JAMESTOWN — Almost 27 years after local officials shuttered Seaboard Chemical Corp. at the edge of what’s now Randleman Regional Reservoir, huge pools of underground contamination remain largely untreated in groundwater beside and beneath the lake that’s a source of drinking water.
Denied an operating license by the Guilford County Board of Commissioners in June 1989 because of its history of environmental misconduct, Seaboard, a former solvent recycler and fuel blender, left behind large amounts of such industrial chemicals as 1,4-dioxane, benzene, perchloroethylene, vinyl chloride and other compounds that seeped into the groundwater and that authorities for the better part of three decades have assured would be cleaned up.
A coalition of the chemical company’s former customers known as Seaboard Group II and the city of High Point spent the past 10 years developing and installing a fully automated cleanup system that they promise to crank up in earnest this spring.
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That might not be so simple: The cleanup initiative, which so far has cost High Point taxpayers $3.3 million, has sputtered along in an on-again, off-again manner since 2011, when a computerized system was originally installed.
The system employs a 33-acre grove of pine trees that represent one of the few economical ways of destroying the dioxane that is among Seaboard’s primary pollutants. The trees break down some pollutants internally and expel the dioxane, which disintegrates when exposed to sunlight.
The treatment network actually didn’t come online until mid-2014, after which it ran erratically for about 18 months. It has been inoperative since December, when the cleanup partnership shut it down to add a large settling pool to remove sludge and metal salts in the contaminated groundwater and landfill leachate that had caused frequent stoppages.
The system’s various snafus led to a dispute that’s pending before the International Chamber of Commerce, where Seaboard Group II and High Point are trying to recover part of the money they paid Canadian manufacturer Purifics ES, which supplied some of the technology and equipment.
In the meantime, dioxane and the other industrial chemicals lurk beside and beneath the reservoir, mostly trapped in deep bedrock and apparently not infiltrating the reservoir in large amounts.
At least not yet.
“We know it’s there,” said Greg Flory, the executive director of the Piedmont Triad Regional Water Authority that produces drinking water from the reservoir. “The numbers that we’re seeing right now are not indicating an appreciable migration from (Seaboard) groundwater to the surface water.”
Even so, the reservoir has a problem with dioxane at concentrations the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers above the threshold for concern as a cancer risk.
The Seaboard Group partnership entrusted with the cleanup since 1991 — after the chemical company went bankrupt — rejects the notion that it could or should have moved faster.
“Substantial progress has been made at this site,” said Terry Houk, High Point public services director who acts as spokesman for the cleanup partnership. “The remediation of the Seaboard Chemical site must follow an established set of regulations, which dictates the steps necessary to be acceptable to the state agencies overseeing this work.”
Regulator troubles
Seaboard Chemical’s trouble complying with environmental rules made headlines throughout the 1980s. The company’s slipshod operating style sparked outcries from residents of the area who urged officials to protect them from pollution of the air, water and soil.
State regulators repeatedly cited the company, formed by several Greensboro businessmen, for reckless practices that ranged from improperly disposing of hazardous waste sent there by a who’s who of corporate America — such as General Electric, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips and Walt Disney World — to haphazardly storing 20,000 or more drums of chemicals, many uncapped or leaking.
After Seaboard folded, hydrologists and other scientists traced much of the site’s underground pollution to the company’s so-called Pond 3 near its chemical-processing boiler house.
Seaboard’s business model involved treating industrial solvents and other hazardous chemicals at the site from 1974 through the 1980s, recycling up to 95 percent of what came in and turning part of what could not be reclaimed into liquid or solid fuels. A network of pipes extended under a catch basin for overflows and spewed a witch’s brew into the unlined Pond 3, said George Willard, a former Seaboard shift supervisor.
“I saw that pond change colors eight times in one day,” Willard said.
The former chemical plant’s unresolved pollution on the banks of what was then the free-flowing Deep River served as a major stumbling block to plans to build a downstream dam near Randleman and create the reservoir that now provides drinking water to thousands in Guilford and Randolph counties.
Groundwater tests during the mid-1990s at Seaboard and High Point’s adjoining landfill found groundwater with concentrations of the industrial chemical dioxane up to 78,000 parts per billion, roughly 26,000 times higher than state groundwater limits. Other known or probable carcinogens that showed up in those tests included benzene at 2,100 times state groundwater standards, as well as methylene chloride, perchloroethene and vinyl chloride, all at concentrations thousands of times beyond safety limits.
Annual sampling last fall at the former Seaboard plant site found one well with groundwater containing dioxane 27,000 times higher than state standards, another with benzene at 1,400 times the standards, a third with perchlorethene at 18,571 times the standards and a fourth with vinyl chloride at 241,000 times the limit.
Cancer is not the only threat from such chemicals. Repeated overexposure to dioxane, for example, can damage the liver and kidneys. Other industrial chemicals also target the heart, central nervous system and other bodily functions.
‘Cradle to grave’
Ultimately, the reservoir won approval after scientific studies showed that while Seaboard’s polluted residue was flowing toward the river, much of it was heavier than water and confined to deep bedrock riddled with crevices and other pathways through the fractured rock.
Studies also predicted that the reservoir could form an opposing force to help restrain the pollutants. And they calculated that the lake would be so large that even if the unthinkable happened, it could absorb and dilute all of Seaboard’s submerged waste without causing serious contamination problems at the Piedmont Triad Regional Water Authority’s water intake about 10 miles downstream.
But nobody wants a pool of carcinogens at water’s edge, especially in a lake that is heavily fed by treated wastewater flowing out of High Point’s Eastside sewage treatment plant located across the road from the former Seaboard grounds.
State officials promised that Seaboard’s former customers would be required to clean up the groundwater mess under “cradle to grave” environmental laws that hold companies that create hazardous waste responsible for proper disposal if they entrust it to a contractor who botches the job.
High Point taxpayers were pulled into the cleanup saga in the early 1990s, after officials closed the city’s Riverdale Landfill next door and research showed that the former, unlined dump’s leachate was contributing to the chemical stew underlying the former Seaboard property.
“High Point is a 25 percent partner (in the Seaboard cleanup effort),” said Houk, the city’s public services director. “But most of the design has not been under the city of High Point’s control.”
Dioxane dilemma
Suspicion fell on the Seaboard site earlier this year when downstream communities in the Cape Fear River system put a spotlight on dioxane, complaining that the industrial solvent was showing up at suspiciously high levels in drinking water they draw from the river. The Cape Fear takes shape southeast of the Triad, where the Deep and Haw rivers combine.
Sewage discharges in Greensboro and Reidsville proved to be the main culprits. But evidence emerged that Randleman Reservoir has dioxane issues, too.
Flory, the regional water authority executive director, said tests had found the chemical at about 2 parts per billion in samples from the lake taken near the drinking-water intake.
That’s about 1 part per billion less than North Carolina’s guideline for water supply lakes in an urban setting. But it’s still roughly six times higher than the level at which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says it begins to pose a cancer risk.
EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System determined several years ago that dioxane concentrated in drinking water at 0.35 parts per billion would trigger cancer in one out of a million people exposed to it continuously across a lifespan of 70 years — a very small risk, but one that goes up as dioxane’s concentration increases.
The EPA does not currently regulate the chemical in drinking water, although it labels it as a “probable” carcinogen. But the agency is re-examining that characterization with an eye toward reclassifying dioxane as hazardous and setting safety limits, a decision that could come later this year.
To the extent dioxane poses a threat, it is particularly onerous because conventional techniques of treating drinking water cannot remove it.
Flory and state environmental officials said after the dioxane issue came to light earlier this year that they held the Seaboard site at least partly responsible for the lake’s elevated dioxane levels, although they couldn’t classify it as the only source in the Randleman Reservoir watershed.
The chemical is used so abundantly that a variety of other sources could be contributing, especially in such an urban watershed as the Deep River, they said.
Seaboard Group II consultant Jim LaRue said at the time that only a small, underground area in the upper tier of the bedrock might be releasing small amounts of the chemical compound into the lake.
But after nearly 27 years and millions of taxpayer dollars, shouldn’t that dioxane and all the rest of Seaboard’s submerged gunk be farther along the path to good riddance instead of being the focus of a cleanup still in its infancy?
The N.C. Department of Environmental Quality remains supportive of the Seaboard cleanup initiative, noting in an email response that “such complex environmental cleanups frequently take decades to complete because of the complexities involved in determining the nature and extent of more than 50 years of contamination.”
Meanwhile, up top ...
In contrast to the groundwater contamination, the Seaboard cleanup above ground got off to a relatively fast start and was completed by late 1992.
The company only had $600,000 in its accounts for post-closure cleanup. So after Seaboard’s bankruptcy trustee spent that money and was only able to partly decontaminate Seaboard’s buildings, tanks and other storage areas, state regulators turned their attention to about 2,000 of the company’s former customers, including the News & Record, who were on the hook for the remainder of that phase of the cleanup.
“Seaboard Group I” spent about $2 million to completely decontaminate what remained of the bankrupt company’s above-ground complex, sending polluted debris, drummed chemicals, solidified sludges and other waste to 10 disposal sites in four states.
Smaller-scale Seaboard customers, including the newspaper, ended most of their involvement after that by settling with North Carolina state government and making payments into a cleanup fund that was used during the next 15 years to continue studying the underground contaminants, their location, and the best strategies and technologies for removing them.
Seaboard’s larger customers eventually formed Seaboard Group II to bear the major cost while deciding what cleanup technique to use and then putting it into effect, all subject to review and approval by the state DEQ.
Fast forward to 2008, when Seaboard Group II, High Point and state environmental officials signed the final settlement agreement that described in general terms how the groundwater would be cleaned up and the penalties for falling short.
Early success
Within a year, per the settlement, Seaboard Group II and High Point presented state officials with their plan for creating the small forest atop the city’s former landfill, irrigated by groundwater that was still contaminated by dioxane but that had been cleansed of many other pollutants by standard treatment practices like aeration, filtering and air stripping.
That “phyto system” would be backed up by Canadian-made mechanical treatment technology that uses ultraviolet light and a chemical additive to remove the dioxane and any other organic pollutants that might remain.
Plans called for the natural system to be the primary cleaning tool, with the backup technology used only if the trees failed because of violent weather, disease or calamity.
Up to that point, everything went smoothly.
Just as the Randleman Reservoir studies predicted, filling the lake seemed to have a pushback effect on the dirty groundwater from the Seaboard property, one bigger wall of water putting hydraulic pressure on a smaller one.
In addition, Seaboard Group II and High Point found that some of the wells they dug established control zones that stopped the contaminated groundwater’s continued migration toward the river.
Then a 2010 experiment at the former landfill proved to the state environmental agency’s satisfaction that the planned phyto system’s small pine forest could thoroughly eliminate the dioxane without leaving any pollution behind in the soil or damaging the trees.
The timing was great: The cleanup partners presented their report on the pilot study to state government just three weeks after the regional water authority’s leaders flipped the switch on their brand-new water treatment plant on the newly filled reservoir.
The cleanup partnership assembled a small complex of prefab buildings at the former landfill not far from the Seaboard plant’s remains and installed the network of piping, lift stations, filtration equipment, aerators and other gear with plans for an October 2011 “first startup.”
But they ran into problems meshing the $1.5 million system from Purifics ES, the Canadian manufacturer, with the rest of the network for a variety of technical, contractual and other reasons. They pushed back the target for full operation to July 2012, then December 2012, then July 2013 and then December 2013.
The partnership put the system into full operation in mid-2014, several years after the original goal set with state DEQ regulators.
It worked, but sporadically.
“From the Spring of 2014 until the shutdown to install the clarifier in late December 2015, the phyto system was operated on a sustained, albeit, not continuous basis,” Houk said in a recent email, referring to the new settling pool now under construction. “Once the modifications to install the clarifier are complete, DEQ will inspect the system and, upon approval, the system will commence on a continuous basis.”
But Houk is cautious about predicting how long it might take after that to restore the Seaboard site to the point where its groundwater is no longer toxic.
“Due to the complexity of the site and the significant technical challenges, the date of completion is highly uncertain,” he said by email, “but will clearly take many years.”