Excerpt from the Commercial Dispatch, October 17, 2015. Read the full article here.
It's been 21 months since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set aside funds for the clean-up on the old Kerr-McGee facility in Columbus. Officials said it would be a long, painstaking process.
The good news is that the process has reached a couple of important milestones in an effort that make take years to complete.
"We have identified all the areas that we want to sample," Lauri Gorton, environmental programs manager for Greenfield Environmental Trust Group, said Wednesday. "We've achieved two things we wanted to get done. The first was the 14th Avenue ditch project, which is finished. The second thing is after meeting with former employees and residents, we have determined the sites we want to sample, not only on the Kerr-McGee site itself but in the adjoining areas where they might be a contamination problem. We are waiting for the EPA and the Department of Environmental Quality to finish reviewing those sites. Once we get their approval, we'll begin field testing...we believe we will be able to start the drilling operations for those samples in November."