Superfund toxic sites and Resorts

[Valigator]

Yesterday I spent a great deal of time looking at some of the superfund sites and researching some of the most polluted areas of the country. Its amazing what I came up with. Did you know this administration passed a law that limited liabilty to persons that were not considered the original polluters? Did you also realize that a vast majority of the funds designated for clean-up of these sites has been slashed? Did you also know that developers are going in to these areas, purchasing large tracts of land and building resort communities on this land? I will give you an example....there is a guy obviously with a boatload of money by the name of "Ginn Developement" one area he is building is called "Bella Collina" on the shores of Lake Apopka Florida. The fish and game guys are out there literally watching the birds fall from the sky and watching them convulse and die on the shores. They have picked up over 475 birds, not to mention other compromised wildlife. The Apopka area was considered one of the most polluted areas in the state. Now steps in Mr. Ginn, buys the property for a song and developes a resort community on it....you should see the webpage advertising the place..." A get back to Nature" premise...He is also doing the same thing in Colorado where a mining site is loaded with polluted groundwater.... and by the way, these places are high dollar ...someone needs to expose this guy and the public needs to be aware of where they may be buying into. His comment of developing these sites was " I am improving a depressed area" yea while killing the people he sells too....so the lesson to be learned???? when considering buying property, check out where the toxic sites are!

[fabsroman]

Val,

Believe it or not, I dealt with a case like this a couple of years ago. I wasn't the lead attorney on it, but I did some legal research involving it. Our case involved a housing development that was built on top of an old landfill. The waste was decaying and creating methane gas, or some other harmful gas. The gas vents that the developer put into the landfill were not doing their job and the harmful gases were coming up through the basement of people's homes. The fire department was called in when people started getting sick and they took some readings. Turns out the the readings were off the charts and the houses were condemned until the problem could be fixed. Of course, the developer was pointing the finger elsewhere. Utterly insane that something like this has to go to litigation. The developer should have paid back the homeowners, without any finger pointing, and then sued the people/entities it thought was responsible for the problem for the cost of settling the claims. Nothing in today's world is easy, especially not after the insurance companies and attorneys get involved.

[Valigator]

To date, there have been five developments built on top of Superfund sites in New Jersey several others are pending. They include:

•The Minor League baseball park built atop the former American Cyanamid factory site in Bridgewater.

•The Cooper Road Dump in Voorhees Township was cleaned up and redeveloped into a residential community.

•The former DeRewal Chemical Co. site in Kingwood Township has been redeveloped into a nature refuge where migratory bird watching is one of several popular recreational activities.

•The Lipari Landfill in Mantua Township was turned into six playing fields, a nature trail, a paved and lighted parking lot and a recreational building. Nearby streams, marshes, and Alcyon Lake had been contaminated but were cleaned up and are used by the public.

•The Vineland State School in Vineland is a residential and treatment facility for mentally handicapped women and includes an array of buildings that support the 1,300 residents. The site had been contaminated with various hazardous materials, including mercury, pesticides, and transformer oil.

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16834983&BRD=1918&PAG=461&dept_id=506840&rfi=6

[Valigator]

Palmerton authority eyes land around its wells
Ex-zinc maker's acres would assure agency access to its facilities.
By Kevin Pentón Of The Morning Call
Over the years, few have answered a holding company's call to buy the contaminated assets of a bankrupt zinc company that left parts of Blue Mountain looking more like the moon than a part of the Appalachian Trail.

But Palmerton now is interested in acquiring acres left behind by the borough's creator and former principal benefactor, the former New Jersey Zinc Co., which deforested the northern side of the mountain with decades of unchecked smelting.

Palmerton's municipal authority, which oversees public water lines laid out by the former company, is interested in a tiny portion — 20 to 25 acres next to wells in the southern part of the borough and land around a pump house near the abandoned West Plant off Route 248, Borough Manager Rodger Danielson said.
http://www.mcall.com/news/local/all-1horseheadjun26,0,5316564.story?coll=all-newslocal-hed

[skeeter@ccia.com]

Again val, someones pocket gets fat....we have an island close to pittsburgh that had one end of it as a dump site for years...nothing would grow and noone was alowed to enter the area but then one year someone came along and now it is a public park with an arena, ballfields playground etc etc...I use to haul some of the contaminated soil from these areas at one time...and for one radioactive site, the gov just put layers of limestone, paper,dirt on top ....for a filter????....one place we hauled into, we had to wash our trucks....decontaminate...before we could leave the area...then a few years later...(I guess they figured people forgot what was there)...they hauled the same fill to the city of pittsburgh as a road bed...and that is under one main artery to the city through a residential area??????? during the big WW's the gov tested nerve agents in one main tunnel entering the city to see how it reacted in there....hummm???..maybe the nail was hit on the head when someone mentioned we need to get rid of every politition in office now and elect all new blood...????? someone out there has to bring this country back to the people...
We have a creek that runs through farm country that had the best bass and at one time stocked trout fishing in the area, but along came $$$ and upstream came housing plans, stores, malls and of course they needed pump stations to handle everything so about once a year, something comes downstream and kills every living thing in the creek...but I guess this is ok...but they don't want the farmers to put manure in the fields when they plant....might come close to the stream....too much government..

[Valigator]

Ya know, sometimes all I can do is just shake my head....:(

[skeeter@ccia.com]

to continue, I was almost fined $3000 for spraying used motor oil around the weeds right next to my garage foundation....now I don't mean it was like an oilfield there, it was only 4 quarts and only once..(on an old stink tree root I couldn't get rid of)..so I quit and washed my car to remove the oil the state had sprayed on the berms along the highway...that was ok to do....I even seen a man with his kids one day picking apples from a tree along the highway and stopped to tell him I had just watched them spray weed killer along there the day before....I still to this day pass signs that say "making a greener pennsylvania" and a few days later as you take a ride through the country looking at the views, the road is lined with about 10 feet of brown, dead weeds that don't look too green to me...the spray does not cut the weeds, it just makes for brown ones hanging along the road....and does the spray make it to the streams or someones water supply?...grrrrrrr...

[Valigator]

Salmon health warning nears

SUSAN GORDON; The News Tribune
Like dancers in an underwater ballet, hundreds of baby chinook salmon dart and swirl as one, their leopard-like markings standing out against the gray walls of narrow, concrete rearing troughs. For decades, the state has reared millions of chinook like these in Lakewood and elsewhere for release into Puget Sound.
The purpose of these fish, under state law, is to be caught by recreational anglers.

But new evidence suggests that by the time these so-called resident chinook are big enough to catch, they are likely contaminated with PCBs, chemical compounds dangerous to people.

Scientists suspect they become more contaminated than other types of chinook because state Department of Fish and Wildlife managers delay release of the fish to suppress the desire to migrate to the ocean. That means these chinook mature in the polluted waters of Puget Sound and never leave for the cleaner waters of the Pacific.

It’s worrisome enough that the Washington Department of Health is preparing to issue the state’s first warning to consumers about eating salmon contaminated with PCBs.

[Dghantt]

Right on vali gator , the company i work for
did evirionmental well samples down there and we suggested they not drill a well less than 250 ft. lest someones kids glow in the dark . its gross and i ve seen weird stuff come from the ground . espesially around the naval base up here in Jax.

[multibeard]

Val Look and see what you find on the number of superfund sites in Muskegon county in Michigan. At one time it was filled with chemical plants that polluted the heck out of the place.

I worked at two and told another where they could stick the place after seeing how bad it was. The Dupont Montague works plant was probably one of the cleanest in the area. OTT-Story and Hooker Chemical were the worst.

I worked for 6 months at the Hooker Montague plant and felt lucky to get out without serious health problems. We knew everytime they were comming to inspect the waste ponds, weeks in advance. We had to live thru hell from the fumes as we couldn't use caustic to kill them. The caustic in the ponds would have gotten the company in trouble with the DEQ. Many nights I wondered if I would make it thru the night alive. The whole plant is buried in a sealed vault now.

Hooker is the same outfit that caused the LOVE Canal mess in the east part of the US.

One of the few plants that remain had a toxic gas release again a couple weeks ago.

When I was a kid the city of Montague had there dump right in the marsh along White River.

There was a tannery along the shores of White Lake for over a century. I don't know how much was just spent cleaning up the mess IN the lake from dumped hides and chemicals.

I could go on and on about all the polution that has happened in Muskegon County by the chemical plants.

[Valigator]

I find that a well timed Letter to the Editor of some not all newspapers can be very efficient when it comes to reminding people what the "powers that be" want them to forget.

But it gets my goat that a developer can come into a place that will rot your child's inside's out...and call it "a safe neighborhood" and then to have the audacity to charge high dollar for it...

ya know we can pay for alarm systems. pay top dollar for hurricane or storm protection, pay extra bucks for extra airbags in our cars, make it home from a world gone crazy, and never realize the soil our house was built on is killing us.....you do see me shaking my head right???
:(

[Valigator]

US: Asarco closure plan cheers Globeville

The metals processor with a long history of polluting nearby areas will be cleaned up for other uses.

by Steve Raabe, The Denver Post
July 13th, 2006


Asarco LLC said Wednesday it will close its controversial metals-processing plant in Globeville by the end of August, eliciting cries of joy from neighborhood residents.

"We're saying 'hallelujah,"' said Lorraine Granado, a community leader in the north Denver neighborhood. "We're just delighted that they're closing the plant."

Asarco's 89-acre plant - called "Globe," it gave Globeville its name - has a long history of polluting nearby areas with toxic waste. It was declared an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site in 1993 after regulators determined that the plant had spread lead and arsenic pollution through parts of a 4.5-square-mile area.

Tucson-based Asarco, a subsidiary of industrial conglomerate Grupo Mexico in Mexico City, said in a statement it will transfer portions of the Globe operations to its copper refinery in Amarillo, Texas.

[Valigator]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Posted on Wed, Aug. 02, 2006



Mining company faces $1.3B in cleanup costs


MCCLATCHY NEWS SERVICE

MINING COMPANY FACES $1.3B OF CLAIMS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL CLEANUP COSTS

WASHINGTON - The federal government has filed up to $1.3 billion in environmental cleanup claims against Asarco, a century-old mining and smelting company that sought bankruptcy protection last year amid allegations its Mexican owners had sold off its most lucrative assets.

The federal claims represent only a portion of what Asarco may owe its creditors, including at least $500 million in asbestos exposure-related claims and hundreds of millions of dollars more to such states as Washington for their environmental cleanup costs.

The federal claims involve 31 sites, including Superfund sites, in 14 states, including Washington, Idaho, Missouri, Kansas, California, Texas and Illinois.

The environmental claims were among the largest ever filed by the Justice Department in a bankruptcy case, said Cynthia Magnuson, a department spokeswoman.

The federal government claims are unsecured. With the Superfund essentially depleted, federal taxpayers may end up paying for the Asarco cleanups.

[Steverino]

Val,

I admittedly only skimmed the posts in this thread but so help me God-I want to see a post from you in the very near future hoisting a mammoth gator out of a boat with a big smile plastered on your face or perhaps a new line of your designer luggage that makes your small business suddenly rival Louis Viton (sp?)

How about a positive post from you-Oh I don't know. Did any of our Southern states turn up Ol' Sparky and really cook some degenerate good that had it coming to them where only a squeegy and a mop were necessary for the prison clean-up detail. No?

How's about a suicide bomber that accidentally blew themselves to bits in a crowded room of their fellow raghead terrorist leaders?:D See, all positive news. If you look hard enough-I just know you'll dig up something good.;)

If I didn't know any better, I'd swear that you were taking over for TBO! I'm not a carpet sweeper by any stretch of the imagination but sometimes the more a person dwells on the negative, the more depressed it can make you. There's days that I can't even make through the local news to get to the weather because the news reports suck so bad that I have to just turn the television off.

Get off the darn 'puter and go on out and have some fun this summer-ya here?!!!:)

[Valigator]

I am just about to go out the door and saw this... I am laughing really hard, but ya know I think you have a point....so with the bad I promise to post the good....alligator season starts in 12 days...:D ....till after lunch and cocktails later.....