LINCOLN – All hazardous waste has been removed from the former Lincoln Metals/Heartland Faucet Corporations brass foundry site and the adjacent First Avenue Park.“The only thing we have left to do is put up the fence,” said Dawn Harris-Young with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of External Affairs, Media Relations.
Workers at the Superfund cleanup site were putting the fence around the abandoned brass foundry property Thursday. The property was once covered with soil contaminated with high levels of lead.
“I’m extremely pleased we are not listed as a hazardous-waste cleanup site anymore,” Mayor Lew Watson said. “Local residents are pleased that the end appears to be in sight.”
EPA officials said their work at the site should be completed by the end of the week.
About 12,000 cubic yards of lead-contaminated soil was removed from the site as well as the old foundry building and trucked to the Cedar Hill Landfill near Ragland.
The hazardous waste was treated to render it non-hazardous before it was transported to the Subtitle D landfill. The landfill is a non-hazardous waste facility in St. Clair County.
Young said new topsoil was brought onto the site and the remaining dirt, with low levels of lead, was covered with the new topsoil.
The lead-contaminated soil left at the site was well below the EPA cleanup level and does not pose any threats to human health or the environment, she said.
All soil contaminated with high levels of lead was treated and removed from the Superfund site in Lincoln.
“We’re extremely pleased with the professional way the EPA handled the removal of the hazardous waste at this site,” Watson said.
He said the estimated $2.5 million cleanup took about two months to complete.
Officials said residents living around the site in the First Avenue Park community asked that a fence be put around the property.
Watson said that, at some point, the city may try to acquire the property, but it’s too early to determine the future of the land.
Documents obtained by The Daily Home revealed that lead-contaminated soil was leaving the old foundry site as early as 1992, but residents living near and around the facility knew nothing of the lead contamination flowing from the foundry property and into their community and public park.
In 2003, Alabama Department of Environmental Management officials scientifically documented the lead contamination in and around the foundry, but no records were found to indicate state environmental officials ever informed the First Avenue Park residents of the hazardous waste left behind by corporations that used the site for the past 50 years.
It was not until the summer of 2007 that residents became aware of the potential hazards to the local community after EPA officials began asking residents for permission to test the soil in their yards.
Subsequently, soil contaminated with high levels of lead was also found in the First Avenue Park.
The community park is next to the abandoned foundry. Lead contaminated soil in the public park was also removed, treated and transported to the St. Clair County landfill.
