Winston-Thomas Sewage Treatment Facility
The Winston-Thomas Treatment Plant (WTTP) was the City of
Bloomington's wastewater treatment plant until the early 1980s,
when it was permanently closed due to PCB contamination. Westinghouse
had been discharging PCBs from their manufacturing plant to the
WTTP since the late 1950s. Every component of the wastewater
treatment plant was contaminated, and everywhere that sludge
was deposited was also contaminated. Sludge was pumped into the
ground, spread on the surface of soil at the plant, and it was
given to local farmers and backyard gardeners for use as organic
soil amendments.
A temporary structure called the Interim Storage Facility
was built on the property of the WTTP to house contaminated material
removed from other locations in Bloomington: the Anderson Road
Landfill, stream sediments that were dredged from Clear Creek
and Richland Creek, and capacitors taken from various locations.
Twenty-three years after the PCB contamination was first discovered,
the WTTP is finally being cleaned up. Most of the material is
being excavated and taken to off-site TSCA or special waste landfills.
Recent activities at WTTP included cleaning up the West side
of Clear Creek (this was not part of the original plan, but PCBs
were found there) and a public comment period on the EPA's Engineering
Evaluation and Cost Analysis (EE/CA) for the lagoons and trickling
filter media. Read
the comments and EPA's responses released on May 12, 1998. At
the same time, the EPA published an Action
Memorandum detailing the cleanup procedures for this site.
The Statement
of Work plan was also included. There are several attachments
and figures associated with both the Action Memorandum and Work
Plan and many are in pdf file format.
Weekly Reports on Cleanup Work done
at Winston Thomas:
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