Brunswick cleanup years away, and some have doubts

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Posted 9:25AM on Monday, July 22, 2002

BRUNSWICK, Ga. - Cleanup of contaminants at a Brunswick Superfund site is at least two years away, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency is struggling to maintain some measures to protect the public. A fence to keep trespassers off the Brunswick Wood Preserving site has been cut, and a plug to stop the flow of tainted water in a tidal creek has failed twice, said Brian Farrier, the EPA remedial project manager for the site. A tighter line of security, individual fences around contaminated ponds, remains in place. Trespassers are not at risk unless they get into ponds where dangerous chemicals have been dumped. Farrier said he does not know who cut the outside fence and will not pursue the vandals unless the damage continues. A plug intended to stop the flow of contaminated water has instead probably caused soil to erode, and a pipe intended to divert some of the tainted water has partly collapsed. The EPA still must come up with a plan to clean up the site - a process that will take 18 months to two years - and some environmentalists are already questioning the agency. The Glynn Environmental Coalition gets federal money to pay for independent reviews of the EPA's plans for Superfund sites in Glynn County. The coalition contracts with Nucleic Assays Inc. of Florida to conduct the reviews. Nucleic Assays president Kevin Pegg said there are glaring problems with the EPA's remedy for the site. The plan has no monitoring wells between the site and nearby neighborhoods, which means some drinking water wells could be contaminated, Pegg said. "You cannot use human wells as sentinel wells," he said. "If you do annual tests, someone could be exposed for a long time." He also has doubts about EPA plans to hook slurry walls - made of impervious material and reaching from the surface to a natural layer of rock or clay - to a layer of limestone. The limestone layer may not be as wide as the contaminated area, he said. "What they're doing is putting a temporary wall around the contamination and sending it on to the next generation," said Daniel Parshley, the coalition project manager.