Industrial site linked to polluted drinking water in SC added to EPA Superfund list
The US Environmental Protection Agency has added an abandoned Darlington County industrial plant that is tied to extensive pollution to a national list of sites prioritized for cleanup under the federal Superfund program.
The Galey and Lord plant is among 12 sites across the country being placed on Superfund’s national priorities list, the agency said in a news release. Galey and Lord had previously been proposed for listing.
“No community deserves to have contaminated sites near where they live, work, play, and go to school,” EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said in the news release this week.
“EPA is building a better America by taking action to clean up some of the nation’s most contaminated sites, protect communities’ health, and return contaminated land to safe and productive reuse for future generations.”
Galey and Lord, located in the small Society Hill community of eastern South Carolina, is a former textile plant that later was found to have left a legacy of environmental contamination.
For years, sludge from Galey and Lord was spread in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina as a way to get rid of industrial waste and add fertilizer to the land. That practice is suspected of contaminating at least four dozen private wells in rural Darlington County, The State reported last year. All told, more than 300 agricultural fields totaling 10,000 acres received the sludge.
Ben Cunningham, an attorney for the non-profit South Carolina Environmental Law Project, said the EPA’s national priorities listing is warranted.
“It’s a welcome first step to cleaning up the problems that the site has wrought in our state,’’ he said, adding that “what struck me about the site is the danger to surrounding surface water bodies, not just groundwater that might be contaminated.’’
Among the biggest pollutants of concern in drinking water wells are PFAS, toxic chemicals that have raised worries across the country. This class of chemicals is suspected of causing cancer and kidney problems, as well as development disabilities in children. It has been found in drinking water in other South Carolina communities, in addition to Darlington County.
The practice of spreading polluted industrial sludge on farm fields has drawn the attention of Cunninghan’s organization, which plans to ask state regulators to ban the use of industrial sludge with PFAS.
But the EPA says other contaminants near Galey and Lord, including arsenic, chromium, copper, lead and manganese, have tainted wetlands along Cedar Creek and the Great Pee Dee River. Some of the same toxic materials were found in wastewater treatment basins at the industrial site, The State reported in November, citing information from the EPA.
The Great Pee Dee River and Cedar Creek next to and downstream of the Galey and Lord site “are impacted by the facility, posing human health and ecological risks,’’ the EPA said.
The Galey and Lord facility employed thousands of local residents through the years in the Society Hill area of Darlington County. It shut down in 2016 after pollution was discovered on the property. Efforts to locate someone who could speak for Galey and Lord have been unsuccessful.
Thursday’s announcement adds another site to the Superfund list in South Carolina. Some two dozen Palmetto State properties have been listed by the EPA. Among other things, those consist of gold mines and an array of industrial sites, including one in the town of Cheraw that was recently added to the Superfund site list
The EPA’s national priorities list includes the country’s most serious “uncontrolled or abandoned releases of contamination,’’ the agency said. The list prioritizes funding for cleanup and enforcement action.
EPA officials have already been working to protect private wells in Darlington County, offering filters to strain out the PFAS pollution in the groundwater. The agency has conducted emergency Superfund work, removing thousands of barrels of containers from the property.
Cunningham and Amy Armstrong, who heads the Environmental Law Project, said the organization will soon ask the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control to ban the practice of spreading industrial sludge that contains PFAS.
Armstrong said action is needed, in part because the state Legislature has failed to adopt a standard to protect drinking water from PFAS or to prioritize funding for cleaning up pollution from PFAS. A bill now before the Legislature does “not appear to be going anywhere,’’ she said.
