Image by Koushik Chowdavarapu.
THE TWILIGHT ZONE — Picture if you will the citizens of a small town in Northeast Ohio, facing a daunting toxic threat yet trapped in a maze of regulatory capture at the so-called Environmental Protection Agency. Not the citizens of East Palestine, though they too face a challenging quest for the truth about the environmental health threats they may face. But the citizens in and around Uniontown, Ohio have been trapped in such a quagmire for decades, subjected to a dystopian level of gaslighting from the powers that be in an effort to bury the truth regarding the ultra-hazardous poisons reportedly dumped at the town landfill.
The Industrial Excess Landfill (IEL) in Uniontown closed in 1980 and was designated as an EPA Superfund site in 1984, listed as one of the most contaminated sites in the country. Akron area rubber companies were the biggest known polluters at the IEL, dumping millions of gallons of industrial waste and chemicals in the ‘60s and ‘70s. But local citizen eyewitnesses have long testified that the U.S. military was another covert client in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. This includes the IEL’s former owner Charles Kittinger, who came forward in 2001 to speak of clandestine dumping of three metal eggs of nuclear weapons waste he was eerily warned not to speak of.
A secret probe by the Department of Justice and EPA Region 5 led the federal judge overseeing legal matters at the site to deem Kittinger’s testimony “not credible”. Yet the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) – a D.C.-based nonprofit watchdog – took issue with these findings, issuing a scathing 2002 report to Congress on the botched cleanup at the IEL. POGO noted testimony of expert legal witnesses like Dr. Robert Simon, in sealed court cases the polluters settled with local residents who had suffered a family member dying of cancer. The Akron Beacon Journal reported in 1998 on how Simon said in deposition that he’d viewed classified documents indicating that “Army nuclear weapons waste” had been dumped at IEL.
The EPA basically closed the book on the cleanup though with their 2002 amended Record of Decision, in which the agency engaged in extensive mental gymnastics to shoot down every criticism from POGO, other expert consultants, and even their own scientists. But local activists point to troubling evidence suggesting the EPA’s new Environmental and Climate Justice program should fund a fresh investigation into the toxic mess at the IEL.
This includes findings of questionable testing methods that appear to have deviated from what was known to be the best available science. The suspect evidence spans from how groundwater samples were collected in the field to how they were analyzed in the lab, which appears to have led to a flawed outcome by design. There are also more recent developments exposing EPA’s prior claims that the originally planned cleanup remedy was no longer needed.
Newly discovered threats revive long standing concerns at the IEL
The EPA’s own admitted discoveries in recent years of both “potentially explosive landfill gas” and a 1,4-dioxane plume emanating from the site to threaten local citizens are the latest events in a long line of controversy at the landfill.
“IEL sits upon a hill near the center of town, was formerly a sand and gravel pit excavated down to just above the water table and has no impermeable seal on its bottom or sides,” local engineer Joseph A. Mosyjowski lamented in a February letter to the editor in the Canton Repository. “To this day, the largely untreated toxins continue to flush offsite. It’s why 1, 4-Dioxane has been discovered… water lines continue being extended outwardly, and some residents are being threatened with fines/civil action to seal their private wells − hardly a confidence-building, aggressive, proactive fix. When will the slow-motion train wreck called IEL get properly remediated? Citizens deserve a truthful answer.”
The EPA’s answer appears to be never. The cleanup remedy was revised around the turn of the millennium to quash the previously prescribed pump and treat system for the groundwater, switching to natural dilution from rainwater (along with the removal of the planned impermeable cap to prevent infiltration of rainfall.) The EPA technocrats call this Monitored Natural Attenuation, a so-called remedy they claimed was adequate when several controversial rounds of groundwater testing allegedly indicated toxicity of plumes with heavy metals and other contaminants had diminished. This decision was made despite the fact that one of EPA’s own scientists told them that MNA was not working at IEL and that the contaminant plume could actually further expand to contaminate groundwater.
EPA not only failed to upgrade and expand the active gas collection system as the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) had pushed for, EPA bowed to polluters and shut it down altogether (without the public comment period or due process required by Superfund law.) Even U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown couldn’t get a straight answer about this lack of due process from the EPA, according to what his staffers related to local activist group Concerned Citizens of Lake Township (CCLT) in 2009.
Dr. Henry Cole, an atmospheric scientist and former section chief with the US EPA’s Office of Air Quality Planning who had consulted with CCLT decades earlier, was troubled enough by potentially explosive gas issues at the IEL to author a new letter to US EPA Administrator Michael Regan in November 2023. After a fresh review of EPA’s records, Cole concluded that threats related to potential fires, explosive gases, and indoor exposure to radon gas still persist.
“EPA Region 5 has failed to take the measures needed to protect the public health and safety,” Cole wrote, asking for “a new and thorough view of conditions at the site…” His letter also noted how the shutdown of the gas collection system in 2004 had saved millions of dollars for the polluting companies responsible for the cleanup (by Superfund law), but left the community with increased risks associated with gas migration, including exposure to carcinogenic radon.
“Local citizens since the 1990s have criticized EPA for allowing the responsible companies to turn off the critical systems designed to prevent the escape of landfill gas containing explosive levels of methane and toxic vapors and to prevent the outflow of contaminated groundwater. Now after decades EPA says it can’t ensure whether residents are at risk. Therefore together with the Concerned Citizens of Lake Township, I am urging Administrator Regan to intervene at IEL,” Cole wrote. He asked Regan to require an increase in the number of monitoring wells and frequency of testing, and to reinstall the active gas collection system.
The EPA responded predictably two weeks later with Remedial Project Manager Aaron Green dismissing Cole’s concerns, asserting that “Current investigations have not detected methane or NMVOCs [non-methane volatile organic compounds] in the subsurface or ambient air at the site boundaries. Further, there is no evidence to indicate an imminent threat of fire or explosion.”
Regarding Cole’s concerns “about an increased threat of radon emanating from the decay of uranium and radionuclides gas from the landfill”, Green attached a December 2022 letter from EPA’s Doug Ballotti – Director of the Superfund and Emergency Management Division – in response to prior CCLT communication to EPA’s Regan about the radiation concerns at the IEL. Ballotti’s letter cited an infamous 2004 report from the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General Ombudsman, which concluded the agency had “properly discounted radionuclides as contaminants of concern at IEL.”
What wasn’t acknowledged was how that 2004 “OIG Ombudsman Report” came in the wake of previous EPA Ombudsman Bob Martin resigning in disgust on Earth Day 2002. Martin had been railroaded out by the Bush-Cheney EPA, which stripped away his position’s independence and wrapped it into the OIG’s authority (a process that had begun under the Clinton-Gore EPA). Martin’s resignation letter spotlighted how EPA Administrator Christine Todd-Whitman had neutered the National Ombudsman’s role at the expense of democracy.
“I hope you find it in yourself to recognize that by obliterating the independent Ombudsman function, you have deprived the American people and the Congress of a valuable means with [which] to keep the EPA true to its mission of protecting human health and the environment and to be accountable to American communities,” Martin lamented at the time.
CCLT leader Chris Borello has long contended that this was a pivotal moment in the coverup at IEL, since Martin was critical of the cleanup and had lobbied for shallow trenching to investigate the landfill’s northeast corner (where the Army’s nuclear waste containers were reportedly deposited.) Borello – a former grade school teacher turned activist – has been digging into the coverup for four decades. Dubbed “the Erin Brockovich of Ohio” by reporters 20+ years ago, she now resembles heroine Sarah Connor in 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate when actress Linda Hamilton returned to the iconic role after nearly three decades as a weary but battle-hardened warrior who can’t give up the fight as long as she feels she can still help save lives.
The controversial 2004 OIG report also cited a prior round of groundwater analysis events conducted by the polluters in 2000-01 (the first time they even looked for radiation in seven years, only thanks to Bob Martin’s efforts). This included a notable sample from a monitoring well collected on December 11, 2000 that angered expert radiochemist Dave Sill — from the DOE’s Radiological and Environmental Sciences Lab in Idaho – when later consulted by CCLT.
Borello says she first reached out to Sill after an NRC official who had worked closely with him told her that Sill was “one of the most brilliant nuclear scientists in the world.”
“It’s all crooked as shit. They’ll say ‘So what, it’s just global fallout,” Sill lamented to this reporter in 2019 after viewing contractor lab records that indicated the count time on the mass spectrometry sample was just 170 minutes, well shy of DOE standards (1,000 minutes/16.67 hours.) Sill suggested that utilization of the short count time helped enable the contractors to avoid the lab detecting a statistically valid hit of plutonium.
As to who was responsible for specifying the questionable procedures, observers have long wondered why the EPA delegated so much oversight authority to the polluters. The rubber companies contracted with Sharp and Associates to write up the work plan, and also hired Dr. John Frazier from Auxier & Associates as their expert radiation consultant. Frazier rationalized the shorter count times for the lab technicians in an internal email, because he didn’t see “any value” in analyzing the samples more closely.
Auxier’s Frazier was apparently using the playbook from EPA’s house of cards that was authorized by John Griggs, Chief of the Monitoring and Analytical Services Branch at the National Air and Radiation Environmental Laboratory (NAREL, managed by the EPA’s Office of Radiation and Indoor Air). It was Griggs and NAREL who had stood by the Finished Drinking Water 900 Method for groundwater sampling, a method never meant to be used for raw untreated water at Superfund sites that may contain man-made radionuclides.
The use of the EPA 900 Method at the IEL has also encompassed controversies over whether or not samples were preserved in the field with acidification, to keep contaminant particles from clinging to the container. Further controversy has included whether or not samples could be filtered in the field, potentially removing suspended particles since EPA was only supposedly looking for common radionuclides and not trying to suspect that man-made isotopes from nuclear weapons waste might be present.
“Plutonium is extremely insoluble in natural unacidified water samples. In order to keep it soluble for analysis, the solution must be acidified. There is much experimental data that shows a laboratory’s inability to detect plutonium in an unacidified water sample, even though it was there. Analyzing unacidified water samples for plutonium is not scientifically defensible,” DOE’s Sill told the Cleveland Free Times in 2006.
Dave Sill unfortunately passed away in 2021 at age 62. A subsequent report from The Idaho National Lab where he had worked deemed him “the heart and soul of the Department of Energy Radiological and Environmental Sciences Laboratory Mixed Analyte Performance Evaluation Program (MAPEP)”. The report further noted that his “expertise and dedication to MAPEP helped to assure the quality of analytical services across the DOE Complex.”
Sill hadn’t even advocated counting for days or weeks on the sample analysis count time at the IEL, but merely for the DOE standard of 1000 minutes (16.67 hours). Yet even just counting overnight for such scientific rigor was apparently too much for the EPA and NAREL.
“This is central to the cover up – the bogus assertion that there is no reason to expect nuclear wastes dumped at places other than those deemed in the system,” CCLT’s Borello laments. “Therefore, it’s ok to continue to use the EPA 900 Method, only meant for detection of naturally occuring rads, like Uranium and Radium. TIme and again, all kinds of questionable deviations took place. But NAREL approved this, reflected in the front page Canton Rep story in December 2001 where Griggs also spoke of how there needs to be a reason to have lower detection limits at a Superfund site. He admits in the article how other DOE sites like Hanford get more precise testing because of the expectations there…”
Griggs executed some more classic EPA-style mental gymnastics to rationalize why the IEL didn’t warrant deeper analysis. “There ought to be a reason to do that… It is resource-intensive. To do it for no reason would not be a good use of resources,” he told the Canton Rep, before going on to claim that the evidence at IEL didn’t lead the EPA to suspect plutonium or other radionuclides were buried there that wouldn’t be found by routine analysis.
The irony of the EPA now propping up the 2004 OIG report with its reliance on the December 2000 groundwater analysis as a foundational column in their house of cards at the IEL only deepens upon digging further into it, in which the report’s own “independent radiation expert” also acknowledged the issue of the contractor lab’s sample count times.
“A significant deficiency in the IEL study was the short periods for which radioactive
isotopes were counted… the more important radionuclides (isotopes of Pu, U and Ra) were only counted for 170 minutes each,” Canadian geoscientist Melvin Gascoyne wrote concerning Plutonium, Uranium, and Radium.
Gascoyne noted that while obtaining improvement in precision of the results would take days or weeks rather than minutes or hours, “it would have been beneficial to have counted key samples for a few days to improve the precision of the results.” This echoed another similar admission from NAREL’s Griggs in an internal memo from December 2001 that citizens obtained via FOIA. “If the count times … were increased substantially, the measurement uncertainties could be reduced. This would allow for a more meaningful evaluation of the… results,” Griggs wrote.
A controversial October 3, 2001 “Review of Plutonium Results for Samples Taken at the IEL” by NAREL concluded “it seems unlikely that Plutonium is present” (despite also admitting to “possible plutonium detections”). Yet the review also acknowledged assuming that all data being assessed was valid, while noting that “Errors found in the methodology used to obtain the results or other errors or inconsistencies may affect this assessment.” It’s for this reason that CCLT and various scientific consultants and observers feel a new assessment of potential plutonium should be ordered by the EPA, due to flaws in prior methodology that have only become clearer in hindsight.
Fast-forwarding back to 2024. Dr. Henry Cole found the EPA’s response to his first letter so inadequate that he sent a second letter to EPA’s remedial project manager in April restating his concerns along with additional evidence. Cole’s second letter states, “Because your letter fails to respond to our specific concerns and questions, we cannot accept your reassurances that EPA has the situation under control and there is nothing to worry about.”
The EPA has yet to reply to Cole’s second letter. In a recent interview, Cole added, “The contractor’s actions at IEL are parallel to what I’ve seen at many sites. I have found that technical contractors working for Potentially Responsible Parties (PRPs) have a tendency to generate studies and reports that tend to downplay risks, problems and remediation costs while failing to recommend solutions which protect the public’s health and safety. Doing so is likely to get them rehired with good recommendations to other companies with pollution problems. When this happens, EPA needs to intervene effectively; something that has yet to happen at IEL.”
Cole’s commentary brings another controversial contractor at the site to mind, Tetra Tech EM. The subsidiary of the notorious Tetra Tech Inc. was in the middle of controversy for their questionable role in a 1998 round of groundwater sampling at the IEL. This was the same year that EPA brushed off a press release from the Project on Government Oversight questioning why the agency rehired the contractor then named as “PRC/Tetra Tech” at the site after they’d already been found to have made numerous “mistakes” in sampling protocols. Similar mistakes such as errors with chain of custody forms for samples would be repeated years later by another subsidiary known as Tetra Tech EC, in the massive eco-fraud scandal at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco.
The contractor formerly known as Planning Research Corporation (PRC) had previously authored a controversial IEL study in 1991. “The Final Report on the Probability of Detection of Hypothetical Radiochemical Contamination of Groundwater” at the IEL was utilized by EPA Region 5 Administrator Valdus Adamkus to brush off U.S. Senator John Glenn’s inquiry on why EPA wasn’t doing core sampling at the site. The study which claimed groundwater monitoring would be “more likely” than core sampling to find radiation was later criticized for its flaws by the EPA’s own Science Advisory Board that was convened to rule on radiation issues at the IEL.
And while Tetra Tech Inc. claims they had nothing to do with PRC beforing acquiring the company in 1995 (and later renaming it Tetra Tech EM), a common denominator between the flawed 1991 groundwater study from PRC and a questionable 1998 groundwater monitoring “technical memorandum revision” plan from Tetra Tech EM exists in the form of the same person who signed off on both of them – Project/Site Manager Majid A. Chaudhry.
CCLT’s Borello feels the DOJ should reopen their IEL case from 2001, given that EPA has acknowledged the groundwater plume with the 1,4 Dioxane is migrating off-site from the IEL and into the next county, prompting some 40 wells to quietly be sealed up over the past couple years. “Given that EPA was dead wrong about the plume going away and the gases becoming explosive again, it should be a no brainer at bare minimum to reinstate the former clean up plans stolen from the town 20 years ago,” Borello says, referring to the pump & treat system and active gas control system that were removed when the Record of Decision was amended.
Yet the citizens who have the misfortune of living near the toxic dump remain trapped in a nebulous “Twilight Zone” of regulatory capture, in which the EPA continues standing by their flawed rationales from decades ago to keep the lid on what’s buried at the Industrial Excess Landfill in Uniontown, Ohio.
