<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=192888919167017&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">
Thursday, March 28, 2024
March 28, 2024

Linkedin Pinterest

EPA to delist Frontier site

Agency says cleanup done, it should come off Superfund list

By Dameon Pesanti, Columbian staff writer
Published: May 21, 2018, 7:53pm
2 Photos
Workers begin the cleanup of a contaminated plume from the Frontier Hard Chrome site at 113 Y St. in Vancouver in 2003.
Workers begin the cleanup of a contaminated plume from the Frontier Hard Chrome site at 113 Y St. in Vancouver in 2003. (The Columbian files) Photo Gallery

Nearly 35 years after the Environmental Protection Agency listed the former Frontier Hard Chrome location as among the nation’s most environmentally contaminated sites and 15 years after cleanup work was officially declared finished, the site is now poised to be removed from the National Priorities List.

On Monday, the EPA issued a Notice of Intent to Delete the Frontier Hard Chrome Inc. Superfund Site from the list. The National Priorities List is a federal list of toxic waste sites across the United States. Sites polluted enough to be included on the list are eligible for long-term cleanup work, with financing from the Superfund program.

The notice is published in the Federal RegisterRegistrar. The public now has until June 20 to offer comment on the proposal. When the comment period closes, the EPA is expected delete the site.

According to the summary statement on the Federal Register, the EPA and the Washington Department of Ecology have determined that all appropriate cleanup work has been completed.

“However, this deletion does not preclude future actions under Superfund,” it reads.

“Ecology partnered with the EPA to take on this highly contaminated site when the owner went out of business,” Ecology spokesman Dave Bennett said in an email. “We helped with the site’s cleanup and then oversaw the long-term monitoring. Now, after several decades of work, the site meets both state and federal cleanup standards.”

The city of Vancouver did not respond to requests for comment before press time.

From 1958 through 1983, the former chrome-plating business, located east of Pearson Field, disposed of chromium-polluted wastewater by dumping it into an on-site dry well — a practice that wasn’t prohibited by state law at the time. In 1982, an industrial supply well about a quarter-mile away from the site was found to be contaminated with more than double the federal drinking water standard of chromium. The business shuttered about a year later without addressing the contamination, around the same time the EPA added the site to the national Superfund list.

In the early 2000s, the business’s old buildings were destroyed and the contaminated soil was excavated and treated with a sulfur-based chemical that would convert the toxic hexavalent chromium to a safer form, trivalent chromium.

The groundwater was monitored until 2016, when the EPA determined the groundwater quality at monitoring wells had reached acceptable levels.

The agency signed a Final Close-Out Report on the site in late January of this year. That document explained the milestones reached and that no further action was required.

Clark County is home to five Superfund sites, including Frontier Hard Chrome. In February, the EPA removed Vancouver Water Stations No. 1 and No. 4 from the National Priorities List. Toftdahl Drum site, located in Brush Prairie, was delisted in 1988.

Only the Boomsnub Chrome & Grind and Airco Gases properties along Northeast 47th Avenue are still undergoing cleanup work.

Mark MacIntyre, spokesman for the EPA, said the agency has no plans to delete any other Superfund sites in Southwest Washington from the National Priorities List this year.

Loading...
Columbian staff writer