"Progress Reported in Cleaning Up Delaware's Largest Superfund Site"

"The Environmental Protection Agency is reporting promising but uneven results in its latest report on costly efforts to control toxic pollution creeping away from Delaware’s largest Superfund cleanup site."



"After 11 years of publicly financed work, contamination levels are sharply lower in wells just outside an underground containment wall that surrounds 23 central acres of the former Metachem Products chlorinated benzene factory north of Delaware City. Bankruptcy put the dangerously unstable chemical plant in taxpayer hands in May 2002.

But in some areas, toxic pollution concentrations are hundreds and even thousands of times higher than federal drinking-water limits, at depths of up to 165 feet, in groundwater once believed to be safe from any surface spills. Levels in one well just outside the buried wall had 800 times more chlorinated benzene than the EPA allows in public taps, and 14,200 times more cancer-causing benzene."

Jeff Montgomery reports for the Wilmington News Journal April 29, 2013.
 

Source: Wilmington News Journal, 04/29/2013