Excerpt from the Columbus Packet. Read entire article here.
By Brian Jones, April 3, 2017
COLUMBUS – The Greenfield Multistate Environmental Trust held a meeting Monday evening to brief residents about investigation and cleanup efforts at the former Kerr-McGee plant site.
The Greenfield Trust is overseeing the cleanup work and eventual rehabilitation of the site, which is located off of 14th Avenue North in Columbus. It began operations in the 1920s as a wood treatment plant. Creosote used in the treatment process was allowed to drip onto the ground, and flowed through open-air ditches that passed through nearby neighborhoods. There was also air pollution by toxic fumes from the treatment process.
The Environmental Protection Agency eventually designated the facility as a Superfund site. The trust has taken hundreds of soil and water samples from the site and the surrounding neighborhoods, and expects to continue cleanup and remediation efforts.
Multistate Trust Project Manager Lauri Gorton briefed the large crowd on the trust’s preliminary findings and fielded questions.
“We are a small private company,” she said. “We are not EPA contractors, and we do not work for the state. We are a court-appointed trustee, and our only job is to take the money that came out of the settlement agreement and own and manage the former Kerr-McGee site.”
She began by talking about the investigation work the trust has overseen since 2015.
“The trust took the property on in 2011,” she said. “When the trust was first started we only got a portion of the settlement, and the first few years there was very limited sampling done. Since 2015 we got full funding and got the full scope of the investigation kicked in. We want to understand the extent of the contamination from the Kerr-McGee property, and what types of contamination there are, and then evaluate whether there’s a risk to the people in what we’ve found. Lastly we use that information to plan the cleanup action.”