Ray Jansky doesn’t know if his Whiting home is contaminated with lead.
He’s been told to avoid having his pregnant daughter and granddaughter go to his home until it’s tested.
“To me that’s unacceptable,” Jansky said.
Jansky was one of many residents from Whiting and Hammond’s Robertsdale section who questioned staff from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency" href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/environmental-issues/u.s.-environmental-protection-agency-ORGOV000048-topic.html">U.S. Environmental Protection Agency about lead contamination found in the neighborhoods. The EPA is just beginning to test the area and get a picture of the extent of the contamination.
The EPA hearing Wednesday was designed to explain ongoing sampling around the Federated Metals site and $1.7 million of “time critical” cleanup measures at properties in Whiting and Hammond. The EPA expects the money will cover soil removal costs at roughly 30 homes, according to Andrew Maguire, an EPA on-scene coordinator.
“My house, it hasn’t been tested,” Jansky said. “When are we going to get to the other houses?”
“It’s still being evaluated,” Maguire said. “I don’t have a timeline.”
Maguire said once the EPA has an access agreement with a property owner, the agency can sample the soil and discover the extent of lead contamination.
The EPA sampled 30 residential properties around the site and found 25 had levels of lead about 400 parts per million, which is the threshold for removal action. One property had lead levels more than 6 times higher than what the EPA says is safe.
The EPA has not fully explored potential residential contamination around the site, according to documents, and conducted soil sampling in April 2018 to gather more information.
The area the EPA is concentrating on runs from 119th Street on the north, East Lakeview Street on the south, White Oak Avenue on the east and Atchison Avenue on the west, according to information provided to residents.
“We live a stone’s throw over the line,” said Whiting resident Jennifer Callaway. She asked how her property could get tested if the sample area were bigger.
“It’s still a work in progress,” Maguire said. “We’re still evaluating the scope of this.”
Many residents asked about the safety of public parks and areas where kids play.
Maguire said none of the city parks in the study showed elevated levels of lead.
Federated Metals operated smelting, refining, recovery and recycling facility for metals including lead, copper and zinc, according to the EPA.
The facility has been in the EPA’s Resource Conservation and Recovery Act program since 2003, according to the EPA, and was passed to the Superfund program for emergency action in 2016.
The emergency actions will excavate contaminated soil in residents’ yards, according to the EPA, and replace that material with clean fill.
Excavation starts next week, weather permitting, Maguire said.
Larry Davis, of Hebron, said as the EPA started working at the U.S.S. Lead Superfund site in East Chicago, testing inside people’s home revealed elevated levels of lead. If high levels of lead were found in the homes, Davis said the EPA cleaned people’s homes to remove that danger.
Davis asked if the same would be done in Whiting and Hammond.
“We’re not sampling inside homes,” Maguire said.
Maguire said once a yard is remediated, the EPA would advise residents to do a thorough cleaning of their home.
“I believe that’s been proven most effective,” Maguire said.
Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. said everyone in the area knows about what happened in East Chicago when residents had to move from a public housing complex because of the high levels of lead.
“I’m trying to differentiate what we’re talking about here,” McDermott said.
“Is this a dangerous situation like it was in East Chicago?” McDermott asked.
Maguire said in East Chicago, the public housing complex was built on top of waste and the smelter.
“That’s not the scenario here,” Maguire said.
The smoke stack at the old Federated property deposited lead into the neighborhood, Maguire said, and the houses weren’t built on lead.
“That’s apples to oranges,” Maguire said.