Ford Plant pollution study finds a dozen spots need a closer look
About a dozen areas at the Ford’s truck assembly plant in St. Paul are polluted enough to require further study and possible cleanup, according to a report the company provided to city and state officials Monday.
Ford plans to close the manufacturing site in Highland Park in 2008, so identifying the extent of contaminants on its 138 acres is a critical step in determining the land’s value and redevelopment options.
The study, done by an environmental consultant for the company, took soil and groundwater samples at about 30 locations at the plant in June and July. Investigators found pockets of contamination that included metals such as arsenic, chromium and lead, petroleum compounds including benzene, and volatile chemicals such as solvents. At eight locations the contamination in soil exceeded state standards for industrial land, and at six areas substances in the groundwater exceeded state health risk limits.
None of the groundwater in the area is used for drinking.
Ford Motor Co. officials issued a written statement saying that additional studies are needed.
Those studies would determine the extent of the pollution. “These results are consistent with our expectations for a facility of the age, size and complexity of the Twin Cities assembly plant,” according to the statement. “At this point, we have no indications that these findings are impacting the community.”
Ford built an assembly plant at the site in 1923 and expanded it several times over the decades. It has been used to make vehicles ranging from Model T cars and trucks to World War II military vehicles to its current production of Ranger pickup trucks.
Some of the contaminated spots include a former hazardous-waste storage area, former railroad spurs where chemicals were loaded and unloaded, a collapsed tunnel area with buried drums, places where underground storage tanks once contained gasoline and paint thinners, and areas where pipelines formerly carried gasoline and diesel fuel.
“You can think of this investigation as a first pass across the site, an initial screening of the outside areas around the plant’s buildings,” said Amy Hadiaris, hydrogeologist for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. She received the two-volume report from Ford on Monday afternoon, and said it will take a couple of weeks for her and three others to analyze the research and to review its conclusions.
“We’ll be looking not only at the concentrations of contaminants that were detected but also the distribution of sampling,” Hadiaris said, including whether enough samples were taken at each location and what they suggest about how deep and how wide the pollution could be.
A large amount of the property is covered by buildings, Hadiaris said, and cannot be investigated until the plant is shut down, or in some cases until the structures are demolished and removed.
One of the areas that did not show serious contamination was a trio of Little League baseball fields on the southeastern edge of the property. Relatively low levels of arsenic detected in August raised concern about potential exposure to contaminated dust, but Ford officials said last week that additional tests showed “no indication of a health risk in the baseball fields.” Additional studies are underway of deeper soil on the fringe of the ball fields, Ford said, and a separate report on them will be submitted to city and state officials by the end of November.