A local company that brewed bug killer for the region’s formerly robust citrus industry used DDT as an ingredient.
That recipe at Tower Chemical spit out an unwanted mess, including dicofol, another pesticide, and a nasty concoction, DCBP. The deadly, discarded stuff, all in the greater DDT family, was flushed into a pit dug into an old sinkhole that percolated way down to the Floridan Aquifer.
The pollution, exacerbated by a burn pit, churned along for more than 20 years until Tower Chemical was shuttered in 1980. Its owner, a Lake County environmental authority, fled the country. In 1983, the defunct plant was added to the nation’s list of hazardous sites that, having no responsible party on hand, were eligible for restoration by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program.
Tower’s history is storied, including from when a spill lethally poisoned a path to Lake Apopka. But EPA officials are dialing up an enormous and costly project they hope will put the plant’s legacy to bed. It’s all suddenly possible thanks to cash from last year’s federal infrastructure act.
“We’ve spent about $9 million out there so far,” said Rob Pope, EPA’s project manager for the Tower Chemical site, referring to years of investigation and removal of poisonous top soils. The next step could cost as much $18 million, a figure that might have remained beyond reach indefinitely.
“I don’t have a time for when it would have been funded without the infrastructure act,” Pope said.
The 15-acre Tower Chemical site is midway between Winter Garden and Clermont, in Lake County just west of Orange County and a jog north of State Road 50.
Until the start of this century, the Tower Superfund property was a weedy, rural setting next to a quiet blacktop, County Road 455.
In several stages of studies and cleanups, EPA removed soils soaked with pesticide constituents and covered the area with a layer of clean dirt 12 feet deep. A scattering of neighbors were unplugged from well water and hooked to city water. With the immediate dangers of Tower Chemical addressed, the site’s infamy as a horror show of liquid death faded.
In 2005, the property was sold by EPA to the owners of Top Notch RV Storage, where nearly 400 boats, campers, RVs and trailers are parked today. Under the terms of the sale, the new owner can’t be held liable for past pollution crimes but must cooperate with ongoing restoration.
The surrounding area also has changed markedly with the torrid development along the now-crowded, six-lane S.R. 50. A Publix opened in 2003 a quarter-mile from Tower Chemical. A 288-unit apartment complex, billing itself as a luxury community, is being built across the street from the former plant.
But apart from the sense of normality above ground, what’s still buried at the site rates as poisonous and problematic.
At a public meeting in 2019, a previous EPA project manager said the buried mess is complex.
“Not only are we seeing DCBP out there, we’re seeing other contaminants as well, not at the same levels as DCBP, but we’re seeing volatile organic compounds,” said Karl Wilson. “We’re seeing semi-volatile organic compounds. We’re seeing other pesticides – DDT, chlordane.”
At the time, EPA opted for a treatment that would focus on the soil beneath nearly an acre of the site. Wilson said then the estimated cost was $13 million.
Soon after, a Montverde council member, Allan Hartle, began a personal campaign to persuade elected officials, from local offices to Congress, that EPA wasn’t aggressive enough.
His family is from the area and Hartle could recall from his younger days seeing green vapors above the plant site.
“They just need to finish the job and be done with it,” he told former Orlando Sentinel columnist Lauren Ritchie, who chronicled Hartle’s quest. He did not respond to several recent requests for comment.
EPA headquarters, however, opted not to green-light the $13 million restoration project at that time because of limited funds needed for Superfund sites that posed more immediate threats to human and environmental health.
That changed in December, just weeks after passage of the infrastructure act. EPA announced it would spend $1 billion to tackle 50 Superfund projects in the U.S.
So far, the agency is focusing on four Superfund sites in Florida for cleanup with infrastructure funds.
Along with Tower Chemical, they are: Anodyne, a metal fabricating plant in Miami-Dade County; American Creosote Works, a wood-treating plant in downtown Pensacola; and Escambia Wood Treating Co. in Escambia County.
Since 2019, the cost of Tower Chemical’s restoration has risen to as much as $18 million, Pope said.
He said the EPA will rely on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to carry out the cleanup project at Tower Chemical by hiring contractors as soon as later this year. The Corps has responded that it may be able to lessen estimated costs by a few millions dollars, Pope said.
The project will involve using giant corkscrews or augers to churn as deeply as 70 feet into the ground, mixing in cement-like materials. EPA officials have likened the approach to turning the ground beneath Tower Chemical into a rock.
Pope said the augers’ blades are designed to leave contaminated soils underground while mixing in cement and other binding materials. Workers are unlikely to need high-hazard protective gear, he said.
The intent is to bind up pesticide contaminants so they cannot leach into aquifers waters and migrate away. Other Superfund approaches, including injecting various chemicals into the ground that would neutralize contaminants were rejected as too uncertain, Pope said.
Meanwhile, the long-banned DDT and its relatives remain hazardous in environments for many years.
Sites contaminated with DCBP are relatively uncommon and technologies for assessing and treating them are still evolving, Pope said. “That’s one of the reasons it’s taken so long to clean up this site.”
The effectiveness of the brute-force approach about to be applied at Tower Chemical isn’t expected to be fully apparent for several years, something EPA will monitor with a network of observation wells.
“We know it will work,” Pope said. “We will see how well it works.”
kspear@orlandosentinel.com
