FORT SMITH - An associate of environmental activist Erin Brockovich arrived in Fort Smith on Monday to begin testing groundwater of a neighborhood contaminated with a hazardous chemical that leaked from the nearby Whirlpool plant over decades but wasn’t disclosed to residents until January.
A vice president of Whirlpool also arrived in Fort Smith on Monday to assure the neighbors the company plans to continue work to clean up contamination oftrichloroethylene around the plant, which closed last year.
Bob Bowcock, founder of the environmental research company Integrated Resource Management of Claremont, Calif., preceded Brockovich, who is scheduled to speak at a neighborhood meeting tonight about the contamination and to hear what residents want to do about it.
The approximately 35 residents who live on Jacobs and Brazil avenues just across Ingersoll Avenue from the former Whirlpool Corp. refrigerator factory received hand delivered letters Monday from Whirlpool Vice President for Communications and Public Affairs Jeff Noel that promised to “be here in the Fort Smith community until this issue is resolved.”
Brockovich, who gained fame when she led the successful fight in the 1990s in a California groundwater contamination case against Pacific Gas and Electric, is scheduled to appear at the 6 p.m. meeting at the Senior Activity Center at 2700 Cavanaugh Road.
“If we are able to solvethis problem with Erin just coming to town one day and a company like Whirlpool is going to step up and do the right thing, great. You’ll never see us again,” Bowcock said. “But that’s not what always happens.”
Brockovich agreed to attend the meeting after one of the neighborhood residents, Debbie Keith, of 1804 Jacobs Ave., wrote to her and sent her Whirlpool and Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality documents she amassed about the contamination and Whirlpool’s reactions to it.
Bowcock said he will collect groundwater and soil samples around the neighborhood today. But most of the information he and Brockovich believe they will gather will be from listening to residents at the neighborhood meeting.
“She hasn’t had a lot of time to deal directly with this site and the unique elements of this site and I am sure that tomorrow night will be as much of a learning process for her and her team,” Noel said.
The letter Whirlpool left for residents included a fact sheet on what it knows about the groundwater contamination, what it has done so far and what it plans to do in the future. It also included a toll-free phone number that Noel invited residents in the neighborhood to call with any questions or concerns.
Whirlpool officials have said the company used trichloroethylene from 1967 to 1981 to clean metal refrigerator parts before assembly. They believe the chemical was spilled over time and seeped into the groundwater, and the contamination was discovered in 2000.
Working with the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality, the company attempted to pump the chemical out of the groundwater and then added a chemical to neutralize the trichloroethylene last year. Both measures failed.
Whirlpool representatives notified the residents of the affected neighborhood in January.
Noel said the company had put out a notice in 2000 when the contamination was discovered and held a neighborhood meeting in2010 on preliminary plans to treat the contamination. But Keith said she didn’t remember ever receiving notice of the 2010 meeting.
Noel said the company also plans to schedule one-on-one meetings with the 15 owners of homes sitting directly over a plume of contaminated groundwater to answer their questions and concerns. He did not say when those meetings would be scheduled.
Representatives of Whirlpool have asked Fort Smithcity directors to pass an ordinance banning the drilling of water wells in the affected neighborhood to eliminate access to the chemical the company says lies seven feet below the surface of the ground. The city directors are scheduled to consider the proposed ordinance at a meeting at 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Fort Smith Public School Service Center at 3205 Jenny Lind Road.
Mayor Sandy Sanders and several city directors have said they plan to attend Tuesday’s neighborhood meeting. Noel said he will not attend the neighborhood meeting but will attend the city directors meeting Wednesday.
Noel said the ordinance is meant as a precaution against access to the chemical and that the company is pursuing ways to clean up the contamination. He said the company has submitted a cleanup plan to the environmental quality department. He didn’t give specifics of the plan but said the department would hold public comment periods for residents.
Department spokesman Katherine Benenati stated in an e-mail Monday that the department was expecting a revised report from Whirlpool but had not yet received one. The company has until mid-April to submit the report, she wrote.
“Once we receive it, we’ll analyze it carefully and determine whether the course of action is acceptable. I do not have a set timeframe for that to occur,” Benenati wrote.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 03/26/2013