The long-running cleanup of one of Delaware’s worst-polluted Superfund sites got a boost last week when the federal government announced $41.5 million in infrastructure funds to speed the remediation of a contaminated wetland at the Standard Chlorine site near Delaware City.
The new money was part of a final installment of about $1 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 (BIL) to help the cleanup of about 100 Superfund sites around the country. They include 25 where the money will be used for new construction; among those is the Delaware site.
At Standard Chlorine of Delaware, also known as Metachem after its final owner, the money will be used to excavate contaminated sediment and treat it on site, said David Sternberg, a spokesman for the EPA’s regional office in Philadelphia. The work will also create a layer of organic material, granular activated carbon and microbes to remove remaining contaminants and restore the wetland.
“The project will result in protection of human health and the environment by addressing source material and remediating contaminated soil and sediment that people and animals may come into contact with,” Sternberg said. The work would have happened eventually but the new funds will allow it to happen sooner, he said.
Sternberg said the Standard Chlorine site, like all the other new recipients, is receiving BIL funding because the remedy design has progressed far enough to allow EPA to sign a contract for construction to start by the end of the federal fiscal year on Sept. 30. The cleanup plan for that part of the site is expected to be complete by spring 2025; construction would start shortly after that, and is expected to take about three years. The overall cleanup is expected to be complete by 2029, said DNREC spokesman Michael Globetti.
“The project will result in protection of human health and the environment by addressing source material and remediating contaminated soil and sediment that people and animals may come into contact with."EPA regional spokesman David Sternberg on what Delaware's infrastructure funds will accomplish.
The 65-acre site about three miles northwest of Delaware City was first contaminated in 1981 when chlorobenzene, a volatile organic compound (VOC), was spilled while being loaded into a railroad tank car. In 1986, the site suffered another spill of 569,000 gallons of VOCs including chlorobenzene into the plant and nearby wetlands. The materials have since been found in ground- and surface water, creek sediments and wetlands.
Standard Chlorine sold the plant to Metachem in 1998 but four years later the new owner declared bankruptcy and closed the plant, leaving some 40 million pounds of chlorobenzenes and related chemicals on site in deteriorating tanks, pipelines and treatment systems, the EPA said. The agency took over the site in 2002 after determining there was no longer a responsible party that could pay for the cleanup.
Since then, the EPA and DNREC have removed “millions of pounds” of abandoned chemicals, and built a barrier beneath the site, from which contaminated water is pumped out and treated before being released into Red Lion Creek. A section of the barrier was repaired after showing signs of groundwater infiltration, and that succeeded in separating the contaminated water from clean water, the EPA said.
Dr. Jerry Kauffman, director of the University of Delaware’s Water Resources Center, said the EPA made the right decision in granting more funding to Standard Chlorine, rather than any of the other 16 Delaware Superfund sites, because of especially bad contamination at the Standard Chlorine site.
“I would have chosen it because of its proximity to potable drinking water sources,” he said, noting that there has been no contamination of drinking water aquifers from the site.
Standard Chlorine and many other Superfund sites should have been cleaned up decades ago, Kauffman said, but progress has been slow largely because of a shortage of money in the “Superfund” which pays for the cleanup of the worst polluted sites. From the passage of the Superfund law in 1980 until 1995, the fund was replenished by corporate money, based on the “polluter pays” principle. But Congressional authorization for the fund ran out in 1995 and has not been renewed, leaving taxpayers on the hook for funding cleanups.
Cleanups are also held back if the polluters have gone bankrupt, as happened with Metachem, leaving the government to pay for and implement the remediation.
Even though the new money will only address a part of the Standard Chlorine site, the funding is a significant step forward for one of Delaware’s most badly polluted locations, he said. “It’s a big deal to address any Superfund site as big as this one,” Kauffman said. He called on Congress to use the historically large BIL funding as a springboard to re-appropriate the Superfund so that more money becomes available for cleanups like that at Standard Chlorine.
“It has been a chronic issue over the years,” he said. “There are many Superfunds in industrial areas but not enough money to clean them up.”
Asked whether the Standard Chlorine site was taking an unusually long time to clean up, even by Superfund standards, DNREC’s Globetti said there are many explanations for the fact that it remains a work in progress 22 years after the EPA took it over and 43 years after the first recorded spill there.
“SCD/Metachem is a complex site, with multi-media impacted by previous owners and operators, which contributes to the challenges of addressing threats to public health, welfare and the environment,” Globetti said.
Sen. Tom Carper, Delaware’s senior U.S. Senator and chairman of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, welcomed the new funding which he said will “help communities across the country clean up legacy pollution and protect public health all while supporting local economies.”
The glacial pace of cleanups at Superfund sites around the country is partly explained by long-running disputes over who must pay, argued Tracy Carluccio, deputy director of the nonprofit environmental group Delaware Riverkeeper Network. “Bureaucratic matters seem to play an important part in addition to the level of toxicity,” she said.
The EPA cleans up all Delaware Superfund sites in cooperation with Delaware’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, which pays 10 percent of the cost, and must approve the cleanup plans.
Tim Ratsep, DNREC’s director of the Division of Waste and Hazardous Substances, said Standard Chlorine was chosen to receive the federal funding because it’s one of only two sites that have plans in place for cleanups to begin in the coming months.
“There is a cleanup action that’s going to be occurring there in coming months that required this and additional state funds,” Ratsep said in an interview.
The other site is Dover Gas Light in Kent County where coal was processed to make gas for street lamps for almost a century until the plant closed in 1948. Although most of the plant was demolished after it closed, coal residues were left behind in tanks and pipes, resulting in “significant contamination” of groundwater with VOCs and other substances, the EPA said.
The Dover site was named to Superfund’s National Priorities List in 1989, making it eligible for federal cleanup funds. Since then, cleanup has included the excavation and removal of contaminated soil, and the construction of a parking lot over a contaminated area to limit the infiltration of storm water.
While the state and federal agencies are still determining how to clean up groundwater at the Dover site, the EPA said there’s no evidence that the contamination has spread to public drinking water in Dover. “Tests confirm that the City of Dover's drinking water supplies currently remain unaffected by site contamination,” it said.
“There is a cleanup action that’s going to be occurring there in coming months that required this and additional state funds."DNREC’s director of the Division of Waste and Hazardous Services Tim Ratsep explaining why Standard Chlorine was chosen to receive the federal funding.
More contamination at the site was found to have been caused by a nearby dry cleaner, the agency said.
Delaware’s list of active Superfund sites also includes Dover Air Force Base where federal officials continue to investigate contamination with PFAS – toxic so-called forever chemicals – which have infiltrated groundwater on and around the base after years of use by the military in firefighting foam.
EPA records show that some PFAS-contaminated material was removed from one part of the DAFB site in 2016 and 2020 but that investigation continues, and a feasibility study on removing other contaminated soil or water is not due until late 2026. The agency is working with DNREC and the Air Force to provide clean water to affected residents, Sternberg said.
Despite the complicated and slow-moving cleanup process at any of Delaware’s Superfund sites, they are all making progress, said Ratsep of DNREC. “The other superfund sites are in different phases; they are moving forward,” he said.
