[CPEO-MEF] FORMER SITES, CONTRACTORS: Former Tarheel Army Missile Plant/Western Electric (NC)

[Lenny Siegel <LSiegel@cpeo.org>]

Superfund decision for Tarheel Army Missile Plant relied on incomplete data
1994 evaluation based largely on “an undetermined area of contaminated soil,” EPA records show

BY LISA SORG 
NC Newsline
MARCH 25, 2024

The former Tarheel Army Missile Plant in east Burlington, which has contaminated the groundwater beneath a low-income, non-white neighborhood for more than 30 years, scored too low to be considered for the EPA’s Superfund program, recently released records show. 

But the findings from 1994 raise questions about the thoroughness of the evaluation, which was based on “only one source, an undetermined area of contaminated soil,” Dynamac, a contractor for the U.S. Army, wrote in a Superfund scoring document that year. “Further information is necessary to fully characterize all possible sources onsite.”

The Superfund program is reserved for some of the most heavily polluted areas in the United States. There are more than 1,300 nationwide, roughly 10% of them former or current military sites.

When a property is enrolled in Superfund, it can still take decades to clean up. But one of the advantages of program is that it requires public engagement. An EPA staffer is assigned as a community liaison, who leads public meetings. Extensive documentation about the site, its hazards and proposed cleanup methods are housed at the public library. Communities can apply for technical assistance grants to help them make sense of the science.

…

For the entire article, see
https://ncnewsline.com/2024/03/25/superfund-decision-for-tarheel-army-missile-plant-relied-on-incomplete-data/

—

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org
Author: DISTURBING THE WAR: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford University out of Southeast Asia - 1965–1975 (See http://a3mreunion.org)

_______________________________________________
Military mailing list
Military@lists.cpeo.org
http://lists.cpeo.org/listinfo.cgi/military-cpeo.org