Olin, Wilmington In Dispute On Cleanup Of Contaminated Site

WILMINGTON, MA -- Officials in Wilmington have reached an impasse with Olin Corp., the company charged with cleaning up toxic waste from a site in town that has been designated a Superfund Site by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The site is contaminated with elevated concentrations of N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA), a probable human carcinogen.

On Monday, Wilmington Selectmen received an update on the cleanup project which has been ongoing since 1989. James DiLorenzo, the Environmental Protection Agency project manager for the site, said his agency and Olin are disagreeing on the timetable and extent of the cleanup efforts.

Contamination at the site, which made chemical blowing agents, stabilizers, antioxidants and other specialty chemicals for the rubber and plastics industry until it closed in 1986, forced the town to close five public water supply wells serving more than 7,000 people. In some sections of Wilmington, Olin still provides bottled drinking water.

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As reported by Wicked Local Wilmington, Olin does not believe it is possible to restore the bedrock aquifer, making it pointless to continue removing pools of dense aqueous phase liquid, or DAPL, the compound which contains NDMA. “We are pushing Olin to look at other options to remove the DAPL,” DiLorenzo said. EPA is also pressuring Olin to implement a final cleanup plan by late 2020, which Olin also objects to.

A study conducted in 2013-14 found about 25 million gallons of DAPL in four areas of the site, with the largest pool located underground between Jewel and Main Streets. At the time, officials estimated Olin could remove a gallon every minute; that rate was later lowered to one gallon every four minutes.

To date, Olin has removed 900,000 gallons from the Jewel Drive site, DiLorenzo said.

"Olin is arguing that NDMA (a toxic chemical in the DAPL) has migrated so far into the bedrock, there is nothing we can do about it and we don’t even plan to try," Martha Stevenson, president of the Wilmington Environmental Restoration Committee, said at Monday's meeting.

For more on this story, see Wicked Local Wilmington.

Superfund site photo by markzvo via Wikimedia Commons.