[Above, Dane County Regional Airport constructing a cell phone lot in 2018 where the heavily contaminated Darwin burn pit was located. Photo-Maria Powell]
*****
On July 25, 1989, Laurie Egre at the Wisconsin DNR wrote to her colleague Joe Brusca about the “Truax Air National Guard Fire Training Site.” She referred to the 1989 Envirodyne report by contractors for the Department of Defense, which showed serious toxic contamination at the Darwin burn pit. The memo said:
“The fire training area was used by the military, the City of Madison, Dane County, and other local fire departments up to 1987. It is located about one half mile north of the Truax landfill. Waste fuels and solvents were burned on the ground for fire training purposes. Over 2500 gallons of waste flammable per year was disposed of this way by the military alone. The burn area is still clearly visible. Monitoring wells installed for the Envirodyne Report show heavy metal contamination (cadmium, chromium, lead) in excess of enforcement standards and VOCs (benzene, toluene, tetrachloroethylene, trichloroethylene, vinyl chloride)…Surface water contamination has also been documented.”
Egre outlined three possible options to address the site:
- RCRA violation enforcement. No approval was given by Southern District staff for use of waste fuels and solvents in fire training. No sample data is available, although the flammability of jet fuel seems obvious.
- Superfund program follow up: The Department of Defense gave the site an HRS of 35.59.[1]
- Spills follow-up. This may be the clearest authority. Any Departmental requirements, however, are likely to become snarled in negotiations among the various responsible parties, as well as the usual entanglements of dealing with units of government. (italics added)
Ms Egre’s last point was clearly based on past experiences “dealing with units of government.” It was also remarkably prescient. The “various responsible parties” for the burn pits—the city, county, and U.S. military–“negotiated” (er, rather, bickered endlessly) about who is responsible for the burn pits for thirty-three years after she wrote this. For much of that time, they simply buried the issue and put their heads in the sand. They are still bickering to this day.
[1] This is a high enough score to be placed on the National Priorities List (NPL) for Superfund.
DOD/USACE “Remedial Investigation Report” on the burn pit disappeared
Why didn’t the DNR use one of the three options above 33 years ago? Good question. Was the agency really powerless to make the “various units of government” that were “snarled in negotiations” follow its laws? Did these government units–the city, county, and/or military–twist DNR’s arms behind closed doors to get them to back off?
We’ll never know what happened behind closed doors, but we do know that the responsibility for the burn pits was passed from one agency to another ad nauseam for years and years.
Following Ms. Egre’s 1989 memo, the city and county convinced the military to investigate the Darwin burn pit. While the Department of Defense/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was investigating it in 1993-1994, Dane County Regional Airport’s (DCRA) engineer Michael Kirchner clearly didn’t take the investigations very seriously, allowing contractors to pile purportedly “clean” soils over the investigative area (while building a rental car lot adjacent to it), even after USACE explicitly told them not to do so. (Perhaps this was a mistake–or perhaps it was a purposeful attempt to muck up the investigations?)
In any case, on February 14, 1996, Gordon D. Hussey, Chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Branch Engineering Division wrote to Michael Schmoller at DNR to notify him that the soils DCRA had spread onto the burn pit investigation area, against their request, were not in fact clean but were contaminated at levels over the NR720 guideline action levels. He didn’t say what contaminants were found.
He referred to a 1995 USACE “Draft Final Remedial Investigation Report” on the burn pit, and some of the results and diagrams in this report. Presumably it had already been sent to DNR (and was probably attached to the letter).
Oddly, this draft report, and any related final reports, have completely disappeared. They are not in DNR or city or county files. Nobody seems to know where they are. Nobody will answer questions about them.
It’s hard not to conclude that the responsible parties have something to hide.
DCRA’s engineer Mike Kirchner blatantly lies to DOT
In May 2018, when I took the above photo, DCRA was constructing a cell phone lot on the former burn pit area (the DNR said it was not on it, but maps refute this). I notified DNR, which looped in WisDOT because the project was regulated under the DOT-DNR “cooperative agreement” process.
In my subsequent communications with staff from several agencies, I learned that the DNR and DOT had issued the required approvals to build there, including filling in wetlands, with no recognition of the highly contaminated burn pit. A “categorical exclusion” (CATEX), which exempted them from performing an “Environmental Analysis” (EA), required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was issued. The CATEX noted that Starkweather Creek was 150 feet east of the project, but (laughably) assured that there would be no impacts on the creek or on the shallow groundwater there. Asked if there would be any environmental justice impacts from the project, whoever filled out the CATEX form checked “no.”
This CATEX was a dishonest sham. Starkweather Creek receives all the runoff from the burn pit.
On June 14, 2018, I sent Matthew Messina, Airport Development Engineer with WisDOT, information about the burn pit. He responded: “I was not aware of the pit, but I talked to the airport and was told that “[t]he burn pit was the Department of Defense’s. Because of this, neither the DNR, the airport, or DOT has any records on the pit. DOD should have remediated the site as it is part of their process.”
Messina likely got this blatantly false information from Mike Kirchner at the airport. Kirchner knew that the burn pit was used by the city, county/airport, and military–and had been owned by Dane County since the 1970s. He knew that the county, DNR, and military had records on it. (It’s not clear what Messina knew or what records DOT had at that time).
I asked him if he knew whether the DoD had ever remediated the area, and he said he would “ask the airport if they can get any more information from the DoD.” He never responded further.
But on July 2, 2018, Steve Martin at DNR told me “no remediation had been performed” at the burn pit. Because the 1995 USACE report (and any subsequent reports) are missing, we don’t know if this is true. But based on years of interacting with government agencies and reviewing documents on the burn pits, we’re pretty certain that it has never been remediated, as Martin told us.
Mike Schmoller, well aware of the past burn pit investigations and DNR’s records on them, also acted completely naive when I notified him of the burn pit after seeing the cell phone lot work there.
But my queries apparently prompted Schmoller to do something. On June 18, 2018, he sent Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, Captain Matthew Shaw from the Wisconsin Air National Guard, and Michael Kirchner, Director of Engineering at Dane County Regional Airport a letter noting that the fire pit south of the airport “has been the location of past firefighting training activities potentially using PFA foams. The Department believes you and other past owners or users of the property may potentially be responsible for causing or contributing to the PFA contamination. The Department is sending this letter to request that you and the other identified parties conduct a soil, groundwater and surface water investigation at the site this summer. The study should describe the full nature and extent of PFA contamination, if any, in preparation for conducting any necessary remedial actions. The Department is willing to assist in developing a site investigation work plan. Within 45 days of receipt of this notice, please provide me with a letter confirming your intention to conduct the field study.”
Schmoller’s letter said nothing whatsoever about all the other regulated toxic contaminants found there in the 1980s, at levels over existing standards–which were presumably further documented in the “disappeared” 1995 USACE report. The DNR, city, and county were also well aware that extensive contamination had been found there.**
Four years later, though DCRA did some limited testing at the burn pits in 2020–and found screaming high PFAS levels–the “full nature and extent” of any of the contamination in soil, groundwater, and numerous migration pathways (of PFAS or other contaminants) has not even remotely been delineated, per NR700 laws.
In July 2022, DNR sent the city, county, and Air National Guard another responsible party letter, with far more detailed expectations on specific NR 700 laws than the one sent on May 2018. The County’s response on September 7 was more of the same: they planned to do further investigations, “additional testing” and experimental pilot treatments that have failed to date. No timelines. Nothing about defining the full extent of the contamination. Nothing about remediation.
Will DNR accept this foot-dragging? Based on what happened over the last 33 years, sadly, it probably will. Will DNR ask the responsible parties to test any other chemicals besides PFAS? Highly unlikely. So far it hasn’t done so, even though we have asked repeatedly. Our questions are ignored.
The people downstream of, and most exposed to, these poisons spewing from the burn pit are mostly low income people of color. They are also ignored.
Our regulatory system is completely broken. Apparently, environmental laws don’t matter. The truth doesn’t matter. Citizens don’t matter. Glaring environmental injustices don’t matter.
***
[Photo to the right, looking south from the recently constructed cell phone lot, with Starkweather Creek just to the left (east): A “retention pond” was built next to the parking lot, purposely designed to infiltrate surface water downward into shallow groundwater. This was likely intended to keep surface water from flowing to the creek, but instead it sends contaminated water instead down into the groundwater. Surface water flows copiously from the burn pit area anyway, as the photo below shows. Photos-Maria Powell, 2018]
**All toxic contaminants except PFAS disappeared?
Fortunately for the responsible parties, in 2018 when they received their first DNR responsible party letter (and now, for the most part), PFAS was not regulated.
But contaminants found at the Darwin burn pit in the 1980s—PCE, TCE, cadmium, chromium, lead, petroleum compounds–have been regulated for years; there are standards for them. In the 1980s, when they were found, as Ms Egre pointed out, levels violated existing standards. Some of these standards, such as those for TCE in groundwater, have dropped down even further since then.
PFAS compounds were definitely all over the Darwin burn pit in the 1980s, and in the groundwater beneath it, but were not tested for until 2020, when extremely high levels were found. Still, as strange as it sounds, responsible parties would probably prefer that regulators and the public focus on PFAS and forget about other poisons there–because PFAS remains only partially (and weakly) regulated.
To date, powerful entities have been able to fend off protective PFAS regulations and standards in Wisconsin. Utilities, airports, municipalities, and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce have been fighting hard, with the help of Wisconsin Republican legislators, to prevent PFAS regulations and standards from being promulgated–and when they can’t prevent them, to assure that they are as weak and unprotective as possible.
Dane County “fixing to get ready” to do something about burn pits
