thursday, february 12, 2004
news
the university daily kansan
7A
Facility detects chemical pollution
By J.T. Mitchum
jmitchum@kansan.com
Kansan staff writer
Tucked away behind the pipes and cooling towers of the abandoned Farmland plant at the eastern edge of Lawrence rests a patch of soil contaminated with an infamous chemical that made one Lawrence woman famous.
Farmland's abandoned plant, east of Lawrence, waits for cleanup and restoration of land because of harmful chemicals being used on the site in the '90s. The site is just two miles from KU property.
Hexavalent chromium, the deadly carcinogen that made Erin Brockovich famous in her self-titled movie, lurks within two miles of the University of Kansas campus, right above the Kansas aquifer.
"Anytime you are dealing with a chemical that is a known poison that's in ground water that could reach a human being, no level is acceptable, and I know industry hates to hear that." Brockovich-Ellis said.
Kamyar Manesh, manager of Farmland's corporate environment division, knows there are problems but doesn't think the issues are that large.
"There is a lot of scare going on that this is a bad place," Manesh said.
The 1995 well samples from Farmland and nearby farms indicated chromium levels of 1090 milligrams per liter (mg/L). This level is a fraction above maximum contamination level, or MCL, of 1000 mg/L for drinking water,
which is set by the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Farmland, east of Lawrence, uses waste pools to store contamination that is filtered out of water from the aquifer underneath it.
When Brockovich-Ellis researched the case documented in her movie, residential wells had significantly higher chromium levels than those found in Farmland samples. Wells in California had levels of 20,000 to 24,000 mg/L, well more than 1,000 times the amount at the Farmland plant when samples were taken more than eight years ago.
Chromium hasn't been used in the cooling towers since 1988.
Beyond the chromium debate, what really frightens city officials, Farmland and would-be buyers is a chemical soup of nitrate and nitrite.
When the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, studied the sight in 1995, results showed ground water levels of 1,810-mg/L nitrate — more than 180 times the Federal recommended safe level. The Safe Drinking Water sets current accepted values at $10\mathrm{mg / L}$ for nitrates and $1\mathrm{mg / L}$ for nitrite.
Nitrate and nitrite are commonly found in nature and, in fact, are necessary to sustain life, but excess exposure to nitrates or nitrites can cause blue baby syndrome if ingested by young infants.
Farmland and KDHE generated a plan to help bring the Farmland site within federal and state guidelines. The plan, called the Corrective Action Decision, was create to keep the plant operating for many more years to come, said Kurt Limesand, unit chief of environmental remediation at KDHE.
Limesand and Manesh see no reason why the industrial portion of the site could not be used for other industry within a relatively short period of time.
Another idea for the Farmland site is to convert it into a business park or limited extension to the 4- H fairgrounds, an attachment to the Farmland facility.
Gary Blackburn, KDHE remediation director, said he could maybe see a commercial use of the site but not for residential use for many more years to come. On-site landfills of waste even though properly made were not placed with the idea of houses and families living above them.
In the meantime, a powered drainage system pulls water out of the deep Kansas aquifer at a droning of 10 to 20 gallons a day, purging the site of any remaining nitrate and chromium contaminated water into controlled ponds where it is eventually sprayed onto farm crops.
"Nobody wants to buy land that's been contaminated, but land that's been contaminated can be cleaned up," Brockovich-Ellis said. "It's not all gloom and doom."
Development is paralyzed by the pace of clean-up. While KDHE had made no assessments to determine the length of remediation, Farmland estimated 20 years until full clean-up of the current systems.
More aggressive plans could make the area suitable for development, but that costs money, Limesand said — something bankruptcy court isn't likely to go for.
"The devil is in the details." Limesand said. "They could tear down all those buildings, and down
who knows what you would find underneath them."
That is something Douglas county commissioners are well aware of. The commission sent a letter to Rod Bremby, KDHE secretary, requesting the department to ensure none of the clean-up cost is dumped onto taxpayers.
Farmland has allocated just less than $500,000 for the cleanup and maintenance of the site.
Farmland intends to sell off much of the plant's still useful buildings, which would be moved to other locations outside of Lawrence. The proprietary technology hidden in the pipes is highly useful to other companies.
"Our fear is they'll deal off the clean parts and leave us with the contaminated ones," said Jones, former KDHE director of environment, according to a Lawrence Journal-World article.
While the dance around what to do with the East Lawrence property continues, the site waits under the watchful ground well checks of KDHE and Farmland.
"The decisions you make today have the ability to impact, possibly in a bad way, a nameless faceless human being down the road," Brockovich-Ellis said.
Edited by Guillaume Doane
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