Talk on Pines investigation draws crowd

By Deborah Sederberg

Staff Writer

Published: Wednesday, March 17, 2010 4:18 AM CDT

PINES — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has not yet completed its review of a draft remedial investigation of the Pines Superfund Site.

Nonetheless, the document generated plenty of conversation during a more than two-hour meeting Tuesday night at Dunes Baptist Church.

About 60 people crammed into the church’s small meeting room, which at one point was standing-room only. They were there to discuss the water and soil contamination that likely is the result of fly ash dumping. Fly ash is a byproduct of burning coal to produce electricity. NIPSCO dumped more 1.5 tons of it at the Yard 520 dump more than 25 years ago. The landfill closed in 2003, but that dump is not the only source of contamination. Fly ash was used as fill on roads as well.

For 10 years now, the people of Pines have been dealing with contaminated wells.

Under a consent order with the EPA, municipal water service was brought to 130 homes in December 2003 and to another 140 homes in 2004, following additional sampling.

Tim Drexler, EPA project manager for the Yard 520 Superfund site remediation, told the crowd the EPA rejected the mathematical groundwater model because the EPA and E.E. Com, the company contracted to do the remediation study, could not reach an agreement on the model.

“We did not require the model,” Drexler said, “and we just decided to forego the model.”

Several audience members, including Pine Township Trustee Nancy Kolasa, asked why the EPA would trust any data provided by the contractors if it didn’t like the model. Drexler explained the EPA was on site when contractors were taking the samples.

“And we trust the labs they are using,” he said. “The numbers are unambiguous.”

The meaning of the mathematical model, however, is open to analysis, he added.

The potentially responsible parties — NIPSCO, Brown Inc. and Bulk Transport — pay the contractor, Drexler said, but the EPA must approve of both the contractors and the labs they use. What’s more, the EPA and its partners, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and the U.S. Geological Survey, all contribute to the final product.

For the study, investigators produced vertical aquifer profiles based on 21 samples from five locations. They monitored 22 wells, as well as four Yard 520 wells. They took 38 samples from 11 existing Yard 520 wells, 33 samples from nine private wells and 375 water level measurements.

Larry Jensen, a former EPA radiation expert, said he has found levels of radiation above what is known as a “cleanup level” on roads contaminated by fly ash and asked whether the remediation investigation mentioned that issue.

Drexler said the investigators took samples from the Superfund site itself, where levels are likely to be highest.

“We took a different approach,” Drexler said, but assured Jensen, who lives in Beverly Shores, but works with the organization, People in Need of Environmental Safety, that the matter is being investigated.