THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, July 18, 1996 TAG: 9607180390
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE LENGTH: 102 lines
At the dead-end of Steel Road, behind a rusting fence, sits an old steel mill where pollutants and scrap once were buried in trenches near the marshy banks of Deep Creek.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency thought conditions were risky enough earlier this year to classify the Norfolk Steel Corp. mill, closed since 1991, as a Superfund hazardous-waste cleanup site.
But the administration of Gov. George F. Allen, while acknowledging potential risks, is choosing a different tactic.
Allen's secretary of natural resources, Becky Norton Dunlop, has blocked the proposed listing of Norfolk Steel and six other sites in Virginia - including the former Nansemond Ordnance Depot in Suffolk, now home to a Tidewater Community College campus - as Superfund candidates.
She reasons that Virginia can oversee a cleanup in its own state just fine, and that federal involvement will only delay and complicate the work.
Dunlop did not, however, stop the addition of Norfolk Naval Base to the National Priorities List, as the roster of Superfund projects is formally known. The giant base was nominated for the list last month.
Nor did she protest environmental scorecards that may one day put three other local landmarks on the list - Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base, and NASA's Wallops Flight Center on Virginia's Eastern Shore.
``We felt they were doing good work at those facilities already, and that a listing may give them a legal driver, a bigger piece of the pie,'' of federal restoration funds, Erica Dameron, state director of Superfund sites, said Tuesday.
Dunlop can block new listings, and agree to others, under a little-known piece of law passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1995. It empowers governors for the first time to veto Superfund additions in their respective states.
Not that Norfolk Steel will now stand idly by, threatening Deep Creek, a tributary of the Elizabeth River, with seeping contaminants that federal reports say include lead, pesticides and highly toxic PCBs and PAHs.
The site's owner, Birmingham Steel Corp., of Birmingham, Ala., is joining a growing number of companies that are signing up for a voluntary cleanup program run by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.
Without threat of penalty or punishment, companies agree to purge old chemicals and wastes from their lands under terms and schedules worked out with the DEQ staff.
Virginia becomes the 38th state to offer its own alternative to Superfund, a federal project launched in 1980 that has come under fire of late for its slow, expensive pace in cleaning up the worst toxic-waste sites in the nation. Congress now is debating how to reform Superfund.
``We think we can do it faster and at less cost,'' said Hassan Vakili, DEQ's director of waste operations, echoing a sentiment heard in states from California to Pennsylvania.
Also blocked from Superfund consideration in Virginia: three military installations outside of Hampton Roads, all of which are being mopped up by the Department of Defense; a gas station in Staunton; a town dump in Saltville in southwestern Virginia; and the former Nansemond Ordnance Depot in Suffolk, according to a letter signed by Dunlop and sent to EPA Administrator Carol M. Browner.
The former 975-acre depot, at the scenic confluence of the Nansemond and James rivers, processed munitions - including chemical weaponry - during World Wars I and II, records show.
A Tidewater Community College campus is on part of the property. School officials are connecting a public water line to the Suffolk campus, in part to allay concerns that groundwater wells may be tainted.
The Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for investigating other potential risks at the development-rich site. The research continues.
Bill Lucas, executive vice president of Birmingham Steel, said he hopes to remove all wastes and residues from the old mill in Chesapeake ``probably in about a year.'' The company then plans to sell the 103-acre site, which it acquired in 1986 and almost immediately discovered was contaminated.
In 1987, the Virginia Department of Waste Management advised the mill's new owners that they had to cope with hazardous dust, produced in steel furnaces and disposed of on the property, according to records.
The dust contains heavy metals, such as chromium, lead and cadmium. Other wastes produced before 1980 had been dumped into a trench near Deep Creek and covered with dirt, state environmental officials reported.
``They (Birmingham Steel) will be assessing the extent of any contamination, either in sediments, runoff or groundwater,'' said Vakili, the state waste director.
The company has salvaged equipment and scrap metal from the mill and sent it for use at other Birmingham Steel plants, Lucas said. Just two employees remain on the property, located in the low-lying marshes at the industrial crossroads of Chesapeake, Portsmouth and Norfolk.
Birmingham Steel has spent ``hundreds of thousands of dollars'' eliminating environmental problems on the property so far, Lucas said, but quickly added that ``much more remains to be spent'' before the site is considered fully clean.
In scoring the ecological risks, EPA inspectors gave the mill a 50; a score higher than 28.5 is grounds for consideration as a Superfund site, EPA officials said.
Listing the mill would only delay cleanup work and complicate a state-run process that has Birmingham Steel moving ahead, said Michael McKenna, DEQ's director of policy and planning.
``Can we do a better job than EPA? Sure. We're closer to the source,'' McKenna said. ILLUSTRATION: Map
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KEYWORDS: WATER POLLUTION by CNB