A Superfund site in St. Louis Michigan has received $9.7 million for cleanup from the federal government.
The EPA is working to remove a variety of chemicals that have leached into the ground around the site of the former Velsicol Chemical Company.
Jane Keon is with the Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force. She says the current grant is to clean up chemical contamination in one acre.
“They’ve projected out for the whole 52 acres and it looks like it’ll be 324 million for the whole project.”
Keon said there have been other EPA projects connected to the site but this is the first work to clean up the plant site itself.
“This is a hotspot with volatile chemicals that you should not even breathe. So they are destroying them underground and then capturing the vapors and the water that come off in the process.”
EPA officials say they are boiling the chemicals underground and capturing the fumes in filters which are then removed from the site.
Funding for the project was announced last year.
Keon said a full cleanup could take as long as twenty years.