The Consent Decree

During the 1980's there were many attempts by the City of Bloomington to assign legal liability to Westinghouse regarding several sites in Bloomington. When these attempts failed the City sued Westinghouse to pay for the PCB cleanup at Winston-Thomas. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) followed suit and also sued Westinghouse for contamination at Neal's Dump and Neal's Landfill under Clean Water Act. These statutes did not obligate Westinghouse to pay for the cleanup. Later, EPA amended their complaint to include _CERCLA_ violations.

In December 1983, the Federal Court consolidated the separate suits against Westinghouse. Settlement negotiations ensued. In 1984, the parties prepared a Consent Decree, which identified the cleanup activities for six municipal and industrial waste sites in the Bloomington area (Anderson Road Landfill, Bennett's Quarry, Lemon Lane Landfill, Neal's Dump, Neal's Landfill, and Winston-Thomas Treatment Plant). These sites totaled approximately 650,000 cubic yards of PCB contaminated soil including many PCB filled capacitors. In recent years this number has been estimated as high as 1,200,000 cubic yards depending on which boundaries are used.

One of the requirements of the Consent Decree is that Westinghouse design and construct a high temperature incinerator fueled by municipal solid waste, to destroy the estimated cubic yards of contaminated material from the six sites identified in the Consent Decree. Westinghouse is also responsible for disposal of the resulting incinerator ash, which later was proposed to go to a Westinghouse built hazardous waste landfill to be located off Bottom Road in Monroe County. To meet this requirement, Westinghouse submitted applications for the construction of a hazardous waste landfill in the Washington Township area of Bloomington. If permitted, the incinerator and ash landfill were to meet all applicable federal, state and local laws.

Westinghouse agreed to accept responsibility for cleanup of the contaminated sites. The City and the County's solid waste were to be used as fuel for the incinerator. This was thought to alleviate the area of a serious problem, a landfill filled to capacity, with no place for local garbage. It would also help Westinghouse recover some of their costs for the cleanup as they could charge a tipping fee for processing garbage similar to those fees charged by the County at the local landfill.

In effect the citizens of Monroe County would end up paying for a large part of the cost of cleaning up the PCB contamination created by Westinghouse.

The hazardous waste landfill issue spawned COPA, the incinerator and landfill proposals were defeated, the municipal landfill expanded its capacity significantly and the parties are now designing proposals that will in effect negate many of the cleanup standards originally required by the consent decree.