Contamination

Preliminary and remedial investigations at the Reich Farm site in 1977 found a wide variety of organic and inorganic contaminants in both the soil and the aquifer below, although not all of them can be attributed to the dumping of chemicals there.  Metals such as cadmium, nickel, lead, chromium, iron, and manganese were detected in groundwater during preliminary remedial investigations; however, knowledge of the wastes and labels on the UCC drums, coupled with the random nature of the detections, seems to indicate that Reich Farm is not the source of these metal contaminants (EPA 1988).  Nevertheless major contaminants that can be traced back to Union Carbide Corporation were discovered in the groundwater (chlorobenzene, tetrachloroethene, trichloroethene, 1,1 and 1,2 dichloroethene), soil (xylenes, styrene), or both (ethylbenzene, toluene, acetone) (EPA, 1988).  The EPA’s Record of Decision from 1988 has an extensive list of both organic and inorganic chemicals found in soil and groundwater at the Reich Farm Superfund site, and differentiates between those that can be assumed to be related to the organic chemical wastes that were dumped there and those that are likely unrelated to dumping events.

The difficulty with many of these pollutants is that they have the ability to travel and the tendency to concentrate themselves in the lower levels of the soil, anywhere from fifteen feet down to thirty five feet down (EPA 1988).  This made it easy for the contamination to eventually impact the aquifer below the Reich Farm site, which fed into the drinking water supply for local residents.  Further compounding the issue was the fact that sampling for the remedial investigation took place in 1987, over fifteen years after the suspected contamination.  This lead to a public health evaluation (PHE) which identified thirteen indicator chemicals that existed in higher than normal concentrations within the soil and water at the site but still declared that the site would not be a public health risk and that there was no indication of Reich Farm contaminating private drinking wells or the aquifer below the Superfund site (EPA 1988).  This was an incorrect diagnosis of the potential human health impacts, as cancer clusters have developed in affected areas (UCC 2003).  This would seem to indicate that pollutants migrated away from the Reich Farm boundaries by the time sampling was done, or sampling wasn’t thorough enough in attempting to determine health risks, or a combination thereof.    No environmental assessments were ever done on the property but the 1988 Record of Decision (ROD) states that “it does not appear to pose a significant risk to the local flora or fauna” and that groundwater contamination did not present a toxic potential or the potential to bioaccumulate in any stream ecosystems (EPA 1988).