One of Central Florida’s most notorious pollution messes is a little more than two months away from a heavy assault by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The Tower Chemical Superfund site, located in a once-remote area now quickly developing east of Clermont and just north of State Road 50, has been poked, tested, scraped and pumped with cleanup agents for decades.
The primary contaminant, a chemical related to DDT called 4,4′-dichlorobenzophenone, or DCBP, remains stubbornly underground, migrating slowly in shallow aquifer waters.
“It has not shown itself to be moving away from the site,” said Rob Pope, EPA’s project manager for the Tower Chemical site, appearing at a community meeting this week. “It has shown itself to be what we would call intractable.”
Tower Chemical was a pesticide maker until it closed in 1980, when the owner fled the country. Pesticide ingredients from the plant had leached into the ground and into an ancient sinkhole. In 1983, the property was added to the nation’s list of Superfund sites.
The early cleanup projects included demolishing buildings, removing wetlands, hauling off several feet of topsoil and bringing in 12 feet of clean topsoil. The remaining contamination, still very toxic, is deep underground, posing little risk to people but not going away on its own.
An area resident, Marie Blackwell has lived north of the Superfund site for nearly 25 years and for much of that time has received EPA mailers with updates about the many phases of cleanup.
“We’ve always wondered how far this stuff is leaching,” said Blackwell, who attended the meeting.
With Tower Chemical reaching 40 years on the Superfund list, the EPA is taking off its gloves for a rougher approach for the contamination.
Until now, EPA has spent $9 million in investigations, excavations, treatments and other measures at Tower Chemical. Going forward, the agency expects to spend another $15 million on what is intended to be a final treatment and $3 million for follow-up work and ongoing monitoring for a total project cost of $27 million.
The final $18 million in costs was nowhere in sight in the EPA’s budget until a funding infusion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021.
“It’s very hard to deal with,” Pope said at a community meeting this week. “We have done a number of pilot studies where we tried different things, tried injecting things and tried treating it, trying to break it down and that has not worked very well.”
The nation’s environmental agency is contracting through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to hire a construction company that will bring in a pair of enormous cranes.
The dual-engine cranes will be equipped with drills – really big ones. They will drill to varying depths of 40, 60 and 70 feet deep in the contamination zone, with drill shafts that are 6, 8 or 10 feet wide.
Starting in April and operating for more than a year, the cranes will drill 935 of the huge holes in an overlapping pattern across an irregularly shaped tract about as large as a football field.
The contaminated soil encountered by the drills won’t be brought to the surface; it will be left in place and ultimately mixed with a blend of cement, clay and coal ash.
The intent is to turn the targeted zone into an underground slab nearly as hard as concrete.
If the process succeeds, it will encase the DCBP contamination and prevent it from migrating in aquifer waters.
“It will be hard, impermeable and it will lock the contamination in place,” Pope said. “We are not going to get 99.9 percent of the contamination — that just won’t be possible. But we will get the great mass of it. We are hoping to get 60 to 90 percent of it.”
Pope said the agency will monitor concentrations and any movement of the contamination for years to come.
kspear@orlandosentinel.com
