ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, January 6, 1997 TAG: 9701060135
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRISTINA NUCKOLS STAFF WRITER
IT'S TAKEN SEVEN YEARS and $11 million to get within sight of finishing the cleanup of the Dixie Caverns landfill - a job county officials once believed would take one year and cost $300,000.
Alan Thomas stood in the middle of the stream that runs through Dixie Caverns landfill hugging a black tube against his chest. Bending over, he scraped the end of the tube along the bottom of the stream bed, sucking up mud, water and small rocks.
Another man nearby loosened the dirt with a pickax while two others scurried along the length of the vacuum tube pummeling it with orange rubber mallets to break up the clogs that formed every few seconds.
All four of them were dressed in brown-spattered white plastic "moonsuits" and yellow galoshes. Duct tape wrapped around their wrists secured a double layer of green rubber gloves.
As the drone faded from the giant vacuum on the back of a nearby truck, Thomas squatted down in the stream for a break muttering "Fun, fun, fun."
Not 100 yards away, bales of hay were stacked across the stream to mark the spot where tests show concentrations of heavy metals drop.
It's a rather unassuming finish line even though it's taken seven years and $11 million to get there.
Thomas and his co-workers reached their goal a few days before the end of 1996. Removing the contaminated sediment from the stream represents the close of the most expensive and most time-consuming part of the Superfund cleanup.
"The threat is gone," said George Simpson, the assistant director of engineering and inspections for Roanoke County. "We've done our part."
It will take another three to six months to wrap up the project. About 70 tons of contaminated dirt from the stream still sit in piles waiting to be treated, but that's minuscule compared to the 16,000 tons already buried in a special landfill on site.
The men who have worked 10-hour days sucking mud out of the stream didn't seem thrilled that it's over.
"It's not too bad," said Stacy Spangler. "In a crazy way, it's fun."
He said hot weather is worse than cold because the plastic suits - complete with footies - don't breathe, and the men must wear respirators so they don't inhale dust laced with heavy metals.
Spangler is an employee of Roanoke Electric Steel, which dumped electric arc furnace dust - commonly known as fly ash - in the landfill during the 1970s. It is the only company accused of polluting the landfill that has cooperated with the county in the cleanup. The county is negotiating with 20 other companies to have them pay some of the costs for their role in creating the mess.
There is still disagreement over whether the cleanup was necessary.
"I really don't think it was that much of a threat," Simpson said. "It's really only a problem if you come in and eat 10 or 15 pounds of dirt."
Tests in 1989 found high levels of lead, cadmium and zinc in the ash dumped on a hillside at the landfill. Some of that material washed into the stream below it during the 1985 flood.
Today, that hillside, once black and barren, is covered with grass. The stream that was lifeless except for a few water striders gliding across its surface is again supporting aquatic plants.
"The stream has already started to heal," said Bob Babst, the county's on-site inspector and coordinator for the project. "We've seen some tadpoles and signs of life, so it's coming back."
Bob Johnson, chairman of the board of supervisors, believes the project had a legitimate goal: to make sure lead did not get into wells supplying homes near the landfill. But he believes that goal got lost along the way as the EPA repeatedly changed how it wanted the landfill cleaned up, creating costly and time-consuming delays.
When the old landfill was first listed as a Superfund site in 1989 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, county officials believed it would take one year and $300,000 to clean up. Eight years later, the final price tag is $11 million.
"The federal government glued, screwed and tattooed Roanoke County," Johnson said. "Knowing what I know now, if I could have gotten a couple of people to vote with me, we should have just let them take us away in chains."
That's exactly what would have happened. If county officials had refused to clean up the site themselves, the EPA would have done it for them and charged three times what they're paying now, federal officials said. If they had not paid, all five supervisors and County Administrator Elmer Hodge would have been jailed.
Even EPA officials had no idea how to clean up the site when they started, said Joe Orena, the federal inspector for the site.
The county had planned to treat the ash that remained on the hillside and bury it on site, much like they are doing now with the stream sediment. But that process left too much of the heavy metals in the ash, so the EPA required 9,000 tons to be hauled to an out-of-state incinerator at a cost of $200 per ton.
Federal officials did allow bulldozers to remove most of the contaminated soil from the stream, with the vacuum tube making a final sweep. The original plan called for using only the vacuum, adding another five years to the project.
Residents along Twine Hollow Road, which leads to the old landfill, said they haven't paid much attention to the goings-on at the Superfund site. In fact, the biggest news in the neighborhood was that the Hackett family had won an honorable mention in a local Christmas lights contest for the three silver crosses on their roof.
Louise Hackett said she thought the cleanup had wrapped up years ago.
"I didn't give it a second thought," she said.
"You sort of get lethargic and think they're taking care of it, but you don't know," said her neighbor, Georgia Davis.
The main concern of local residents continues to be their wells. Many are contaminated, but health department tests have consistently indicated the problem is leaking septic systems, not the landfill.
Residents said they still hope to get public water lines through their neighborhood, and they want the county to pay for the project. Hodge said water lines will be extended along Twine Hollow Road, but he said it will probably take several years and homeowners will have to pay to hook up.
Supervisors will begin discussing future uses of the old landfill site this year, and local residents will be asked to participate in that decision. Hodge is determined to use it for something. After all, that $11 million spent to clean up the landfill could have been used for parks, schools and fire stations.
Hodge believes the Dixie Caverns landfill was used as an example to scare southern states that hadn't been targeted for Superfund sites as frequently as those in the Northeast. EPA officials deny that claim.
Either way, Roanoke County has gotten the message. Hodge said county officials were more careful in designing the Smith Gap landfill and they've increased treatment requirements for companies wanting to dump industrial waste there. Supervisors have even turned down a foundry and other businesses with poor environmental records wanting to locate in the county.
"Having spent millions of dollars, I'd like to think something positive came out of it," Hodge said.
LENGTH: Long : 131 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON STAFF. 1. Two days before Christmas,by CNBRoanoke Electric Steel employees Stacy Spangler (left) and Alan
Thomas near the end of the cleanup of the stream that runs through
the Dixie Caverns landfill. 2. Cleanup continues at the Dixie
Caverns landfill. In the foreground, grass grows on a hillside that
was once black with ash. color.