Superfund cleanup catches arsenic returning to site

VINELAND – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Friday announced its intent to revise how it contains and removes dangerous levels of arsenic from the Maurice River watershed here in order to deal with the discovery that arsenic is seeping back into waterway sediment in some areas.

The EPA has made a decades-long effort to reverse environmental damage to the watershed that the now defunct Vineland Chemical Co. created with its facility at 1405 N. Mill Road.

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Arsenic is showing up in sediment in stretches of Blackwater Branch, which runs near Route 55, that previously were declared finished with treatment. Arsenic is a carcinogen and causes other health problems when absorbed above certain levels.

Municipal drinking water wells are not affected by the development, the EPA said.

The EPA first noted the return of arsenic in 2011 within months after sediment remediation had been completed.

"The levels in re-contamination are substantially less and much more localized than prior to the original sediment cleanup, but still above our sediment cleanup value," agency spokesman Elias Rodriguez told The Daily Journal. "We are catching this relatively early, so the problem has not had a chance to recontaminate large areas, yet.

"Hot spots have levels from approximately 100-500 ppm (parts per million) of arsenic in the soil — 500 ppm being rare," he said. "This is only in localized hot spots. The majority of the stream does not have high levels of contamination."

As a result, the Environmental Protection Agency is proposing new “treatment technologies.” Friday marked the start of a monthlong public comment period on its proposed treatment plan revision. The process includes an EPA meeting at City Hall on Aug. 8 to explain its ideas and take comments.

City officials could not be reached for comment on Friday. Rodriguez said his understanding is that Vineland was informally contacted earlier about the emergent situation.

Rodriguez said the work done to date is considered a success. "Today, we are building on that success to address areas that through our continued vigilance have been deemed necessary to address to protect human health," he said.

According to Friday’s EPA statement, the agency wants to treat the arsenic in groundwater to stop it from making its way into sediment. One possible way is to inject oxygen that renders arsenic “immobile and insoluble.”

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“The specific treatment will be selected after the EPA further studies the conditions in localized areas to gauge the effectiveness,” the agency stated. “The EPA may require excavation of ‘hot spots’ to remove remaining contaminated exposed sediment or soil in the Blackwater Branch floodplain.”

The additional cleanup cost would be about $15 million, the agency said.

Blackwater Branch is a tributary of the Maurice River, which heads south into Union Lake in Millville and from there into the Delaware Bay. Union Lake also was badly contaminated with arsenic, and the EPA has a plan for cleaning it at some point.

Vineland Chemical contaminated the watershed due to what government officials called “improper plant practices” connected to its making and storing of herbicides and various other agriculture chemicals and their components.

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The company had made agriculture chemicals since 1949, but its practices did not get it into ruinous trouble until the 1980s. Production ceased in 1994.

The Superfund cleanup effort at the site started in the late 1980s, with a long-term aim of reducing arsenic to levels that would allow it be used again for industrial purposes.

The long, expensive effort has involved treating hundreds of thousands of tons of soil and sediment, and many billions of gallons of water. The watershed still is monitored. Blackwater Branch repeatedly has had its channel altered to accommodate work.

Written comments on the EPA proposal may be mailed to Hunter Young, remedial project manager, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 290 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, N.Y. 10007. Comments also may be emailed to young.hunter@epa.gov. The telephone number is (212) 637-4243.

The proposed plan can be viewed at www.epa.gov/superfund/vineland-chemical.

Joseph P. Smith; (856) 563-5252; jsmith@gannettnj.com