News, Culture and NPR for Central & Northern Michigan
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
91.7FM Alpena and WCML-TV Channel 6 Alpena are off the air. Click here to learn more.

Former electro-plating business to be torn down

Courtesy madison-heights.org

The former electro-plating business in Madison Heights that leaked ‘green ooze’ onto I-696 will be torn down... eventually.

Efforts to clean up the site continue.

The ooze was discovered last December and since then it’s been a race for environmental officials to fix the stew of hexavalent chromium cyanide PFAS left behind by convicted felon Gary Sayer when he abandoned the business.

The plan now is to put chemical reagents into the soil that will actually help cleanse the contaminated groundwater.

EPA scientist Tricia Edwards says just hauling the pollution away isn’t a long-term solution.

“We've collected nearly 320,000 gallons of liquid so it's  an extremely expensive and very it's cost prohibitive to keep this up,” said Edwards.

Remediation is costly and time consuming the total bill will be over four million dollars and the site will take years to restore.