EPA requires stricter coal ash cleanup in Town of Pines due to flawed soil test

The Environmental Protection Agency said the standard for cleaning up coal ash in the Town of Pines will now be a little more strict. In March, the environmental group Earthjustice pointed out flaws in the data used to set that standard. But activists say some flaws still remain — and that means the soil will still be unsafe.

Coal ash contains high levels of toxic heavy metals, which can cause cancer and heart disease. Coal ash from the northern Indiana utility NIPSCO was used as construction fill in hundreds of properties in the Town of Pines.

Erik Hardin is the EPA’s remedial project manager for the Town of Pines Superfund site. At a public meeting on Thursday, he said when NIPSCO tested the area’s soil to find out how much toxic heavy metals naturally occur there, it included a sample with coal ash in it — making those levels look abnormally high.

“It should have been tossed out. So we removed it and recalculated the background concentration with that sample removed," Hardin said.

READ MORE: Pines residents, activists worry coal ash cleanup standard for soil based on flawed data

Now, Hardin said now those standards are stricter than before. The limit for arsenic went from 30 parts per million to 25 ppm and thallium went from 1.9 ppm to 1.6 ppm. The agency also halved the limit for lead based on recent changes to EPA's residential cleanup levels for lead, unrelated to the Town of Pines Superfund site.

NIPSCO will have to offer to clean up properties with soil that have levels above the new limits. Though it's unclear if the EPA will retest residents' yards.

Though it's good the EPA removed one flawed sample, Lisa Evans with Earthjustice said the limit for arsenic is still nearly twice as high as it should be. She said other outliers in the data need to be removed too.

"This impacts the safety of the folks yards, the safety of their grandkids, the safety of the food they grow. You know, this is an important decision," Evans said.
 

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EPA project manager Hardin said just because a soil sample is a statistical outlier doesn't mean it should be tossed out of the data. He said there was one sample that had high levels of arsenic, but was not shown to contain coal ash — even if that area had other industrial pollution.

Evans and a former EPA radiation expert have said the agency also needs to take a second look at radioactivity at the site. New research from the EPA shows exposure to radium in coal ash can increase people’s risk of cancer.

READ MORE: Town of Pines residents sign letter urging EPA to ban using toxic coal ash as fill in construction

Residents say they used to have technical advisor through the company Geo-Hydro, Inc. that would look at things like soil testing with fresh eyes — making sure NIPSCO’s numbers were accurate. But the funding for that advisor ran out. Residents and Earthjustice said these errors show a new technical advisor for the Town of Pines Superfund site is needed.

Paul Kysel is the former president of the residents’ group PINES (People In Need of Environmental Safety). He said the decades' long cleanup has also been through three EPA remedial project managers.

"It's a common human flaw to take on someone else's work and assume that all their work, all the work that predated your involvement, was correct, accurate, without flaws," Kysel said.

Rebecca is our energy and environment reporter. Contact her at rthiele@iu.edu or follow her on Twitter at @beckythiele.