Lauren Ritchie: Superfund site contaminating underground water, Trump cuts could drag it out even longer | Commentary

Aug. 2--The thing about the banned pesticide DDT is that it never goes away -- at least not for hundreds of years.

This is a lesson Central Florida learned the hard way, starting nearly 40 years ago when a crooked chemical company owner dumped DDT-laced water into ponds that overflowed into a drainage canal connected to Lake Apopka.

The city of Clermont was a rural outpost of 5,000 people at the time in a county where the owner of Tower Chemical, which made the DDT, was also the head of the Lake County Pollution Control Board.

Anyone possessed of the facts in the paragraph above -- and knowing that this is Florida -- can finish this fox-watching-hen-house story.

Few people realized that something was amiss at Tower because the land between the east border of Clermont and the west one of Oakland was a no man's land. The plant was conveniently tucked just a half-mile north of State Road 50 on County Road 455.

The first clue came when the toxic stew started killing neighborhood dogs that unwittingly lapped from puddles and sent the now-banned pesticide flowing into Florida's second-largest lake, already polluted by years of municipal and agricultural waste.

Allan Hartle, who grew up near Tower, often was sent as a kid to feed the family's cows in the pasture next to the company, where he could see a greenish cloud hovering over the plant. It was chlorine mixed with DDT, and it had leaked.

(Later, Hartle, now 61, would see aerial photos of the plant from the 1970s and realize that it looked as though the military had bombed it with the defoliant called Agent Orange -- it was just a big brown blob on the photos.)

The owner of Tower fled the country, and the Environmental Protection Agency swooped in to declare the chemical maker a "Superfund" site, one of the 115 worst in the U.S.

Over the years, the EPA dug out 48,800 cubic yards of contaminated soil and sent it to be burned at a hazardous- materials facility in Tennessee, and the agency connected eight homes around the area to Clermont city water.

Problem solved, right? Not exactly. Scientists believe DDT and its derivatives don't break down for hundreds of years.

Here's what's going on now:

"We're starting to see it in the groundwater at high levels, and we want to stop it," said Karl Wilson, the EPA's Atlanta-based project manager for Tower. He was in town for a community meeting earlier this week to announce a new attempt to halt this 40-year-old gift that just won't stop giving.

The goal is to contain a "hot spot" of two unpronounceable cancer-causing chemicals derived from DDT, which Wilson called "the most toxic pesticide there is." The spot is beneath the parking lot of an RV storage business atop the spill site. The poisons are measuring more than 1,000 micro-grams per liter of water when fewer than 21 micro-grams per liter is considered safe.

"We're not seeing a downward trend, so we've decided to change strategy," Wilson said.

The new plan is to use a mixture of 6% Portland cement combined with 12% furnace slag -- that comes from cooling molten iron, a byproduct of steel-making, in water, then grinding it. It adds durability and strength to the final product.

Here's where the project gets a little wild. Those materials would be mixed with soil from the site, then poured down 1,213 holes that are between 40 and 70 feet deep and 8 inches across. That's 62,000 yards of the mixture into holes dug by a fleet of augers.

Holy cow.

The concrete would bind the poisons and keep them from migrating into the groundwater -- at least that's the theory. The first nine months would be the pilot program to make sure the plan works at what Wilson said is probably the worst DDT-polluted site in the nation.

Unfortunately, all of this depends on money.

Wilson must appear before an EPA board in the fall and ask for the $13.4 million it will cost to stabilize the DDT derivatives. Getting the cash will be no easy task in a year when the EPA budget is expected to go from $8.8 billion in 2019 to $6.1 billion in 2020, at President Donald Trump's insistence.

Trump sees the EPA as a nosy, interfering agency that prevents companies from making money by issuing too many rules.

Too bad he doesn't understand the importance of this important agency.

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The budget to clean up the nation's 1,337 Superfund sites, 17% of the EPA's total spending plan, will be dropping from $784 million to $668 million.

Meanwhile, car dealers, small businesses, homes and grocery stores all have grown into that formerly remote area and now are neighbors to Tower Chemical, though not close enough to be polluted, according to Wilson.

Want to make your voice heard? The EPA is seeking comments on the plan and on how important this is to the community. Just drop a note to [email protected]. It's hard to imagine a more pressing kind of toxic disaster than DDT leaking into Florida's drinking water.

[email protected]

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