Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, August 11, 1995 TAG: 9508110030
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The waste is now mixed with too much soil to be burned in the high-temperature metal recovery kiln in Chicago, its destination, county spokeswoman Anne Marie Green said.
On Monday, a tractor-trailer hauling fly ash from the Dixie Caverns Superfund site wrecked on Interstate 64 in West Virginia, spilling one to two tons of the truck's 21-ton load into a ditch, said Tom Fisher, supervisor with the West Virginia Division of Environmental Protection.
In cleaning the muck up, crews scraped dirt, leaves and grass into the waste, making it unacceptable at the high-tech burning facility.
"They were going to send it back down there [to Roanoke County] to let them down there worry about how to handle it," Fisher said.
The cleanup took about six hours, ending around 9:30 p.m. No fly ash escaped into the environment, Fisher said, and there were no houses or businesses nearby.
The waste is old fly ash captured from Roanoke Electric Steel's smokestacks and dumped in the landfill, which operated between 1965 and 1976. The ash solidified after being exposed to rain and snow for decades, and now contains high levels of lead, zinc and cadmium, rendering the waste hazardous under the federal Superfund law. These metals, if eaten or ingested in drinking water, are considered poisonous, Green said.
Roanoke County is asking the federal Environmental Protection Agency for permission to stabilize the 21 tons of "contaminated" waste at Roanoke Electric and bury it at the Dixie Caverns dump - which is what the county had wanted to do with the entire landfill all along.
In 1987, the EPA ordered the site cleaned up. The county clashed with EPA for several years over what to do with the 9,000 cubic yards of fly ash. Not only would the county's plan have cost less, but an accident like the one on Monday was the kind of thing the county wanted to avoid.
"You could put this stuff in a truck and send it out on the highway and maybe have an accident," Green said.
Roanoke Electric has chipped in about $4.25 million so far for the cleanup, and Roanoke County is facing a $12 million tab. The county has sued several other companies that may have dumped toxic waste there in the past.
Russell Fish, an EPA employee overseeing the Dixie Caverns landfill cleanup, said the agency is holding to its original decision that the best cleanup method is to haul the muck off site for treatment.
"The pure nature of the fly ash lent itself to metals recovery," he said.
The EPA considers the potential for highway accidents and how hazardous the material would be to surrounding communities in making a decision on how to clean up Superfund sites.
Horsehead Resource De- velopment, based in Pennsylvania, has facilities in Tennessee and Chicago that extract and recycle heavy metals from fly ash.
County engineer Bob Babst said that since February, about three or four tractor-trailer loads of fly ash have been hauled out of Dixie Caverns. The job should be done by the end of the month.
The accident on Monday occurred near Huntington, W.Va., when a car driven by Erica Tyler of West Virginia swerved into the oncoming lane of I-64, according to West Virginia State Police. The truck driver, Neil Snyder, who works for John Pfrommer Inc. of Pennsylvania, swerved to avoid the car and landed in the ditch. Snyder was treated for minor injuries and released, state police said.
Some of the fly ash spilled out of the truck, an open bed with a tarp.
Tyler, 19, was listed in critical condition Thursday evening at Cabell-Huntington Hospital.
by CNB