Published: November 12, 2009 10:54 pm      

Work at Continental continues as 2009 ends

The ground where the slag piles once sat is littered with multi-hued pieces of metal oxides, broken and scattered by the churning of earth-moving equipment.

The bright colors of the oxides, a tiny portion of the leftovers from Continental Steel’s massive operation, will soon be gone, along with the 2009 construction season.

This week, officials from the Indiana Department of Environmental Management and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency traveled to Kokomo for what amounted to a season wrap-up tour of the 183-acre site.

More than $78 million — most of it federal funding — has been spent on the Continental cleanup since work resumed in 1998, but 2009 was a banner year.

In addition to the funding the site gets on an annual basis, the federal stimulus package poured another $5.9 million into the cleanup.

That money is directly responsible for the disappearance of the slag piles along Markland Avenue, some 83,000 cubic yards of lead- and arsenic-contaminated material, according to EPA project manager Nabil Fayoumi.

Originally scheduled to start in 2011, the stimulus funds moved up the slag removal by two years.

The money is being paid to Canadian general contractors CH2M Hill, but Hill, in turn, has subcontracted much of the work to Hoosier firms, such as Terra Inc., Terre Haute.

The stimulus funding — in addition to grading and capping the slag piles — also created about 45 temporarily jobs, Fayoumi estimated.

Much of the slag material will be placed on top of the old acid lagoons — vast drying beds where spent “pickling acid” was pumped — to the west of the Wildcat Creek.

But the most impressive stop on Tuesday’s media tour was probably the old Markland Avenue Quarry.

Once filled with a blue-green chemical stew, the quarry has been drained and cleaned. All summer, dump trucks have brought in clean fill dirt, and the quarry is now about 85 percent filled.

Next year, Fayoumi said he expects work will begin to grade the area immediately around the rim of the quarry, along with a city-led project to use the quarry as a stormwater retention area.

Kokomo Mayor Greg Goodnight expressed the community’s thanks Tuesday.

“A few short months ago, we had a toxic lagoon,” Goodnight said. “But just because of the work being done, I’m sure that in my grandchildren’s lifetime, the land will be put back into productive use.”

The Continental site was one of four sites in EPA’s Region V — the upper Midwest — to receive stimulus funding this year. And for the past five years, the cleanup work in Kokomo has been funded to the tune of about $6 million per year.

Next year, work will continue in several areas.

Fayoumi said the last remaining structure, the former wastewater plant located near the acid lagoons will be demolished and hauled

offsite.

Work will continue to cap the acid lagoons, and toxic chemicals will be removed from a small area of the Main Plant site using a steam injection method.

IDEM and EPA officials are also monitoring the Wildcat Creek near the site.

In September, members of the Wildcat Guardians reported an oily substance floating on the surface of the Wildcat, just south of a soon-to-be-removed dam.

Emergency response officials with IDEM and EPA are investigating and recently took samples of the floating globules. Fayoumi said he expects lab results back in two weeks.

It’s possible, he said, that the globules could be a temporary phenomenon, and that they’ll go away on their own. But the testing is being done just to make sure.

“The creek is looking better than I’ve ever seen it; we’ve spent $10 million cleaning it up,” Fayoumi said.

• Scott Smith is a Kokomo Tribune staff writer. He may be reached at 765-454-8569 or via e-mail at scott.smith@kokomotribune.com