EPA officials held a public meeting at Northwestern High School in Clark County last night (Wednesday, June 7) to discuss the clean-up of the Tremont City Barrel Fill superfund site.
In the late seventies, the Tremont City Barrel Fill was a place where companies like Procter & Gamble, PPG industries, and Waste Management (now WM) buried their unwanted waste. One problem: the landfill is built near the aquifers that supply drinking water to approximately one hundred thousand people in Clark County.
Last year, a local judge approved a plan ordering the companies who dumped there to clean it up. The consent decree came after residents had been sounding the alarm for years about the potential for water contamination at the site.
Crews will start that clean-up later this month, though it will take years to complete.
Jenny Polster, remedial project manager for the US EPA, met both with the public and local officials this week to discuss the clean-up her agency is overseeing.
“I want to make sure that you understand that these questions aren’t going to go away and they're going to be in the back of our minds,” Polster said to the crowd during the question and answer session at the public meeting. “I've got some of them right now in my head, and I'm going to write them down quickly as soon as this meeting is done.”
The consent decree approved last year requires the clean-up to be a collaborative process — the public meetings held this week are part of that effort.
The public asked questions about how the waste will be transported off-site, including what roads will be taken by trucks. They also asked how local citizens would be notified of potential emergencies.
“These questions are going to be answered. They're going to be answered in great detail. We have processes in place to make sure that this happens, and a lot of the things that you're bringing up right now are part of the standard response,” Polster said.
ThePotentially Responsible Parties (PRPs) in this case did not respond to WYSO's request for comment.
