Letters: Don’t let DHEC keep covering up pollution

Once again DHEC has pulled a bait-and-switch to benefit polluters. Instead of demanding a thorough clean-up of toxic contamination in an area of the Congaree River popular for recreation, DHEC is going to let SCANA off the hook with a cheap and unacceptable “solution” — a cap over polluted coal tar in the river.

Twenty-five years ago, after spending millions of dollars on preliminary investigations into the severely contaminated Columbia Organic Chemicals Superfund Site at Cedar Terrace, DHEC also decided to “cap” the site to “make it safe.” Worse, the cap never happened.

The Columbia Organic site is a stone’s throw from the VA hospital. Today the site is not secured, not marked as hazardous, certainly not capped, and houses have been built immediately adjacent to it on land the EPA designated as highly suspect for serious contamination.

DHEC is either criminally incompetent or corrupt. There are many examples of these failures or possible corruption over the past three decades. Let’s not allow DHEC to make the Congaree River another failure. It’s time to clean house at DHEC.

This story was originally published January 22, 2017 at 6:01 PM with the headline "Letters: Don’t let DHEC keep covering up pollution."