The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants to know what residents think about its plans to remove St. Croix’s Island Chemical/V.I. Chemical facility from its Superfund National Priorities List of most contaminated sites in the United States and its territories. Comments will be accepted until Sept. 15.
"The fact that we can take this site off the list shows the success of the Superfund program," said George Pavlou, EPA’s acting regional administrator, according to a news release. "EPA has made sure that this site is no longer a threat to the people of the U.S. Virgin Islands, and deleting Island Chemical from the Superfund list is evidence of all the hard work that has been done to clean it up."
Once it is taken off the list, the site will remain eligible for cleanup in the very unlikely event that changes in the condition of the property warrant such action, the EPA said in its release.
The EPA started looking into the site in 1989, according to agency spokesman Elias Rodriquez. The site was placed on the National Priorities List on June 17, 1996. Field work began in 1995, with the final inspection on the remedial work completed Feb. 17, 2004.
The site is now grown over with vegetation, Rodriquez said.
The Island Chemical site is a 3.5-acre facility in the southwest portion of St. Croix. The facility was used to manufacture pharmaceutical chemicals and benzyl acetate, which is used in perfumes, flavorings, resins, lacquers, printing inks and varnish removers. As a result, contaminants — including ethyl benzene, xylene, acetone and chloroform — were found in the groundwater and the soil at the site.
The EPA addressed soil and groundwater contamination at the site through a process called soil vapor extraction, which involves removing the contaminants, in the form of vapors, from the soil by vacuuming them out, and air sparging, which uses air to help remove harmful vapors from polluted soil and ground water. Air is pumped underground, causing contaminants to evaporate faster, which makes them easier to remove by vacuuming. The remedy also entailed monitoring chloroform levels in the groundwater to ensure that the levels continued to naturally decrease. Controls that limit groundwater use at the site have also been implemented.
The EPA identifies sites that appear to present a significant risk to public health, welfare or the environment, and maintains the National Priorities List as the list of those sites. In general, National Priorities List sites are those where serious hazards exist or have existed which are threats to health.
After several rounds of sampling and monitoring, it is clear that the St. Croix site no longer poses a risk to the surrounding community, and the EPA is ready to take the Island Chemical site off the National Priorities List, the release said.
For more information about the Island Chemical superfund site, go to http://www.epa.gov/region02/superfund/npl/0202651c.pdf.
Email comments to Caroline Kwan, the remedial project manager of the site, at kwan.caroline@epa.gov, or send regular mail to Kwan at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 2, Emergency and Remedial Response Division, 290 Broadway, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10007.
