Washington College's toxic expansion
Washington College is looking to expand its Chestertown campus by purchasing some land on the Chester River, where the small liberal arts school intends to build environmental laboratories, as well as a new boathouse, classrooms, and a dormitory. The move was announced last year.
The college couldn't ask for a better place to study the environment, since the five-acre riverfront tract it's acquiring is apparently contaminated with the toxic legacy of a farm chemical storage businesses that once occupied the sites. An investigation earlier this year found the soil tainted with high levels of toxaphene, a now-banned insecticide; arsenic, chromium and other hazardous substances, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment.
College officials have said they plan to forge ahead, despite a consultant's estimate that it could cost $1.6 million to get rid of the tainted soil. The school hopes to get a $400,000 federal "brownfields" grant to help with the cleanup once it acquires the property. Officals plan to close the deal today.
But in the past several days, a grimmer assessment of the land's contamination has surfaced. An investigation done 22 years ago found the soil riddled with petroleum hydrocarbon contaminants, pesticides and heavy metals. It also warned that there was a risk that toxic chemicals from the site could be seeping into the river via the ground water. The consultant warned that "worst case" cleanup could cost more than $4 million (in 1987 dollars).
The 1987 investigation - first reported by the Chestertown Spy, an online newspaper - was commissioned by John Wayne, owner of a security business in town. Wayne, 59, says he hired a consultant to check the site then because he had an option to buy it. But he walked away from the deal, he says, when he learned how tainted it was.
Now Wayne says he worries the college may be rushing into a toxic quagmire. "As an alumnus of the college, some of my concern is my alma mater buying something that's going to cost a lot mroe than they know they're getting into," he says. He says he also wonders if the contaminated site could be polluting the Chester, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay.
Meredith Davies Hadaway, vice president for college relations and marketing, says the contamination of the future riverfront campus has been the subject of "exhaustive study," and the earlier study was taken into account. She said she did not know why the cleanup cost estimates varied so greatly.
Comments
There is an EPA-approved in-situ bioremediation technology called DARAMEND which may be ideal for this site. See http://www.adventusgroup.com/projects/proj_daramend.shtml for some representative case studies
Posted by: Mike Mueller | October 19, 2009 12:47 PM