The end may be in sight for the long and costly asbestos cleanup of the former Johns-Manville Corp. factory site in Waukegan on the shore of Lake Michigan.
A dump truck convoy has been running for more than two months between the Veolia landfill on Green Bay Road west of Zion and the cleanup site on the far north end of Waukegan. The heavy traffic has prompted complaints from homeowners along Sheridan Road about dust, noise and shaking walls, said Ald. Patrick Needham, who represents the area.
But officials from Manville and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency say the trucks have made critical progress in one of the last phases of the federally directed cleanup, which has been ongoing for more than 20 years.
“We can see the light at the end of the tunnel now,” Denny Clinton, a Manville engineering manager, said Wednesday as among the last of 24,000 semitrucks filled with clay and dirt roared onto the site and emptied their 10-cubic-yard loads.
The stream of truck traffic has been almost nonstop, said Joan Callahan, who lives just off Sheridan.
“They’re like ants,” she said.
Manville made asbestos shingles and pipe in Waukegan for more than 60 years. The plant’s 150-acre waste landfill was designated a federal Superfund site in 1983. Manville stopped making asbestos products in Waukegan two years later. The sprawling factory complex was closed in 1996 and later razed.
Veolia created a new cell at its landfill, and Manville is removing the excavated material, Clinton said.
The 240,000 cubic yards of fill dirt that has been moved will fill what was a 33-acre wastewater treatment pond, about 100 acres once covered by the sprawling Manville plant and other areas.
Another 150,000 to 160,000 cubic yards of fill will be needed in remaining phases, he said.
“It’s the biggest [trucking operation] I’ve seen in this area,” said John Moore, Waukegan city engineer.
The dirt has formed a blocklong, five-story-high mountain at the lakefront that Moore estimates as weighing 360,000 tons.
The Waukegan Park District is negotiating with Manville to acquire the 100-acre vacant plant site for an outdoor sports and recreation complex.
The company finished covering the main landfill with 2 feet of clay and soil in 1991, but the work has been expanded as new discoveries of asbestos contamination have been made in and outside the Manville site. The cleanup is expected to cost the Denver-based company at least $30 million.
The treatment pond issue wasn’t resolved until three years ago when Manville, threatened with state and federal lawsuits, agreed to clean up the sludge-filled settling pond and an adjacent drainage canal at the north end of its property.
When it is dried out, the treatment pond will be covered in layers with more than 2 feet of sand, clay and topsoil, said Brad Bradley, project manager for the EPA.
The bed of the canal, which borders a nature preserve at the south end of Illinois Beach State Park, has a layer of asbestos sludge 2 to 3 inches thick, Bradley said.
But he said removing the sludge would disrupt the drainage of the south end of the park and disturb the nature preserve. If it’s capped, drainage can continue, but the asbestos “will be entombed under several feet of cover,” he said.
Asbestos debris has been found in areas of the park in the last five years. State health officials have said the park’s sand, air and water are safe.
Four smaller areas on the perimeter of the Manville site still have to be cleaned up, Bradley said, including spots in an adjacent Midwest Generation power plant parking lot and along the shoulders of Greenwood Avenue, which borders the north end of the Manville tract.
It will take almost three years to finish the entire project, he said. If the cleanup is completed by 2010, the project will have taken 27 years, starting from the year the site was designated a Superfund site.
