Excerpt from Coastal Review Online, January 25, 2018. Read the full article here.
NAVASSA — The extent of creosote contamination in the soil and groundwater on and around a former wood treatment plant is of “various levels,” according to a remedial investigation of the site.
“The most heavily impacted area is what we call the process plant and the ponds,” explained Richard Elliott, the Multistate Environmental Response Trust project manager of the federally designated Superfund site in Brunswick County’s Navassa.
Logs coated in creosote, a gummy, tar-like mix of hundreds of chemicals used as a wood preservative, were stacked and dried before being loaded onto trains.
The top 3 or 4 feet of soil in the area in which the logs were placed to dry has higher concentrations of contamination, but that soil can likely easily be removed and replaced with contaminant-free dirt.
Samples routinely taken from 69 monitoring wells drilled in and around the site reveal creosote has traveled anywhere from 10 feet below the surface to a depth of as much as 90 feet below the surface and it is affecting the groundwater, Elliott said.
“Creosote is heavier than water, so it’s going down,” he said. “It’s dense, so it’s tending to just flow down.”
The plume of contamination in the groundwater is slow moving, staying relatively in the same area since the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. treatment plant closed more than 40 years ago.