Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

County pledges faster cleanup

Neighborhood activists say it's none too soon to attack contamination at the old public works site in Brooksville and see if it's flowing into their yards.

By DAN DeWITT
Published September 23, 2005

BROOKSVILLE - The county promised that a new consultant will speed up the often-delayed cleanup of the old public works compound and help answer the question that neighbors have been asking for 15 years:

Are toxins spilling into their yards and gardens?

"We've got a new consultant on board," said Charles Mixson, the county's public works director. "We're going to straighten this thing out."

It's about time, said Richard Howell and Paul Boston, two African-American activists who hosted a meeting on the contamination Wednesday night at the Allen Temple AME Church on Leonard Street.

Both have said the issue has been ignored partly because most of the affected homeowners are black.

They displayed pictures that showed contamination leaking into a drainage ditch to the south of the property, on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, they said.

They also showed copies of letters, dating to 1991, from state environmental agencies urging the county to take action.

Not only has the cleanup been inadequate, Boston said, but the county has never determined if the chemicals - including toluene, benzene and arsenic - have spilled into the neighborhood.

"They have never increased the scope of their investigation," he said.

That will change, said government officials from a variety of agencies, who nearly outnumbered residents at the meeting. Howell lamented the low turnout; he criticized the Southwest Florida Water Management District, commonly known as Swiftmud, for not sending a representative when drainage patterns at the site were a major concern.

Nell Tyner, of the state Department of Environmental Protection, presented a plan to take several samples around the edge of the site, including in the drainage ditch Boston highlighted.

Mixson said work will be done by Creative Environmental Solutions Inc., of Brooksville, and not Engineering Technology of America Inc., the former consultant that has been blamed for many of the delays. The DEP warned the county in July it would be fined as much as $10,000 per day if it did not take prompt action to investigate and eliminate pollution at the site.

Engineering Technology also tested for arsenic in the soil samples to industrial standards, not the standard for residential areas, where lower rates of the toxin are allowed, said George Foster, president of Creative Environmental Solutions.

"The biggest issue is probably related to arsenic," Foster said.

"We'll have to go back and resample all the previous sampled locations."

Pollution at the site comes from two main sources. Some was found near where underground gasoline and diesel tanks were removed in 1998. To clean the soil from this contamination, the county has removed 715 tons of dirt, said Laurel Culbreth, an environmental manager with the department.

Monitoring wells has also shown that contamination has seeped into groundwater. Determining whether this has spread beyond the site will be another high priority, Foster said. Fortunately, he said, the chemicals are in a pocket of groundwater a few feet below the ground, and not in the deep aquifer that supplies residents with drinking water.

The other source of contaminants is fluids spilled on the ground: paint and insecticide, as well as oil and hydraulic fluids that leaked from trucks and heavy equipment.

The county has removed 82 tons of soil to clean up this type of pollution, Tyner said.

Dan DeWitt can be reached at 352 754-6116 or dewitt@sptimes.com

[Last modified September 23, 2005, 02:50:29]