[CPEO-BIF] Chemical Metals Industries, Westport, Baltimore, Maryland

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

The Vapors
Toxic gases seeping from the ground in Westport are news to most people 
who live there

BY VAN SMITH
Baltimore City Paper (MD)
July 22, 2009


Bill Cragg works for a local construction firm. He was born and raised 
in the same Westport house, 2047 Annapolis Road, where he still lives 
today. It's the end-of-row unit on the southern end of the block, and it 
has a porch and a little yard that wraps around, next to the railroad 
tracks. Behind the homes on Cragg's block are fields of BGE power 
transmitters, humming in the shimmering heat of summer. On the other 
side of Annapolis Road is an overgrown empty lot that abuts Gwynns 
Falls, which flows a short ways downstream, past the BRESCO garbage 
incinerator, into the shallows of the Patapsco River beneath the I-95 
overpass.

....

On either side of Cragg's block, at 2001 and 2103 Annapolis Road, are 
the former sites of Chemical Metals Industries (CMI), a precious-metals 
smelter tied to former Maryland governor Marvin Mandel. Cragg remembers 
that, back when CMI was still operating in the 1970s, its chemical fumes 
and acids were a neighborhood hazard.

....

In 1981, the toxic mess at CMI spurred the first emergency clean-up 
under the then-new federal Superfund law, which was designed to pay for 
making dangerous chemical-waste sites safe again. Vats and drums of 
improperly stored chemicals were emptied and hauled away, and 
contaminated soil was removed, all in a $360,000 (roughly $849,6000 in 
2009 dollars) effort to prevent public harm. But according to recent 
federal court documents, those long-ago efforts weren't enough, and the 
CMI site continues to pose a cancer risk to long-term residents of 
nearby homes subjected to "vapor intrusion" of chemical-laden air rising 
through the soil from contaminated groundwater below.

....

For the entire article, see
http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=18391

--


Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org



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