The EPA is finally looking to clean-up the most toxic superfund site in Georgia, and they are only going to remove the some of the pollution!! Their reason is to minamize impact to the marsh. Clean it all up!!! Because all the heavy metals and other toxins just sitting there doesnt harm the marsh? Humans & Dolphins using the area show high levels of toxins in their blood. This is absolutley Inadequate! The following article by Dan Chapman, The Atlanta Journal-Consitution gives the history of the site, and coverage of the recent EPAs plan. December 20, 2014 Plant cleanup raises new concerns on Georgia coast Blood tests of dolphins in the waters near this coastal city a few years ago revealed a disturbing discovery: the mammals carried levels of toxins in their bloodstreams higher than any ever documented. For decades the dolphins ate tainted shrimp, mullet and croaker in the Turtle River, which feeds the Brunswick River and St. Simons Sound. The source of the contamination: an old factory that was the scene of a chemical-dumping scandal in the 1990s. State and federal officials this month released long-awaited plans to clean up a portion of the polluted marsh around the defunct LCP Chemicals plant, a federal Superfund site. But controversy and concern lingers. Locals question whether the same pollutants found in the dolphins may have been ingested by humans who ate seafood caught in the area. A study last summer by the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control showed higher-than-normal levels of the same type of PCB fouling the Turtle River in people living on Sapelo Island — 25 miles from Brunswick. The sample, though, was small — nine people — so definitive conclusions weren’t made. The cleanup proposal, meanwhile, has drawn criticism from some quarters. “This plan will not be protective of the public or the wildlife,” said Daniel Parshley, the project manager for the Glynn Environmental Coalition who has spent 25 years trying to clean up Brunswick’s many environmental messes. “There’s a tremendous lack of detail in how they’re going to protect people going forward. “It sounds like their answer is to let God take care of it.” Brunswick is the gateway to the Golden Isles, the tourism and upscale-home enclaves of Sea Island, St. Simons and Jekyll Island popular with metro Atlantans. Yet few Atlantans know that surrounding Glynn County is one of the south’s most polluted communities with 15 hazardous waste sites, including four on the Superfund cleanup list. “We’re all connected, the entire state of Georgia, so we should all want to protect Brunswick,” said Alice Keyes, associate director of One Hundred Miles, a new coastal advocacy group. Toxic broth Brunswick has long been the blue-collar brawler along Georgia’s coast. Paper, chemical and fish-processing plants flank tidal rivers and salt marsh. A state port handles Georgia’s agricultural and auto import-export traffic. LCP Chemicals, whose corporate remnants are now owned by aerospace and chemical giant Honeywell, figures prominently in Brunswick’s industrial history — and infamously in its environmental record. The Atlantic Richfield Company ran an oil refinery on the site between 1918 and 1935. Georgia Power burned oil to fire power plants on the property. Companies that made paint, varnish, chlorine and bleach worked the site between 1941 and 1979, when LCP bought it and started making hydrochloric acid. Each company added its own toxic broth to northwest Brunswick’s soil, groundwater and marsh. LCP declared bankruptcy in 1991 and closed its factory in 1994 when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency designated the property a Superfund site. A half-dozen company officials were sentenced to several years of prison for illegally dumping mercury and other chemicals into local creeks and knowingly endangering the lives of their workers. Fishing was banned in surrounding waters for years; warnings are still posted. “It’s the largest Superfund site in Georgia and the contamination was so severe that the governor got it listed (with the EPA) right away,” said Jim Brown, the site’s program manager with the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR). “If it’s not the worst in Georgia, it’s right up there.” Honeywell bought LCP out of bankruptcy in 1998 and took over liability for the 764-acre site along with Georgia Power and BP (which bought Atlantic Richfield). The companies dug up 167,000 cubic yards of soil, sediment and waste contaminated with petroleum, mercury, alkaline sludges and polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs. An additional 13 acres of marsh has also been dredged. “They closed this creek 10 years ago, so we really don’t let nobody fish off our dock or nothing,” said William Jones, who owns a bait shop with his mother across the Turtle River from the site. “It just tore up our business when they started to clean up the river. It always seems to mess with our livelihood.” In 2006, DNR and a federal agency began studying chemical contamination in dolphins near Brunswick and Sapelo, a barrier island 25 miles up the coast. Three years later scientists captured 29 dolphins and discovered many had highly elevated levels of PCB contamination — 10 times greater than any other dolphins ever documented — in their bloodstreams. Some suffered weak immune systems and low thyroid hormone levels. A quarter were anemic. Several were smaller than normal. Those affected shared a unique PCB mixture known as Aroclor 1268 — the same chemical discharged over the years by LCP Chemical. “We’ve got the most toxic dolphins found anywhere in the world and people are asking, ‘What does this mean for us?’ ” Parshley said. ‘Another 100 years’ The CDC targeted coastal communities in Georgia, Florida and South Carolina to determine if people, like the dolphins, ingested high levels of PCBs and other contaminants. Nine people on Sapelo, who ate at least two meals a week of locally caught seafood, gave blood samples. The CDC hasn’t completed reports on fish eaters in Biscayne Bay, Fla. or Charleston, S.C. But the agency reported that “the current fishing advisory for the Turtle River system may not adequately cover other contaminated rivers and creeks around Brunswick.” The CDC said in September that “human and dolphin specimens contain qualitatively similar environmental contaminants” — namely Aroclor 1268, which was made almost exclusively by LCP. PCBs can effect the immune and nervous systems and lead to stunted development in children and reproductive problems for women. “Contamination from LCP Chemicals Superfund Sites may have migrated along the Georgia coast,” the report said. The DNR’s Brown discounted the study. “We think it’s highly unlikely that sediment and surface water from the Brunswick area migrated up to Sapelo because the discharge of the Altamaha River is between those two locations,” he said. Peter deFur, an environmental biologist hired by the Glynn Environmental Coalition, acknowledged that the CDC’s sample size was too small for conclusions, but that proximity to Aroclor 1268 couldn’t be dismissed “And there’s a substantial body of evidence about the long-range transport of PCBs under various circumstances,” said deFur who teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University. “Twenty-five miles is nothing, particularly in a tidal situation where PCBs move out of one river and the tide flushes it into a different river.” Under the proposed cleanup plan, nearly 25 acres of marsh, creek and upland will be dug up or covered over. The $29 million project will last two years. Monitoring will continue many years after that. A final EPA decision whether to proceed with the proposed cleanup, to be paid for by Honeywell, Georgia Power and BP, is expected early next year. “This is a well-thought through approach for the marsh and it is based on a lot of scientific investigation and analysis,” said John Morris, the site’s project manager for Honeywell. “The remedy will meet the objective established for the cleanup.” Some locals, though, wanted more than 25 acres of soil and marsh cleared of PCBs. EPA at one point proposed a more comprehensive, 48-acre cleanup costing $65 million. Even that plan, ultimately dropped by the feds out of concern it would be too damaging to the marsh, wouldn’t satisfy Parshley and other locals. “Their argument for not removing the poison is to reduce the short-term impact to the marsh,” he said. “But that’s irrelevant for a problem that could go on for another 100 years.”
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 21:36:04 +0000
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