It could be another two months before the Environmental Protection Agency has a finalized plan to clean up 22 acres of the former Kerr-McGee plant site, and another three years before that effort is complete.
EPA Remedial Project Manager Charles King and other personnel gave updates about the future cleanup plan Thursday night for the old wood-treatment plant, which was declared a Superfund site in 2011.
King said the plan is to encase up to 20 of the 56-acre-main-plant area, with a 4,550-foot-long and 50-feet-deep concrete barrier wall to contain creosote still in the ground. There would also be a 12-foot-tall soil cap placed on top. The encasement would generally be located in the southwest corner of of the site, south of 14th Avenue.
At that point, trees would be planted on top for phytoremediation, a method of growing trees to soak up the creosote contamination from the groundwater and soil through root systems.
The project is expected to cost $13.6 million and take two to three years, King said.
“This is the best trade-off of the bouncing criteria for cleanup,” King said. “It’s cost-effective, and it provides permanent solutions to the maximum extent that is practical. It has concurrence on support from our EPA headquarters, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, as well as the Multistate Trust.”
For the 18 acres of the northern portion of the site, known as OU-5, King said the EPA recommends the Trust to implement personal protective equipment and protocols for future construction work done there. No protective barriers would be built on that section of the plant.
“In OU-5, there was only one contaminant, and it was found at low levels,” King said. “That is what we call a relatively low-risk area. Depending on what the reuse scenario is, such as a parking lot, maybe nothing needs to be done… If there’s going to be something that may require digging up dirt and stuff like that, there may be some additional things that need to be done.”
Public comment period
The public comment period ends Nov. 16, and King said that community members can submit comments and concerns to EPA via his email at [email protected].
Once comments and concerns are collected, the EPA will come to a record of decision and advise the Multistate Trust on moving forward with the cleanup.
“It kind of depends on how many comments, and if the comments that we get don’t cause us to change the remedy, then that ROD will come sooner, probably within 60 or 90 days,” King said. “If there is something that causes us to readjust and rethink the remedy, I don’t even know how to put a timeframe on it because it might cause us to have to recalculate something or collect some more samples.”
Cleanup efforts so far
Kerr-McGee operated a wood-treatment plant at the site from 1928 to 2003, by which time the pollutant creosote, which is used to treat wood, had contaminated the plant site and surrounding area. Creosote can cause skin and eye irritation, stomach pains, liver or kidney problems and possibly cancer according to the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
Since 2015, the Multistate Trust, which is responsible for the $67 million cleanup, has completed the removal of topsoil at the site, installed water pumps to keep contamination in the main plant area below groundwater levels and remediated up to 22 acres of the Pine Yard.
The Trust also completed a project to clean up ditches along 14th Avenue and Waterworks Road by 2021, which cost $2.3 million.
Next steps
Claire Woods, director for environmental justice with the Greenfield Trust and Theo Von Wallmenich, program director for federal sites, told The Dispatch once the Trust receives a final decision from EPA, it will enter into a design phase for the cleanup project, which will outline what the barrier wall will look like, how many trees to plant and where those will go. The project is expected to take two to three years.
“There’s several key steps to go through the remedial design,” Von Wallmenich said. “There are some designs that take a couple of years, there are some that take a couple of months, but this one I think is going to be somewhere less than a year. Then, we have a procurement step to seek and evaluate bids. So that also takes some time, roughly a year, and then you have to do the build, and we’re hoping that would take between six and nine months.”
he Trust will also work with the City of Columbus and the Community Action Group to gather feedback on a development plan for the northern section of the main plant, and if it will require further cleanup.
“It’s really in the early phases of discussion with the city and the community members here,” Woods said. “We’re trying to understand what they want, what they’re interested in and what would serve the needs of residents here. I’ve definitely heard people talking about a small commercial center with access to things like convenience stores and other amenities for people who are using the recreation center vendors.”
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 31 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
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