By JAMES RONALD SKAINS

Not only did the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approve and supervise the burial of over 10,000 cubic yards of creosote-contaminated soil that had been designated for incineration, but the EPA approved the burial near an artesian water well that still flows on the old American Creosote plant that started operations nearly 90 years ago in Winnfield, the Piney Woods Journal has learned.

The SuperFund clean-up project of the old American Creosote plant site, where the plant began operations in 1912, was initially a $20 million project. The project started in 1995 and was supposedly completed in 1998, but will not actually finish its mission for another 20 years or longer, the estimated time for a decontamination process for the buried material, involving mechanical and chemical flushing through the burial site, to be complete.

Rudolph Foster, a longtime Winnfield resident told the Journal "There was an artesian water well on the Creosote plant site that was like a community water well. We lived up the hill from the well when I was a kid in the 1920's and got our drinking water from it. People in the neighborhood including my Mama would carry their clothes down to the well on wash-day."

The Journal asked Eagle Construction Company of Winnfield, the prime dirt contractor on the project, about the artesian water well on the American Creosote company site.

"We were building an access road to the incinerator when we found the old water well," a spokesperson for Eagle told the Journal. "It was about six feet square with 3x10 boards for a curb."

"Our Trac-hoe could dig down 20 feet, which we did in digging out the curb," the Eagle spokesperson said. "As soon as we dug out the well, it filled up with water. We couldn't stop the flow of water even when the well was filled up with dirt."

"We were finally instructed to run a pipe from the old well to a small creek that runs adjacent to the old creosote plant site," the Eagle Construction company spokesperson said, recalling the work with the artesian water well. "The Army Corps of Engineers was right there watching everything that we did with the old water well."

The Journal asked Tim Howell, the civil engineer who did the survey work on the American Creosote SuperFund site about the old artesian water well. "Digging into that old well while they were building the road was the first major problem encountered by International Technology, the general contractor on the project."

``The biggest problem that I'm aware of on the project was when about 10,000 cubic yards of creosote-contaminated dirt that was designated to be incinerated was buried," Howell said. "The extra 10,000 yards of material came from digging out the trenches and was designated to be incinerated. However, after the incinerator was shut down because somebody didn't pay the gas bill, they decided to bury the material."

"According to my experience working with hazardous waste material such as creosote, there are definite guidelines as to how material is to be buried," Howell explained. "I worked on a cresote contaminated clean-up over at Urania that was done by the Cavenham company as an in-house clean-up instead of a SuperFund site."

"At Urania, a liner barrier was put down at the bottom of the excavation area before they started burying the creosote dirt to keep the hazardous material from leaching down into drinking water supplies," Howell noted. "We were required to shoot elevations every step in the burying process. Everytime they dumped in a layer of creosote dirt, we shot elevations before they put in a layer of clay. Then, when all the fill was completed in layers, we shot elevations on the vent pipes that were put down into the burying ground as well as finished elevations at ground level."

"To my knowledge, these procedures was not followed at the old American Creosote site in Winnfield," Howell stated.

"In fact, the day they were getting ready to start burying the creosote contaminated dirt, the contractor told us that they would call us when they were ready for us to come back and shoot elevations. I was not officially on the site to work for three months or more, when they called me back to shoot elevations on the vent pipes that they had put in where the material was buried."

The old plant site is within sight of two of the City of Winnfield's deep water wells and adjacent to the City's sewer treatment plant.

Stacey Bennett with the Federal EPA Region 6 office in Dallas told the Journal "Everything that went on during the American Creosote SuperFund clean-up in Winnfield, the EPA knew about and approved. The EPA contracted with the Army Corps of Engineers through an Interagency Agreement to supervise the project for the FedEPA. The Corps of Engineers reported regularly to the EPA on every aspect of the project."

T. L. Luther, another native of the South Winnfield community, told the Journal more about the artesian well that is still flowing into Creosote branch that runs adjacent to the former plant site.

"I've drank water out of that well many times and watered stock from it. There was a foot bridge across what we called Tannehill branch from the road to the well. In fact, as late as the 1940's, people who were working at the creosote mill were drinking water from the well," Luther said.

And the well is still flowing through the pipe installed from the well site to the adjacent creek. The Piney Woods Journal has made several trips to the location where a small but steady stream of water is still flowing from the pipe into the creek that is covered with a layer of what appears to be creosote sludge.

Although creosote sludge repeatedly for more than 50 years was dumped into the adjacent small creek that eventually empties into Dugdemona River, the creek, or branch, as the local people call it, was never part of the SuperFund clean-up in Winnfield. Old timers along the Dugdemona River have blamed the Creosote plant for years as the source of sizable fish kills that have occurred in Dugdemona.

Dictionaries and textbooks define an artesian water well as a naturally-occurring upward flow of water to the surface from an underground aquifer. The pressure to cause the upward flow of water may be from underground natural gas pockets or from the subsurface structure of the aquifer itself which generates sufficient pressure to continuously force a flow of water upward through faults and cracks in the subsurface geological structure of the earth.

T. L. Luther also told the Journal about other naturally occurring water sources in the area. "Just on the other side of the old Creosote plant was a spring branch that had a big pool of water in it. We called it the Scout Hole and swam in it a lot as young boys."

Rudolph Foster also remembered the `Scout Swimming Hole' and another well-known water source less than a mile from the Creosote site. ``Home Springs on the old Alexandria highway had the coldest spring water I've ever tasted. People coming into Winnfield from the south on horseback or in wagons would stop and water their animals. There was a good swimming hole down below the spring.''

The Piney Woods Journal has learned that the prime dirt contractor on the project had a contract that called for the excavation of two trenches. One was to be 4 feet wide, 40 feet deep and 700 hundred feet long. The other trench was to be 4 feet wide, 40 feet deep and 680 foot long.

It was from the excavation of the trenches that the extra contaminated material came that was designated to incinerated, along with the approximately 33,000 cubic yards of creosote-contaminated dirt the EPA estimated that was in the ``Tar Mat'' area on the creosote plant site, but was instead buried under about three feet of clay.

Apparently, the EPA used some technology in cleaning-up the Winnfield American Cresote plant site that is beyond the understanding of the average resident of Winnfield. Most folks in the Winnfield area are under the impression that the EPA's plan to clean up the old American Creosote plant under the supervision of the Army Corps of Engineers involved incinerating all the creosote contaminated material.

However, under the direction of the low-bidder contractor, International Technology (IT) of Monroeville, Pennsylvania, only a small percentage of the creosote-contaminated hazardous material was incinerated. The ``clean-up technology'' designed by the EPA for the Winnfield SuperFund site involved a series of injection and recovery wells.

On one side of the plant site which was designated as the "high side," injection wells were installed into the 40-foot deep trench excavated by the prime dirt contractor. On the other side of the site, or "low side" as it was known, the recovery wells were installed.
The multi-million dollar Winnfield SuperFund "clean-up technology" was supposed to work much like a washing machine. Water and chemical cleaning compounds were forced into the ground through the injection wells under pressure. Under ideal conditions this technology will ``wash'' the creosote out of the subsurface areas into which the creosote has leached over the last 80-plus years.

The liquid coming from the recovery wells is then run through a Process Liquid Treatment System (PLTS) and is released as clean water. The Journal has been told that several of the recovery wells are still pumping almost pure creosote four years after being installed "as washing machine technology" at the old Winnfield American Creosote plant location.

Stacey Bennett with the Fed-EPA Region 6 office also told the Journal, "We are in the process of doing a review of the Winnfield American Creosote SuperFund project. Our report and how the project is doing will be out in September."

When the Journal the involvement of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, Bennett replied. "The Louisiana DEQ was involved only as a monitor. They were allowed to come onto the project site but they were not allowed to talk with any of the contractors or their people."

The LADEQ was required to fund 10% of the $20 million dollar SuperFund project. A spokes person for the LADEQ said "Our involvement was limited. We didn't have access or knowledge as to what was really going on there."

Apparently, the Federal Environmental Protection Agency violated their own ironclad rules that call for an "environmental impact study" for any and every earth disturbing project. This FedEPA environmental impact study regulation rule also requires an archeology survey of the area in which a man-made "earth disturbance" is to occur. If the FedEPA had looked at a 1924 copyrighted edition of a Sanborn Map Company map of Winnfield, they would have clearly seen marked the 85-foot deep water well on the American Creosote plant site.

Incidentally, the Piney Woods Journal "discovered" the old Sanborn Map in a place where old things are kept--the Winnfield Museum.