MDEP pollution team postpones GAC shore inspection FOR THIRD TIME.

Curiouser and curiouser....
Our Friday visit to Maine DEP's Bangor office to look at the pollution history of GAC Chemical  and polluters past on Kidder Point  had its highs and its lows.

The bad news: The agency has for the third time cancelled its site visit to examine GAC's shore in light of our complaints.  A sudden scheduling conflict; the field investigative team is needed elsewhere.  Improbable, given the number of times the agency visit to this polluted site has already been delayed. Did our unexpected introduction of the fertilizer waste problem into the Kidder Point cleanup discussion freak DEP out?

Was this a political postponement of the investigation? I.e. did a call from the head of "Maine's Chemical Company" to Governor Lepage lead to ruthlessly pro-industry Patty Aho Commissioner being tasked to throttle back  her employees' rush to examine that polluted shore? One wonders.  Meetings with the top GAC guy David Colter started well, too but petered out over the course of the year into canceled meetings and postponed cleanup plans.

The good news: We got access to about a thousand pages of well organized documents, charts, maps etc from two sub-bureaus, solid waste and remediation (polluted sites cleanup). The two officials that greeted us were professional and helpful.  Split among four of us, and a patient DEP receptionist/copy machine operator, we extracted about 180 pages of maps, charts, core sample data, pollution evaluations, enforcement letters/ replies and more. These will appear on the Friends of Penobscot Bay website as they get digitized.

The missing news: We saw DEP's attention was on the top layers of  alum production waste laid down after fertilizer production shut down in 1970.  But where did the 11 million tons of chemical waste from  fifty years of  fertilizer production on Kidder Point and Mack Point go?

Made by sulfuric acid drenching of phosphate ore, every ton of  superphosphate leaves five tons of  useless, unhealthily radioactive and highly acidic waste "phosphogypsum" behind.  Phosphogypsum (PG) is a problem powdery waste. Too much radium, uranium and radon for use in inhabited areas, according to US EPA. But every day more thousands of tons are produced around the world. So  much that  it is piled in enormous stacked  pyramids around the world, some of them visible from outer space  thanks to our fertilizer-using planetary civilization.

Searsport's fertilizer's  main market was the state's potato farms. Phosphate ore and sulfur arrived at Mack Point by ship; fertilizer went from Searsport to the tater-growing County by rail. Potatoes came back down the rail to Searsport for export.

Kidder Point & Mack Point both hosted a series of fertilizer companies:

1907 American Agricultural Chemical Company built plant and pier. Mack Pt
1907-1914 B&A RR runs electric power plant on Kidder Point  for AACC, etc.
1909  Hubbard (later Armour) Fertilizer sets up  Mack Pt
1919 Summers Fertilizer  Kidder Pt
1944 Northern Chemical Kidder Point
1966 W.R. Grace  Kidder Pt
1970 Delta Chemical  Kidder Pt
1994 to present: General Alum and Chemical(GAC)  Kidder Point

Superphosphate was made there. Lots of it.
In 1962 alone, Searsport would have generated 225,000 tons of waste while making 45,000 tons of superphosphate. Where is it?  Over fifty years, around 11 million tons of phosphogypsum would have been discarded in Searsport. Where is that? 

It is logical that the abovementioned  companies would deposit this toxic material nearby as possible.  It is most likely lining Kidder Point, Mack Point and even Sears Island  and was probably dumped into abandoned quarries like those in Northport. The amount of postponing by both the company and by MDEP suggests something is wrong on the shores of Stockton Harbor.

GAC Chemical and  Maine DEP would do better to speedily investigate the site and get the necessary remediation done and over with. Stockton Harbor, with its entrance only yards from the mouth of Penobscot River, is a very important part of Penobscot Bay's estuary system. A century of waste deposition and spillage into it from Kidder Point is a legacy that must be confronted and dealt with.

Time to  get the site investigation rescheduled AGAIN.

Acid Testing GAC Chemical's Stockton Harbor shore, August 4, 2013

On August 4, 2013, Friends of Penobscot Bay carried out pH testing of water and soils on both side of the first cove of Stockton Harbor near GAC Chemical.

( See photos of the pH tests being done here. (includes closeups of  pH meters at sites.)

The tests were not intended to be conclusive. They were carried out to see if there are anomalies or changes in acidity of the soils and sediments tested at various distances from the abandoned sulfuric acid plant (the bldgs above the "6" in the photo below).

Summary 

Test gear: Ferry-Morse "Electronic Soil Tester" and  Luster Leaf's "Rapitest." 

Narrative: The testing began on the end of the sandbar in the cove facing the old acid plant (1,2), crossed over the cove to the intertidal flats on the shore side of the cove (3,4), sampled three areas of the eroding bluff, (5,6,7)  then the gravelly beach shoreline(8) and two areas of mudflats close to and "downstream" from the abandoned facility (9, 10) Area 10 was tested multiple times.  

Results See photos of the pH tests being done here. (includes closeups of the pH meters at sites.) The pH was near neutral (pH 7) in areas 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5.  A lower pH was found  in site 6 above the concrete debris under the old sulfuric acid factory & storage tank.  Acidity increased sharply in the gray eroding material at area 7 on the steep path leading  from the shore to the old factory  (pH 4.5 to 4.8).  Readings in the  gravelly beach & mudflat directly below Area 7 and bayward were as low as pH 2.2.

A great deal of sulfuric acid  must have leaked from the old plant  (believed to have been shut down in the early 1970s) and its storage tank for it to still be leaking into the soils and shores and the intertidal flats!

Toxic Tour of the GAC Shore 7/30/13 MEDIA COVERAGE

Coverage of Friends of Penobscot Bay's Toxic Tour of the GAC Shore 7/30/13
  
Pen Bay Pilot coverage ** Bangor Daily News coverage  ** WABI TV Coverage  **  WERU  Radio Coverage
We held our press conference and public briefing at point (P) on this map. Once the final media showed up, we went down onto the beach and followed the curve of the cove around to the industrialized far side of it. There, the tainted flats and eroding shore wastes, their dispersal into the mud so easily visible from the air also evident from the ground.

We praised GAC Chemical Corp for its present compliance with state and federal environmental laws regarding their their outfall emissions, and for their important contribution to the local and state economy. 

But at the same time we urged David Colter, the now-CEO of the company, who has run the Searsport operation so well, to seize the time and deal with mitigating the legacy goop and funk dumped there the last 90 years, as fertilizer and chemical operations rose and fell, each leaving its layer of waste 'down the hill' on the shore! 

FOPB  is offering GAC a choice: 1. the Carrot of Community Cooperation or 2. the Stick of Agency Enforcement or 3. the Sword of Litigation.

We of  course want them to  take Door# 1 and  work with  the people whose parents and grandparents fished, clammed, dug worms and otherwise once made $$ in that harbor. They will  join GAC in healing the past injuries GAC's predecessors have made to the shore and intertidal area there. 

For the history of the industrial age from the late 1800s to the present day can be seen there. The bluff above the shore is layered like a cake with different colors , along the shore of Stockton harbor from the that built atop each other leaking out of their land into Stockton Harbor. 

Worse, the harbor that GAC is leaking into is the very first in a chain of little sub-estuaries of upper Penobscot Bay that the Penobscot River mixes into. Folks used to send their kids to college by digging worms and clams there, there were so many. 

Then Governor McKernan's causeway turned Sears Island into the fat end of a mile-long skinny peninsula jutting out from the mainland. Cutting off the circulation between Stockton Harbor and its neighbor sub-estuary Searsport, except by going around the island, into the river flowing past into the bay and into the other harbor. Now the GAC funk doesn't dilute out into the bay with the circulation.

Instead it has concentrated in the inward portion of the intertidal flats right alongside the eroding shore instead of dispersing out into the bay. At least it will be easier to clean up since its in a sort of contained areasection of that cove. Thus removable!