the chemical while trying to open the
force main line.
The
contamination caused the project to nearly double in cost, jumping from
$145,000 to $277,000. In addition to replacing the force main, contractors had
to remove the waste in a hazardous waste landfill.
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