Nov. 07--One of the Central Florida’s most challenging pollution sites is being entombed in a gargantuan casket spanning several blocks of Parramore near downtown Orlando’s Creative Village.
Concrete sides 2 feet thick were recently extended below ground as much as 65 feet into a solid layer of clay. Within the next few months, a concrete lid 6 to 8 inches thick, more than two football fields long and 100 feet wide, will be built.
When done, an enormous amount of contaminated earth will be sealed off from people, rain and groundwater.
“It will be impervious,” said Tim Morgan, a project manager with Great Lakes Environmental Infrastructure, one of the site’s contractors.
Similar to hundreds of cities in the U.S. and dozens in Florida, Orlando had a factory along the 400 to 600 blocks of West Robinson Street that from the late 1800s heated coal in a chamber to produce manufactured gas for stoves, lights and industry.
The factory closed in the late 1950s with the arrival of natural gas via pipelines.
But the coal-gasification plant left the ground saturated with a hazardous byproduct, coal tar. The oily goop also sank more than 100 feet, infiltrating the Floridan Aquifer.
In 1988, federal investigators found chemicals associated with coal tar in the aquifer and said the probable source was the former gasification plant.
In 2003, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency designated the stretch of East Robinson Street as in need of a Superfund cleanup, an approach for the nation’s worst, most difficult or costly pollution messes.
Investigators at the Orlando site detected coal-tar ingredients of benzene and other chemicals like those in petroleum. Some were found to have spread underground in groundwater more than a mile to the northeast.
The EPA’s website refers to the former Orlando plant as a Superfund site. The technically correct label is Superfund Alternative Site, meaning that local parties and not the federal government are paying for restoration under Superfund protocols.
People living near the site today typically don’t know of the site’s history or ongoing challenges. The EPA states that contamination "does not currently threaten people living and working near the site.”
A study three years ago by the Florida Department of Health determined the site poses a low risk for exposure to hazardous chemicals.
Lawanna Gelzer, a west Orlando community activist, said she appreciates EPA’s efforts to inform the community on the Superfund site but remains critical of the city for not undertaking a comprehensive look at the health effects of west Orlando’s industrial legacy, which includes the plant.
“It has been an uphill battle,” Gelzer said of pursuing such a study.
The area around West Robinson Street has seen vast transformation since the plant was dismantled in 1960.
It is surrounded by government buildings and, arriving recently and closely adjoining the Superfund site, the Creative Village development for the campuses of the University of Central Florida and Valencia College.
While the EPA has yet to determine permanent rules for use of the property, Pence said it may be possible to eventually redevelop the property for other purposes.
The first phase of managing the site’s contamination, including investigations, design, removal of some soil and construction of the concrete enclosure, cost $19 million, said Bill Pence, an Orlando lawyer for the site owners and responsible parties.
Of that cost, nearly 48 percent will be paid by Atlanta Gas Light Co., 31 percent by Duke Energy, 10 percent by Continental Holdings Inc., 8 percent by Teco Peoples Gas System Inc., and 2 percent by the city of Orlando.
After the concrete lid is in place, a network of pipes and compressors will pump air into the soil beneath the lid -- a technique called air sparging -- to accelerate the breaking down of contaminates by naturally occurring microbes.
“We will inject oxygen to give the bugs a little bit of an energy drink to boost them up,” said EPA project manager Peter Thorpe in Atlanta. “That will last about three years.”
Orlando is on the hook for a small percentage of costs because of its longstanding maintenance of wells that drain storm water into the Floridan Aquifer. One or more of those are thought to have funneled coal tar into the aquifer.
A later chapter in cleaning up the site will focus on coal-tar contamination of the Floridan Aquifer, a difficult task.
Through wells drilling into the contamination zone, water will be pumped out to remove coal tar and stop the spread of its ingredients. The scope and cost of that phase are yet to be determined, Pence said.
Orlando drinking-water wells more than a mile from the Superfund site are not thought to be at risk, according to utility and environmental officials, because they withdraw from far deeper than the zone of contamination and are routinely monitored.
kspear@orlandosentinel.com
