Around three dozen members of the public gathered at the Westchester Public Library's main branch in Chesterton Thursday for a public meeting held by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Agency staff offered an update on the ongoing effort to clean up Town of Pines properties contaminated by coal ash, a process that has potentially increased in scope after the EPA announced it would recalculate the threshold for soil removal after discovering an error in its dataset.
During the 1970s, a contractor for NIPSCO tasked with disposing of fly ash from the company's Michigan City Generating Station provided the material to Town of Pines homeowners as landscaping fill. A fine particulate byproduct of coal combustion, fly ash contains arsenic, thallium, lead and other heavy metals that pose serious health risks if they enter the body through inhalation, skin contact or consuming produce grown in tainted soil.
The Town of Pines, along with nearby areas of Pines Township, has been a Superfund site since 2004 due to the discovery that a landfill used by NIPSCO to dispose of coal ash had contaminated local groundwater.
The EPA's remediation efforts expanded to include soil cleanup in 2016 after heavy metals from fly ash were discovered in the town's residential soil. In 2022, NIPSCO signed a consent decree with the agency and the state of Indiana that requires the company to pay for an estimated $11.8 million in remediation efforts.
In March, the EPA launched a renewed effort to secure permission from Town of Pines property owners for soil sampling by NIPSCO contractors, holding its first public meeting on the subject since 2016. The levels of heavy metals measured across each parcel determine whether it is eligible for soil removal. EPA community involvement coordinator Kirsten Safakas has been meeting in-person with residents of the Superfund site in an effort to spread the word.
Because the contaminants contained in fly ash can also occur naturally in soil or could be present due to sources unrelated to NIPSCO, determining where to remove soil requires establishing a background level by sampling unaffected soil from the area. Properties with levels of arsenic, thallium or lead greater than the background level are eligible for soil removal, and NIPSCO will pay for the excavation and replacement of up to three feet of topsoil.
A March 14 letter to the EPA sign signed by two Town of Pines residents along with representatives of Earthjustice and Just Transition Northwest Indiana claimed that AECOM had included a soil sample tainted by fly ash, a fact that should have led to its removal from the dataset.
In May, following a review, the EPA said it would removal the sample and recalculate background levels accordingly. The activists were right, the agency said — the sample in question contained 0.25% fly ash.
The sample contained elevated levels of arsenic and thallium, raising the background values for both metals.
NIPSCO director of communications Wendy Lussier called the sample's inclusion "an inadvertent error."
The letter's authors also sought the removal of a second sample that had an unusually high level of arsenic which they suspected had been "impacted by an industrial source," but were unsuccessful.
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