John Fox watched the trees turn brown and die. It freaked him out a little.
A trackhoe digs at the former Armstrong World Industries site off
Harrisburg Avenue in Lancaster. At
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"Perhaps it's nothing," said Fox, president of the Iron Compass Map Co., in Liberty Place in Lancaster. But because of where the trees were, he thought it might be something.
They lined a fence along the western edge of what was once the Armstrong World Industries floor plant site. Fox had watched as the buildings — which manufactured products that contained asbestos, among other things — were demolished. He'd seen truckloads of dirt carted away. And he wondered if whatever was in that dirt had killed the trees.
The answer appears to be "no." The "junk" trees died because they were in Norfolk Southern's right of way, and the railroad sprayed them, said David Nikoloff, president of EDC Finance Corp., which is overseeing the $33 million demolition and environmental cleanup of the old Armstrong site.
There's nothing in the soil, he said, that would kill those trees.
Not anymore.
Two years ago, EDC began to clean up the 47-acre site, which will eventually be sold to Franklin & Marshall College and Lancaster General Hospital. F&M plans to build athletic fields, while Lancaster General wants to build medical offices and a nursing school. Local officials long feared the site was extremely contaminated, but "it's not as bad as people made it out to be," Nikoloff said. "I'm not saying there weren't issues. But they were manageable."
Arsenic, lead and thallium were detected in the soil; benzene, toluene and other compounds were in the water. All are highly toxic. While excavating the "hot spots," work crews found lots of other surprises, too. There were buried storage tanks no one knew were there, as well as an entire railroad car filled with sand.
But now, Nikoloff said, the Armstrong site might be the most nonpolluted piece of ground in the old industrial corridor that rings the city.
"We told the community that we were going to clean it up to residential standards," Nikoloff said — so clean you could live atop it.
"We've been doing everything we said we'd do."
And, on occasion, a little more.
Which would explain why, this summer, engineers with the ARM Group, in Hershey, were knocking on doors in southern Manheim Township, near the Amtrak station and the old Armstrong site.
What was in the water?As part of the cleanup process, groundwater is extracted from the Armstrong site and filtered. That water, according to an ARM Group report to the state Department of Environmental Protection, was actually "quite favorable," though it did contain concentrations of aromatics (benzene, toluene and ethylbenzene) and phthalates (esters of phthalic acid) that exceeded residential standards.
All these chemicals are used in the manufacture of plastics and other materials, and all are, to varying degrees, poisonous. Phthalate exposure can cause birth defects, according to tests conducted by the Centers For Disease Control. Long-term toluene exposure has been linked to brain damage, while benzene is a known carcinogen.
Computer models have shown that the water could migrate from the Armstrong site to other portions of Manheim Township. Previously, the City of Lancaster had gotten the DEP to declare the municipality a "non-use aquifer" — meaning that no one in the city could draw groundwater from a well, and therefore it didn't need to be cleaned up to a level safe for human consumption.
EDC Finance wanted the same designation for parts of Manheim Township within 1,000 feet of the Armstrong site. That required verifying that 257 properties were connected to the city's water system. Officials were able to verify all but 12.
Of those 12, several were parking lots, others were vacant ground owned by the state. But one of the sites was Stumpf Field.
McMinn's Asphalt owns Stumpf Field. McMinn's Jeff Sweigart said no one there drinks contaminated water: The field is hooked up to the public water system.
But he understands the concern about environmental issues. "Back in the 1930s, this was a city dump," Sweigart said. "When we redid the field in 2003 and were digging the dugouts, old-timers would come in and sift through the dirt," taking old, green glass and other treasures.
And at one time, he said, six automobiles were buried in the outfield area in order to "stabilize the field."
"If there was ever a brownfield," Sweigart said, "that's it."
The same is true of the entire ring around the city. "One hundred years ago, this was the industrial core of the city," Nikoloff said. It became polluted accordingly.
According to DEP documents, Armstrong World Industries began to clean up the area around the old floor plant in 1986, when exploring the possibility of selling part of the property. There was a lot to clean up.
In 2005, for instance — the year before it sold the land — the company sent the DEP a "notice of intent to remediate" the old salvage area, which had been used as a hazardous waste storage pad. Soil borings found vinyl chloride, a carcinogen. Groundwater samplings found relatively low levels of tricholoroethylene and other compounds. The area was cleaned up, but the problems didn't end there.
When Armstrong sold the site to the EDC in 2006, it sought and got a "covenant not to sue" — basically, an agreement that F&M would indemnify Armstrong "in the unlikely event that the Department [of Environmental Protection] seeks to pursue a cleanup action against Armstrong."
Armstrong World Industries consolidated its residential flooring operations on 20 acres on the northwest corner of the site along Dillerville Road, transferring the rest to EDC. Armstrong, F&M and LGH pledged $6 million each to the cost of the $33 million demolition and cleanup. Another $1 million came from the county; $12 million came from the state, with additional funds coming from the federal government.
As work got under way, crews found several surprises.
For example, there were radioactive rocks, 280 tons of rubble that tested positive for thorium 232. It was, according to a Penn State radiologist hired to come in and take a look, a minimal hazard, but no one could figure out where the "ore-like" material had come from.
A subsequent DEP analysis deemed it to be "naturally occurring," though it was "not a character native to the immediate Lancaster area," and the department couldn't say for sure whether it had been "enhanced." It was trucked away.
A March 2007 report noted "the presence of area-wide concentrations of arsenic in excess of the residential direct contact" guidelines. The origin of the arsenic, the report noted, "may be due to coal ash residues and other historical fill deposits on the site, and also potentially due to historical on-site and off-site airborne sources of arsenic."
In October 2007, minutes from a meeting on the project recorded that two buried items had been found near the old rotogravure plant: one railroad car filled with sand, and a 1,000-gallon storage tank filled with "product." There's no mention of what the product was. Workers digging up another buried tank damaged it, causing a spill of oily substances.
And as late as February of this year, DEP officials continued to note "exceedences of arsenic," among other substances, on the site.
Nikoloff says virtually all of it is gone. "Stuff from Norfolk Southern could seep onto our site," he noted and, indeed, DEP documentation shows portions of the railroad property are as contaminated as or more contaminated than the Armstrong site was, from fueling operations that ceased in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
Yet one reason EDC pledged to clean the site to residential standards was that "we don't want to have any of this come back and bite us" down the road, Nikoloff said.
Workers are now installing infrastructure on the site — water, sewer and electrical lines, roads, sidewalks and curbs. But environmental remediation goes on. "We've literally bombed that site with test wells," Nikoloff said, and DEP regulations stipulate that those wells must come up clear four quarters in a row before EDC can turn the site over to F&M and LGH for redevelopment.
Nikoloff hopes that will happen by the third or fourth quarter of next year.
"F&M and LGH are expecting a clean bill of health," Nikoloff said. "We're going to give it to them."
Gil Smart is associate editor of the Sunday News. E-mail him at gsmart@lnpnews.com, or phone 291-8817.
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