Workers have begun preliminary site work at the Tremont City Barrel Fill, the 8.5-acre closed industrial waste landfill at 3108 Snyder Domer Road in German Township that holds an estimated 1.5 million gallons of hazardous waste buried in the ground. The cleanup targets around 51,000 individual drums sitting near an aquifer that supplies drinking water to tens of thousands of residents, and it marks the start of a process residents have pushed for over decades.
According to the Springfield News-Sun, Springfield City Commissioner Larry Ricketts said crews will build a permanent road and erect a fence over the next few weeks, while workers pour concrete slabs to support the remediation buildings. Ricketts, who first became involved with the site in 1984 as a county disaster services coordinator and later served as a member of People for Safe Water, said he was glad to see work finally underway and wished those involved over the years who had died could have seen it happen.
Bob Rule, project manager for the Responsible Environmental Solutions Alliance II, said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved the start of site preparation work in August. Ricketts said the overall cleanup process will take two to three years, though the same News-Sun report notes a separate estimate putting the timeline at three to four construction seasons, which typically run from April through October. The alliance, known as RESA II, is made up of Chemical Waste Management, Franklin International, International Paper, The Procter & Gamble Co., PPG Industries, Strebor Inc. and Worthington Cylinder Corporation, and it has set up a website, tremontbarrelcleanup.com, that will post reports on barrels removed and other project updates.
Decades of Dumping Left a Buried Hazard
Hazardous waste disposal at the site stopped in 1980, and soil was later placed on top of the waste cells. The U.S. EPA began an investigation into the barrel fill in 1997, 17 years after disposal stopped, and that investigation found some leaks from waste cells. A 2005 inquiry conducted by potentially responsible parties found that most waste cells were intact but still showed high levels of contaminants at the site.
Contaminants at the barrel fill include volatile organic compounds such as xylenes, ethylbenzene, toluene and methylene chloride, along with metals like chromium and arsenic detected in liquid and solid waste, per the News-Sun. The site inventory includes both containerized and uncontained waste, most of it liquid. Residents have fought for decades to get the site cleaned up given its proximity to the aquifer it threatens.
A Legal Fight That Took Years to Resolve
The companies responsible for the contamination acknowledged in a court order that they dumped waste at the site and agreed to shoulder the cleanup costs. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio granted a motion approving a consent decree signed by all parties in April 2022, and the court formally approved the cleanup plan that October. The U.S. Department of Justice had announced the proposed consent decree requiring the seven potentially responsible parties to clean up contamination at the Superfund site. Cleanup planning began more than three years before this month's site work, reflecting how long the legal and engineering groundwork took to finalize.
Under the approved plan, workers will pull buried drums out individually and check them for leaks before removal, rather than conducting mass excavations. Barrels will either be properly disposed of or reburied in a new double-lined cell that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has described as the most protective option it can offer, a plan that also calls for removing and disposing of off site nearly 1,000 drums of still-bottom waste in place of an earlier slurry wall and clay/leakage collection design. Liquid waste will be removed from the site entirely, and some solid waste will be shipped off site for proper disposal, while the rest is reburied and monitored indefinitely.
Groundwater Testing Shows No Contamination So Far
Recent tests at the Tremont City Barrel Fill have found no contamination reaching the nearby aquifer, the News-Sun reported separately. Voluntary groundwater monitoring in December showed no significant changes in contaminant concentrations compared with the Ohio EPA's 2014 sampling results. Rule said two rounds of recent testing showed the pollution was not moving, telling WYSO, “It's not moving. So groundwater is still protected.”
The site has been monitored by the U.S. EPA since 1997, according to WYSO, and that long oversight history underpins the agency's confidence that groundwater has remained protected while the legal process played out. Preparation work, expected to start as early as mid-September, was set to include road upgrades, fencing and a staging area for removed barrels. Once the new cap and double-lined cell are in place, the News-Sun noted that the design could eliminate about 1,000 truckloads of soil that would otherwise have to pass through the community.
