State Probes Hazardous Waste Near Framingham, MA School

May 11, 2010 - There are serious and troubling questions concerning a hazardous waste facility in a busy suburban neighborhood. WBZ's I-Team has learned there is now a formal state investigation. The facility sits just a few yards from a school full of children, and the town says that the school faces significant risk.

You can hear the laughter of children on a playground at the Woodrow Wilson elementary school in Framingham. Every school day they play a few yards from a very controversial hazardous waste facility owned by General Chemical Corporation.

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Worry spreads over General Chemical's place in the neighborhood in Milford, MA.

April 27, 2010- Simply because of what it does, General Chemical Corp.'s work is "dirty business," one company official acknowledges. "We try to be a cooperative neighbor and we have historically done everything that the town has asked us to do," said Roy Swartz, the company's compliance manager.

The dirty work done at the company's Southside facility, though, has produced a record and reputation that's anything but clean.

Since the hazardous waste transfer facility's start at 133 Leland St. in 1960, next to the Woodrow Wilson School, General Chemical has been in trouble with state and federal regulators, been sued by Framingham's fire chief and been the source of panic in the neighborhood over toxic spills.

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Protestors Want Cleanup of Former North Carolina Plant

April 22, 2010 - Protesters gathered beside the rubble of the former N.C. Finishing Plant (later called Color-Tex) on Wednesday afternoon, urging a cleanup of the site with signs claiming it is a "Hazardous Waste Site."

Officials from the Environmental Protection Agency, N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources and Rowan County Emergency Management visited the site Wednesday. The protest, led by Doug and Bonnie Thomas, was part of an effort to encourage agencies to get to work at the site. Doug Thomas, who was contracted to demolish the buildings two years ago, said he knows of barrels filled with toxic chemicals that are buried under the debris. "I saw they were burying barrels out there and reported it," he said. "People are just tired of this, and we just want it to get cleaned up."

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Pollution fix-it plan proposed for Georgetown site in WA.

February 10, 2010- The state has proposed several fix-it measures to tackle groundwater contamination in Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood. Washington's Department of Ecology is seeking public comments on the proposal through March 26.

Burlington Environmental LLC, a subsidiary of PSC Environmental Services, operated a hazardous wastes processing plant at the site at 734 S. Lucille St. until 2003, when it closed.
Several types of chemicals contaminated the soil and groundwater at that location, the ecology department said in a news release. Burlington has no plans to revive the plant.

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Minnesota Residents Speak Out Against 3M Incinerator

September 24, 2009 - Cottage Grove Environmental Task Force members heard that message often Wednesday during an emotional forum held to gather public input on the 3M Co. proposal to begin burning non-3M hazardous waste at its corporate incinerator in Cottage Grove.

Nearly 50 residents joined the task force, local elected officials and 3M representatives at the meeting, and most who spoke made clear their views to the volunteer group studying 3M’s proposed amendments to its Minnesota Pollution Control Agency permits that govern the four-decade-old hazardous waste incinerator.

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Proposed Hazardous Waste Riles Texas Residents

July 29, 2009 - A proposal to build a hazardous household waste collection facility near a neighborhood has residents worried about safety. League City applied for a grant to build a regional hub for the collection of household hazardous waste, including paint, oil, pool chemicals, potent cleaners and discarded electronics, near the Bay Ridge subdivision on the city’s east side.

But some people living in the subdivision near the site said they want the city to provide more information, including about how it would prevent chemicals at the site from leaching into the soil near their homes.

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Waste Has IN Property Over A Barrel

May 26, 2009- No one wants to own the hazardous waste-soaked Hassan Barrel site. The defunct company’s Summer Street location and several neighboring properties weren’t sold last fall when Allen County conducted its tax sale to collect delinquent taxes.

The $20,000 in back taxes isn’t worth the risk of helping to pay to clean up the property, said Dave Fuller, Allen County building commissioner. Federal officials have said employees stored barrels of caustic chemicals in sheds and trailers and eventually dumped the waste into huge trash bins and open pits because the cost of disposing the waste grew too high over the years. But what they were dumping was a toxic brew of paint waste, volatile chemicals such as butanone, ethyl benzene and toluene and heavy metals such as cadmium, chromium, lead and mercury. The chemicals can cause health problems including cancer, kidney and liver damage and lung problems.

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Arkansas Contamination Prevents Garden Expansion

April 24, 2009- The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) found land and water contamination at 11 natural gas and oil sites.

Jack White enjoys growing his own produce out of his greenhouse at his Hartford home. His only source of water comes from a well.

He said a nearby natural gas waste water dumping site, operated by Eastern Tank Services, and is preventing him from expanding his garden.

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Brockovich Discusses Lawsuit in Missouri

April 24, 2009- Erin Brockovich, along with Field Environmental Investigator Bob Bowcock and Brian Madden, a lawyer with Madden and Redding Law Firm, spoke with the Cameron community on Wednesday night at Goodrich Auditorium.

On Wednesday morning, Madden's law firm, in conjunction with Stephen K. Griffin, a lawyer in Cameron, filed a suit in the 43rd Judicial Court against Prime Tanning Corp, National Beef Leathers Co. and Rick Ream, of St. Joseph.

The lawsuit states that the tanning company was distributing a waste byproduct from their operation that was given free to farmers to use as fertilizer. And that hexavalent chromium, a known carcinogen also called chromium 6, used in the tanning process, is present in the material.

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PA Residents Hot Over Hazardous Waste Site

April 17, 2009- Residents living near the Tank Car Corp. of America on Oreland Mill Road are still looking for answers about why they were not notified that a hazardous waste cleanup was under way at the property. They also remain concerned about the potential risks still associated with the site.

“We wanted to organize [the meeting] because we were curious to know what was going on back there and why no one in the neighborhood was notified,” Grabus said. “Having residents in close proximity to potentially dangerous materials is something we should know about.”

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EPA eyeballing potential hazardous waste in Kansas City

March 27, 2009-The Environmental Protection Agency is investigating a potential hazardous materials site owned by the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kan.

The EPA’s Region 7 headquarters announced in a news release this afternoon that inspectors are collecting samples of the material at the site, located at North First Street and Franklin Avenue in Kansas City, Kan., next to the Juniper Gardens public housing development.

The EPA visited the site earlier this week after receiving a tip from a confidential source. Once there, inspectors discovered abandoned drums, containers with unknown substances, suspected pesticide wastes, broken fluorescent light bulbs, used tires, oil, abandoned vehicles and an electrical transformer.

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Roswell New Mexicoresidents protest hazardous waste site

November 20, 2008 - Roswell residents are protesting the idea of putting a hazardous waste dump near their southeastern New Mexico city.

Complaints surfaced at a hearing in Roswell (Tuesday) over the Bush administration's proposed Global Nuclear Energy Partnership program, or GNEP.

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Health risks at creosote cleanup site in Washington State are mulled

August 18, 2007 - What hazards remain for the public at the still-polluted Superfund site?

Life was simpler before people wised up to the dangers of hazardous waste.

Charles Schmid recalls swimming in the Atlantic Ocean and coming home with tar on his feet. Jerry Elfendahl spoke of the the Japanese drug Seirogan, which touts creosote as its main ingredient to fight diarrhea.

While the small audience at the EPA’s five-year review of the Wyckoff Super-fund site chuckled at the expense of a more naive age, Richard Kauffman, senior regional representative for the Agency of Toxic Substances and Disease Registry brought the issue home:

“With so many variables that affect public health, it’s very difficult to link specific contaminants to ailments.”

While the EPA is pushing for a containment plan on the controversial site at Bill Point, and the city, Suquamish Tribe and the state Department of Ecology are pushing for a more costly thermal treatment of underground creosote waste, community concerns about health hazards have not been addressed since the ATSDR’s last report on the site back in 1994.

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A Washington Family Finds a Hazardous Waste Site in the Backyard of Their New Home

July 9, 2007 - n the middle of the flooding and the mold, years of personal and industrial waste began percolating up from the middle of the Nealey's backyard.

Julie showed us through the thick brush pointing out trash, oil drums and rusted car bodies from an old auto shop.

"The only way it could get worse is if they dug into the property and found a burial site," she said.

"We did all the things you're suppose to do, we had home inspections, our mortgage company did flood determinations, we had a title company look at stuff, no one found anything," Julie said.

The Nealeys sued their home inspector, only to find out their contract allowed them to sue only for what they paid their inspector -- less than $200. The Nealeys also sued the former owners and their real estate company, Wilson Realty.

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Nearly half of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Superfund site

April 26, 2007 - WASHINGTON, April 26, 2007 — Communities across America face a daunting threat from hazardous waste sites — some near neighborhoods and schools — 27 years after the federal government launched the landmark Superfund program to wipe out the problem, a Center for Public Integrity investigation has found.

Initiated in 1980, Superfund is desperately short of money to clean up abandoned waste sites, which has created a backlog of sites that continue to menace the environment and, quite often, the health of nearby residents.

Nearly half of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of one of the 1,304 active and proposed Superfund sites listed by the Environmental Protection Agency, according to the Center's analysis of these sites and U.S. Census data of the 2000 population.

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