Superfund sites upstream remain a concern for the Illinois River

In her 1997 book “Living Downstream,” Pekin native Sandra Steingraber wrote, “Giving people cancer in order to ensure them a water supply safe from disease-causing microbes is not necessary. Our drinking water should not contain the fear of cancer. The presence of carcinogens in groundwater, no matter how faint, means we have paid too high a price for accepting the unimaginative way things are.

“A so-called private industry is engaging in a very public act when it releases toxic chemicals into a community’s air, water and soil.”

Elsewhere, the Environmental Working Group’s 2024 drinking water quality report found Peoria’s tap water contains dozens of contaminants many times the recommended levels in EWG’s health guidelines, between 2.2 times (1,4-Dioxane) to 2,149 time (Perfluorohexane sulfonate).

“Tap water provided by this water utility was in compliance with federal health-based drinking water standards,” EWG said, adding, “Legal does not necessarily equal safe.”

Former Community Word columnist William Rau (“Heat Waves in Red and Black”) commented from his home in Bloomington, “If I were living in Peoria, I would find their results very disturbing.”

It could get worse.

Concentrations of hazardous materials are sometimes segregated as Superfund sites (See below), and three of them are at or near the Illinois River some 70 miles upstream from metro Peoria. Technically, they and their substances are secured, but like almost anything else, they’re not invulnerable to catastrophes, such as earthquakes or floods.

On April 23, a mild, magnitude-4.0 earthquake was felt in Illinois, Indiana and Missouri when the New Madrid Seismic Zone made its presence felt. The New Madrid fault system, covering almost 1 million square miles from Arkansas to Illinois, has been mostly quiet since a series of large earthquakes in 1811-1812, but the U.S. Geological Survey says the probability of a quake of 6.0 to 7.0 on the New Madrid Fault Line is 28-46% over the next 50 years.

(As for floods, Illinois already has had four “100-year floods” in the 2020s, including one in Central Illinois in 2021.)

Here's a summary of those sites, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency:

* LaSalle Electric Utilities in LaSalle--

Until 1982, the "industrial complex" made capacitors for electric power transmission. It has “contaminated soil and groundwater with polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs) and chlorinated solvents.” The EPA removed 23,000 cubic yards of PCD-contaminated soil and thermally destroyed them, but consolidated drummed wastes; years later the complex was demolished and non-destructible material was shipped off-site. In 1995, groundwater monitoring and treatment started.

* East about 20 miles are the “Ottawa Radiation Areas,” EPA says, “ -- 16 areas contaminated by material from two companies, the Radium Dial Co., and Luminous Processes, Inc.” EPA says it removed radium-contaminated soil from five of the areas affected, but “ongoing work consists of securing funding to implement remedies at a local landfill, “which the agency says is a “capped stockpile” to be inspected at unspecified intervals.

* Another 12 miles east is the former Matthiessen and Hegeler Zinc Co., which until 1978 did zinc smelting and rolling, and manufactured chemicals. The site has a slag pile on the Little Vermillion River, a tributary to the Illinois River, containing “cadmium, copper, chromium, lead, nickel and zinc,” says the EPA, which placed a soil cover over the area and has “short-term groundwater monitoring.”

 

Dr. Peter Schwartzman, who teaches environmental studies at Knox College in Galesburg, says, “Many chemicals mentioned (and emitted by industrial facilities) do not break down easily and thus can be found in measurable concentrations decades after they were ‘freely’ emitted into the air and water. These chemicals – PCBs, cadmium, etc. – are definitely harmful to life, even at low concentrations.”

In “Living Downstream,” Steingraber highlighted the Illinois River as an example of industrial pollution, utilizing the U.S. EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) data to map toxic hotspots and connections to Superfund sites. The award-winning author’s analysis connected the historical and ongoing pollution of the Illinois River to contaminated sites requiring environmental remediation, highlighting the ecological impact of industrial waste.

It doesn’t take an earth-shaking disaster to see material migrate from Superfund sites.

“Numerous Superfund sites in Illinois have contaminated groundwater and surface/river water, primarily due to industrial waste, landfills and chemical dumping,” Rau added. “I would not want to live downstream from one of these sites if my drinking water from came from a river adjacent to these sites.”

And the sites themselves are just part of the picture.

“There are additional sites in Illinois that had ‘scores’ in excess of Superfund status that were not declared as such,” Schwartzman says. “So, the current map is missing heavily contaminated, and likely hazardous, sites.”

Awareness of sites and the risks is key, Schwartzman says.

“We’ve had more than a century’s worth of toxic waste disposed – some legal, some illegal – and to ensure public safety requires vigilance and public involvement,” he says.

 

What are Superfund sites and how they came to be

Superfund sites contain a wide variety of hazardous materials — not only toxic, but sometimes corrosive or flammable. All of them can hurt people, more so when they seep into drinking water.

Historically, there were few to no state or federal laws forbidding the disposal of those hazardous materials in places where they could poison or harm people. They might have been buried in unstable terrain, or left in 55-gallon drums that would rust and leak. This happened for decades.

The Superfund story began with Love Canal in the southeast corner of Niagara Falls, N.Y.. Starting in the 1940s, the Hooker Chemical Co. had used the upstate site as a dump for harmful chemical wastes. Then it was covered over, and a housing development was built on top of it. In the 1960s and 1970s, people living there got sick with diseases like leukemia. Eventually, the health harms were traced to the toxic wastes mobilized by shallow groundwater. Neighbors organized and demanded help. In 1980, Congress finally passed the Superfund law to deal with similar problems all over the United States. That law held hazardous waste dumpers strictly liable for the damages they had caused. Once those “responsible parties” were identified, victims and governments could go after them in court to recover cleanup costs.

In cases where danger was immediate, the EPA could step in and do immediate stabilization of the site. This was called “removal,” although it was rarely so simple as merely trucking away some drums. This was paid for by the multibillion-dollar Superfund, which was originally paid for by a tax on petrochemical companies. What followed was a complex array of lawsuits against (and between) companies.

There are currently about 1,342 contaminated sites on the EPA’s Superfund National Priority List. These are the worst of the worst. There’s at least one in almost every state. The EPA estimates that some 78 million people live within three miles of a Superfund site. That’s almost a quarter of the U.S. population. Many more are not on the list.

Although normally Superfund cleanups have been slow, the EPA under Trump 1.0 and 2.0 has made a big deal over efforts to speed up the process. One worry that has arisen is that faster cleanups will be superficial, temporary and less clean.

-- By Joseph A. Davis, Society of Environmental Journalists