EPA to add former Federated Metals property as toxic Superfund site

Mar. 28—The U.S.Environmental Protection Agency said Monday it intends to add the former Federated Metals smelter on the Whiting-Hammond border to its toxic Superfund cleanup program.

There will be a 60-day period for public comment starting Wednesday.

Federated Metals, 2230 Indianapolis Blvd., once operated a 36-acre smelting, refining, recovery and recycling facility for metals from 1937 to 1983, including lead, copper and zinc, according to the EPA. Other industrial firms, like Whiting Metals, operated on the property until recent years.

For decades, various firms pumped lead in the air.

"I think it's a victory," Hammond environmentalist Carolyn Marsh said. "It means that the EPA is gonna come in and spend money, instead of kicking the can down the road."

Regulators traced high lead levels found in at least 130 surrounding yards to the former facility. About 700 more yards need to still be tested. High levels of arsenic were also found in yards closer to the smelter site, according to the EPA.

They also found higher concentrations of lead in the sediment of nearby George Lake. The property is located off its northeast shore.

Nearly 10,000 people live within a mile of the former smelter in Whiting and the Robertsdale neighborhood of Hammond. The site is near a bike trail, parks, a church and Calumet College of St. Joseph.

"I'm not surprised," Hammond Mayor Tom McDermott said Tuesday. City officials went to meetings with the EPA years back.

Hammond spent about $5 million to remediate 102 of 112 lead-tainted yards since it started its own program in August 2021, he said. Ten property owners refused to cooperate with the city.

Those yards tested over 400 parts per million — the agency's benchmark to step in for cleanup.

The EPA will also have to remediate other areas, like along the bike trail and on the George Lake shoreline, McDermott said.

David Dabertin, a Hammond attorney and former regional director of the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, confronted Gov. Eric Holcomb in April 2018 and asked why federal and state officials have allowed other lead-processing companies to operate on the Federated Metals site in Whiting.

Five years later, not much had changed, he said Tuesday.

"That's insulting," he said.

Indiana had plenty of opportunities over the years to step in — including $1.2 million set aside from a historic $1.79 billion 2009 settlement with Asarco, Federated Metals' then-parent company, Dabertin said. It could have been done without resorting to the federal Superfund program.

It shouldn't have taken the EPA to step in many years later, leaving more generations of residents exposed with their health in danger, he said.

IDEM spokesman Barry Sneed said he was working on the agency's response, but may not have it by Tuesday's press deadline.

McDermott added the Superfund program, by definition, was a slow-moving process.

In a decade, "we'll still be talking about the cleanup", he said.

The designation was a problem for property values if people want to sell their homes, McDermott said. Rather than wait on the EPA, "it was important to do that work ourselves," so that residents could provide certificates to the county recorder's office verifying the remediation.

Whiting Mayor Steve Spebar was not immediately available Tuesday.

"When we add a site to the National Priorities List, EPA is committing to permanently addressing contamination on-site and ensuring surrounding communities receive the protection and support they deserve," EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement.

The facility has been in the EPA's Resource Conservation and Recovery Act program since 2003, according to the EPA, and was passed to the Superfund program for emergency action (i.e. soil testing) in 2016.

The agency itself admitted the challenges of cleanup over the years. While federal and state officials oversaw a cleanup of the Federated Metals site during the 1980s, they did not test surrounding neighborhoods.

Documents show other companies like Whiting Metals and Northern Indiana Metals bought 17-acres of the property and kept "smelting operations on-and-off" through 2020.

The EPA inked a consent decree for cleanup in 1992 with Federated Metals' parent company ASARCO to address the whole property. The company declared bankruptcy in 2005 partway through cleanup, which put the brakes on plans.

A bankruptcy trust took over in 2009, but it didn't have the money to test nearby homes.

Career EPA employees in 2016 began digging through files on polluted sites in northwest Indiana that either hadn't been cleaned up or weren't scoured thoroughly enough years ago. They started a gradual, years-long process to test nearby homes.

Holcomb and ex-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt briefly visited the area in 2018, pledging $1.7 million for soil remediation in 25 homes.

Residents, and environmental activists including Marsh, suspected lead poisoning killed a string of swans found in George Lake around 2018. Further tests concluded it was lake parasites.

Lead is unsafe at any level, according to the EPA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ingesting tiny concentrations can permanently damage the developing brains of children and contribute to heart disease, kidney failure and other health problems later in life.

Long-term exposure to arsenic could lead to severe illness, including cancer. It's also linked to skin lesions, high blood pressure and elevated risk for diabetes.

The Chicago Tribune and Post-Tribune archives contributed.

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