Hazards in the Refuge:
The Clean-up Begins

by Laraine Wright

Like all good researchers, wildlife biologist Alan Woolf is curious. What's on his plate is important, but there still might be something in the oven. Thus, "It was serendipity," he said about his discovery in 1981, that ultimately led to a massive Superfund cleanup of a national wildlife refuge in Illinois.

With funding from the Illinois Department of Conservation, Woolf and his team from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC) were heading a statewide study of whitetail deer. As part of their research, they decided to analyze the deer's livers, which collect and store toxins. Comparing deer from each county, the team found something totally unexpected. Those from the Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge, only a few miles from the university, "stuck out like a sore thumb," Woolf said. The livers of the refuge deer -and only the refuge deer- contained unusually high levels of heavy metals, particularly lead.

Woolf alerted the staff at the refuge. "They weren't very happy about it," he said. "At first they didn't believe it." Only after subsequent studies were conducted did the refuge confirm they had inherited a major problem, one that dated to World War II, shortly before the refuge was founded.

Parts of the refuge contain a stew of hazardous waste landfills and abandoned munitions dumps. From the 1940s through the early 1970s, manufacturers simply emptied their wastes in unused areas of the refuge and shoved a little dirt over them. They discharged liquids directly into existing bodies of water and impoundments. Although only small sections of the refuge were affected directly, those sites are dotted over a wide area. The cleanup costs are staggering. They include $34 million for the incineration of soils containing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

In 1987 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) placed Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge on its National Priorities List. That dubious honor brought the refuge into the Superfund program. Since the mid-1980s, the Illinois Hazardous Waste Research and Information Center (HWRIC) has been funding studies of the refuge contamination. According to HWRIC, its continuing research support "provides an opportunity to follow a Superfund cleanup and collect information about environmental contamination before, during, and after the remediation."

One current HWRIC study is conducted by Richard Halbrook of SIUC's Cooperative Wildlife Research Laboratory, now headed by Woolf. Halbrook has been tracking European starlings, an abundant avian species. Because starlings adapt to practically any habitat, they are useful as monitors of environmental contamination.

In March 1995, Halbrook installed two sets of nest boxes on the refuge- one at a site with PCBs and the other in an uncontaminated area. A third set was placed on the university campus. Although the starlings nesting in the PCB contaminated areas laid eggs and produced hatchlings at the same rate as the others, the parent birds visited their nests 55% less often. As dramatic, only 20% of the nestlings inhabiting the boxes in the PCB contaminated area reached the age of 15 days, compared to 90% in the non-contaminated area.

"These studies do illustrate the value that wildlife have as sentinels of the environment," Woolf says. "They also show why research is so important."

LOOKS ARE DECEIVING
Despite all that is now known about the hazardous waste at Crab Orchard, despite the stacks of articles and reports that have been written, nothing looks wrong at the refuge. The 43,500 acres of rolling land and lakes are bucolic. Cattle graze on pastures from May to October. Sharecroppers plant and harvest crops. Trails take hikers through deciduous and coniferous woodlands, past ponds, and over rocky outcroppings. The 7,000-acre Crab Orchard Lake is the centerpiece of the refuge and its most popular attraction. Motorboats filled with fishermen roar across the water in all seasons. Not far from the lake's southern shore, an observation tower and blind overlook a wetland filled in spring and fall with migrating shorebirds and ducks. In winter, thousands of Canada geese blanket the area. Prairie restoration and woodland consolidation projects are ongoing.

A few years ago, as a staff member of HWRIC's sister agency, the Illinois State Water Survey, Dr. Stephen Vermette studied airborne PCB levels in the refuge. "Most people don't view the contamination there as a problem," he says, "because we're used to thinking of toxic waste only as barrels stacked 15 stories high."

In contrast, the contamination at Crab Orchard is hidden, discrete. One site, known to contain waste but not yet studied extensively, is simply an open field fringed with trees. If you poked around a little here and there at the refuge, you might uncover an old electrical capacitor or notice that the soil is tinted red by crystalline TNT. A big tree fell over recently near an abandoned munitions area. Entangled in its roots were World War II-era land mines.

Although the refuge was established in 1947, its history really dates back to the 1930s when the federal government purchased land between Carbondale and Marion, dammed up a creek, and created Crab Orchard Lake. When World War II began, the government built the Illinois Ordnance Plant on the future refuge property, erecting metal buildings for munitions manufacturing and concrete bunkers for storage.

To shore up the local economy at the end of the war, Washington chose to lease the existing ordinance buildings to manufacturers and allow the construction of other factories. In the same spirit, when Congress dedicated the land as a national wildlife refuge, it dictated several unique provisions. Crab Orchard became -and still is- the only federal refuge in the country with the mandate to combine wildlife management and recreation with industry and agriculture. Twenty or more companies currently occupy 1.2 million square feet of industrial space.

Between 1946 and 1962, one former refuge tenant, Sangamo-Weston, manufactured electrical components that contained PCBs. Dating back to the "chemical revolution" of the 1930s, PCBs were used as heat transfer agents. In the years 1929 to 1976, before PCBs were banned in the United States because of their known toxicity, 1.5 billion pounds of PCBs were manufactured in the United States alone.

Today, the general public reacts with alarm to the initials "PCB" even if it doesn't comprehend why. PCBs are chemically stable, not easily destroyed or diluted, and are suspected of causing cancer. They are, according to one refuge report, "exceptionally persistent in the environment."

By 1988, the Environmental Protection Agency had identified 33 sites in the refuge as having potential problems with hazardous waste. PCBs, dioxins, and metals such as lead and cadmium are the most serious of the contaminants. Yet the August 1990 "Declaration for the Record of Decision, PCB Areas Operable Unit" report admits, "There are no good estimates of the total volume of disposed materials" at the refuge. "As with many Superfund Sites, the problems at the Refuge are complex."

PCB contamination of fish at Crab Orchard Lake has caused the most direct scare. HWRIC funded studies by SIUC's Cooperative Fisheries Research Laboratory began in 1986. Roy C. Heidinger, director of the laboratory, and his colleague Christopher C. Kohler looked for PCBs and toxic trace metals such as arsenic, mercury, and lead in the fish and other biota of the reservoir. By 1988 enough evidence was in place to cause the Illinois Department of Public Health to warn against eating too much of the common fish species stocked there. Pregnant women and small children are most at risk. Currently, the only fish advisory is for carp over 15 inches caught east of Wolf Creek Road, which vertically bisects the lake. It is here that runoff from contaminated land is concentrated; a nearby dam restricts the free flow of water.

The SIUC fish study did yield some good news for postcleanup populations and the humans who catch and eat them. The fish analyzed in the study required continual exposure of PCBs to maintain their elevated levels of those substances.

BURNING SOIL
Under the EPA plans, hazardous waste at the refuge has been grouped into five major cleanup projects that will stretch at least to the end of the decade. Roles are assigned to the EPA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of the Army, and the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.

Another key player -in the PCB cleanup, at least- is Schlumberger Industries, Inc., which purchased Sangamo-Western in 1976. A consent decree signed in 1992 between the EPA and Schlumberger spells out remediation terms for the corporation. On-site incineration was chosen as the most effective way to remove the PCBs in the Sangamo area. Schlumberger is paying for more than half of its cost. The firm was also assessed $2.5 million for remediation projects, seven of which were identified as priorities in public meetings. The resulting draft proposals, which include land purchase, recreation enhancement, and reforestation, will be presented for public comment at another series of open meetings.

A mobile incinerator -whose parts fill 25 semi trucks and four railroad cars- is under construction now near the worst of the four PCB sites, the Area 9 landfill east of Illinois 148. The 2.5-acre landfill is only 100 yards south of Crab Orchard Lake. From the 1950s through 1964, industrial wastes were burned there, then compacted in a swale and covered by earth. Runoff from this site drained into an intermittent creek and then into the lake itself. Close by is the Area 9 Building Complex that held several industrial tenants, including Sangamo-Weston.

IN total, 200,000 cubic yards of soil at the refuge are polluted with PCBs. Approximately 80,000 cubic yards of the most heavily polluted soil will be incinerated. The mobile incinerator is expected to be completed by May 1996. The actual incineration, at temperatures up to 2500šF,, should be completed by the end of the year, at which point the incinerator will be dismantled. Special landfills are being created to hold the incineration residue. Monitoring of those sites will continue for some time.

WHAT'S IN THE AIR?
Beginning at public hearings in 1990, a relatively small group of citizens raised concerns about incineration. A suggestion was made to use a vitrification process to lock the PCBs into a glassy substance rather than disturb and release them into the air. The EPA, after looking into the process rejected it as inferior to incineration.

Stephen Vermette, now an assistant professor of earth science and science education at the State University of New York College at Buffalo, thinks it is important to eliminate the PCBs from the refuge. He remembers the 1990-92 studies he did for HWRIC on airborne PCBs at the Area 9 landfill and building complex. (He also remembers his first-ever chigger bites, the ticks that fell from the trees, and poison ivy. "There were hazards," he says. ("And hazards!")

"A certain normal background level of PCBs is found in the air regardless of where one is in the world," Vermette says. At one kilometer away from the Area 9 landfill, no unusual levels can be detected on a typical day, but because each PCB-laced landfill has its own signature, the landfill does contribute to that background level. PCB air contamination directly over the landfill is 3,000 times higher than normal, and the closer to the ground measurements are taken, the higher the contamination. Vermette developed height profiles for levels of air contamination in the now-fenced areas. "Short-term exposure by humans who come and go is bad enough. Long-term exposure by small animals who inhabit the space closer to ground level is far worse," he says.

"Incineration, if operated properly, will destroy the PCBs and not release them to the air. However, proper monitoring of the incineration emissions is necessary," he emphasized, "and should include checks for all 30 congeners of PCBs included in our original study." Looking for all of the various congeners is one reason why research, cleanup, and incineration are so expensive. The effort being taken to remove the soil and incinerate it, he said, "is definitely worthwhile."

Woolf said that although the refuge cleanup is "certainly controversial," in his opinion the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service "is proceeding with deliberation. I believe they are doing it conscientiously and the best way they can." Like other scientists, he favors incineration over leaving the landfills simply fenced off. Mark Sattelberg, project manager for the PCBs Areas Operable Unit at the refuge, pointed out that some of the PCB concentrations are in the 10% range, or 100,000 parts per million -an incredibly high concentration. "Fifty years have gone by since the first contaminants were laid here. They haven't gone away, and they haven't been diluted," he said.

If all goes well, by the next decade Crab Orchard will be a different place -not so much to the human eye, but for the plants and animals that live there and for the other animals that feed on them. The high cost, perhaps, is justified given the decision so many years ago to stitch manufacturing and animals closely together in a tapestry of mixed uses that constitute the wildlife refuge.