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Former Plant Stirs Debate on Pollution
by Tom Pelton
While the former Allied chrome factory in Baltimore churned out chemicals that made hubcaps gleam and fireworks sparkle, it also dumped more than a million cubic yards of potentially cancer-causing chrome waste into and around the harbor.
After the plant closed in 1985, the owner of the property paid $100 million to seal the site. Now its new owner wants the federal government this week to remove chromium from a list of pollutants that cause problems in the harbor.
Environmentalists oppose the move, saying the harbor remains badly polluted and that making the change would weaken protections for Baltimore Harbor and the Patapsco River, which flows into the Chesapeake Bay.
"The state should be doing something to clean up Baltimore Harbor. But now, instead of cleaning it up, we're going to start removing these substances from the list of chemicals to be concerned about," said Beth McGee, senior scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. "They are doing nothing for the harbor."
The owner of the 27-acre vacant former chrome factory site near Fells Point, the Honeywell corporation, is working with developers, who plan to build up to 1.4 million square feet of offices, plus shops, hotels and parking. Honeywell has the support of the Maryland Department of the Environment in taking chromium off the list of harbor pollutants.
The state's analysis shows that the chrome waste that remains buried under mud at the bottom of the harbor is no longer dangerous, said Joe Beaman, chief of MDE's chemical assessment division.
"It's not toxic to humans or organisms inhabiting the bay," said Erik Rifkin, a consultant for Honeywell.
The state has asked for approval from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to remove not only chromium but also lead and zinc from the list of pollutants impairing the harbor, for which the state sets daily discharge limits, called total maximum daily loads. The sediment under the harbor remains toxic, but these three elements don't seem to be killing marine life, state officials said.
The EPA, which must approve the change, will offer its opinion by the end of the month, said Bonnie Smith, an agency spokeswoman.
In the late 1990s, the former factory site was covered by four layers of plastic, which was then buried under 3 feet of soil and gravel.
But potentially dangerous chromium waste - a byproduct of the chrome manufacturing process - remains buried in at least a half-dozen other sites in and around the harbor where it was dumped, state records show.
Keeping chromium on the list could help force property owners such as Honeywell and the state to pay for monitoring and cleaning up pollution discovered in the future, advocates argue.
Removing chromium from the list of pollutants hurting Baltimore Harbor weakens a tool that officials could use to force property owners to clean up or monitor waste sites, said Sylvia Lowrance, a former top enforcement official with the EPA who helped oversee the chrome plant cleanup.
"The question in my mind is, do you need to have chromium listed to have a limit and keep people on the straight and narrow?" Lowrance asked. "If it's listed, there is legal accountability. It provides another tool - and a powerful tool - to keep people responsible and vigilant."
At the heart of the debate is a distinction between two forms of chromium, a naturally occurring metal used to make chrome plating on cars and pigments in paints.
In the decades before the Allied plant's closing, particles of hexavalent chromium dust caused lung cancer and skin rashes and ate through the nasal passage of workers, said Peter Lees, a professor of environmental science at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
"Hexavalent chromium is a very potent lung carcinogen," said Lees.
Lung cancer deaths
As part of a study released in 2000, Lees examined the records of 2,357 former Allied chrome plant workers and found that 104 of them had died of lung cancer - about twice the normal rate. The high cancer rate likely is attributable to inhaling hexavalent chromium, Lees said.
Since the site's closure, breathing the air on the vacant lot is as safe as elsewhere in Baltimore, Lees said.
The chrome waste - some of which contained the dangerous form of the metal - that was dumped into the harbor years ago has settled into the mud under the harbor and has no contact with humans, he said.
"As long as it stays in the mud, it's not a problem," Lees said. "If you were to dig it out, there would be risks associated with digging it out. Let sleeping dogs lie."
Under the mud all these years, much of the dangerous form of chromium has interacted with organisms and minerals and been chemically transformed into a less dangerous variety, called trivalent chromium, according to Rifkin, the Honeywell consultant.
Lees and state officials agree that this trivalent chromium isn't dangerous. But Lees said it's an "excellent question" whether the mounds of chrome waste buried at sites scattered around the harbor's edge still contain dangerous hexavalent chromium. "There is some debatable potential for a problem there," Lees said.
The state doesn't know where all of these waste disposal sites are, but tons of waste was used in landfill under the state's Dundalk Marine Terminal. Chrome waste from the Allied plant also was used as landfill under a now-closed pesticide factory at 2000 Race St. on the Middle Branch river, under the Patapsco Wastewater Treatment Plant in Fairfield, and at the Hawkins Point and Solley Road landfills in Anne Arundel County, according to state records.
Chromium runoff
Because of the potential for chromium runoff, Honeywell - which inherited some responsibility for chrome waste when it bought Allied-Signal Corp. in 1999 - is paying $1.75 million toward the state's project to build a $3.5 million storm water treatment plant to collect chromium seeping from under the state-owned Dundalk terminal, state officials said.
Richard Eskin, director of technical and regulatory services at the MDE, said delisting chromium would not end the responsibility of Honeywell or others to keep the pollutant out of the harbor, because they are bound by court consent decrees and water-quality standards in the Clean Water Act.
"The generator of hazardous waste - or the new owner of the property - is ultimately responsible for the material from cradle to grave," said Harold L. "Butch" Dye Jr., administrator of the state's hazardous waste program.