Officials discuss summer work in Superior

Superior residents had a lot of questions for officials on Wednesday night at a meeting concerning the soil samples that the Environmental Protection Agency had done last summer and work that is being planned for this summer. Superior mayor Mike Wood opened the meeting by thanking everyone for coming out noting that there was a lot of work to be done this summer.

Diana Hammer, from the EPA, started off the meeting by addressing two concerns of the residents. The first involved how everything was to be paid for and the second issue she addressed was the hiring of local contractors. Unlike back in 2002 when the town had to pay for the removal, funds for yard sampling and removal this time around are coming from government funds as Superior was listed to the Superfund National Priorities List. The state of Montana and the Forest Service also has money from the Asarco settlement to clean up the Flat Creek Area. As for the hiring of local contractors, Hammer said that their intention is for the main contractor to subcontract out to as many local contractors to do the work as they can.

The rest of the meeting was broken into the following sections: work sampling results from last summer, sampling to be done this summer, work to be done this summer, the repository and institutional controls for after the cleanup is finished.

Leslie Sims, the project manager from EPA, said that last summer they sampled 317 yards exceeding their goal of 250.

"From those samples, good news is that 82 percent came back clean," Sims said.

Twenty-five of those homes that were above the threshold, meaning they are believed to pose a risk to human health, are guaranteed to be cleaned up this summer. In the scale the EPA uses, a yard that is over the threshold contains a lead amount over 3000 part per million (ppm). In parts of the fairgrounds and high school lead was also found in high concentration and will be cleaned up this summer. Twenty-eight homes were found to be in the intermediate area, falling between 250 ppm and 2999 ppm. Sims said that these homes would be sampled again this summer to give the EPA a more accurate idea of what is actually in the yards. Hammer said that not only are they looking at the concentration of lead, but the type of lead and whether or not it is one that will be absorbed into the bloodstream.

Also planned for this summer is the sampling of more yards and Sims said that if they find any of high concentration they will do their best to also get them cleaned up, but with the short window of work, from June to August, they will probably be cleaned up next summer in 2011.

Duc Nguyen, from the EPA who will be out in the field this summer supervising the cleanup efforts, said that it is only required that it is policy that he only goes down 12 inches. However, if a yard is really contaminated in some instances he might end up going down 24 inches. And while confirmation samples will be taken to assure that the lead is cleaned up it is possible that farther down there is more severe contamination. If a homeowner did end up digging further and found more contamination then they themselves would be responsible for the removal of the contaminated soil.

"If we try to remove all the contamination out it would clean out the superfund budget," Nguyen said. "It's all based on risk assessment. Policy says all we have to do is go down a maximum of 24 inches to avoid risk to human health."

Wood, as well as Hammer and Sims, said that most of the contamination that is in Superior is only surface level however and so they don't foresee contamination further down as a problem.

"The nice thing about the contamination we have is most of it is surface level," Wood said. "There are only a few properties that might have to be concerned about going deeper, as this stuff was brought in by pickup and scattered on the surface."

Rather than haul the waste from Superior into landfills in Missoula, Nguyen said it is going to be more cost effective to setup a temporary repository to hold the waste until a permanent structure could be built. The temporary structure will possibly be built over on a piece of property by the airport in the county. Currently, the Forest Service has a piece of land that is being traded over to the DNRC, which is close to the Flat Creek area so transport from cleanup efforts would be easily accomplished.

One other important part that will have to be worked out is what happens if someone does find a largely contaminated area after the cleanup processes. Tim Read, who works in sanitation for Mineral County, said that is possibly where institutional controls would come into place. Basically, these controls would present a process on what should be done and how it should be done should such a situation occur. While the details remain to be worked out at a later date, one of the hopes is that the permanent repository would be open-ended.

Finally, through a grant funded by the EPA, Superior would be eligible for $50,000 in grant money over a period of a few years. With this grant, the community would have an independent technical assistant to help the community understand the documents the EPA puts out. George Bailey and Robert Lions are currently working to committee for this.

"Not only are they trained in this area, but they'd be able to answer a lot of questions on an ongoing basis between these types of meetings," Bailey said.

Removal planning is already underway with property owners and sometime in June the EPA field office should once again open up in Superior. Soil samplings and removal will also begin. Sampling will end in July and in August the field office will close once again with the end of the summer.