News Releases from Region 05
EPA completes cleanup at Midco II Superfund site in Gary
For Immediate Release No. 20-OPA-014
GARY (Oct. 21, 2020) – Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the completion of the cleanup of the Midco II Superfund Site at 5900 Industrial Highway. This site was added to Superfund’s National Priorities List (NPL) in 1986 to address contamination stemming from a 1977 fire at the former hazardous waste recycling operation.
The federal cleanup at Midco II involved consolidating and covering contaminated soil and sediment on-site, addressing soil vapors and treating contaminated groundwater. Groundwater treatment and monitoring will continue at the site until the agency confirms that it meets drinking water standards.
“This administration is keeping its promise to pick up the pace of Superfund cleanups - projects that languished under previous administrations," said EPA Regional Administrator Kurt Thiede. “Cleaning up Superfund sites brings real environmental benefits to places that have suffered environmental degradation while also helping move them forward economically.”
When groundwater at Midco II meets the federal standard, EPA will be able to delete the site from the NPL. Sites are deleted when no further cleanup is required to protect human health or the environment. Years, and sometimes decades, of complex investigation and cleanup go into deleting sites from the NPL.
While EPA encourages site reuse throughout the cleanup process, deletions from the NPL can help revitalize communities and promote economic growth by signaling to potential developers and financial institutions that cleanup is complete. Over the past several years, EPA has placed special emphasis on deleting sites and portions of sites to demonstrate to communities that cleanup is complete.
In FY 2020, EPA employees initiated a project to evaluate and improve the deletion process and as a result consolidated the rulemaking process to streamline the administrative steps involved in deleting sites from the NPL. Going forward, this improvement is expected to reduce workloads, shorten process lead-times and lower program costs.
For more information on the MIDCO II site: https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0501800
The Superfund Task Force Accomplishments can be viewed at https://19january2021snapshot.epa.gov/superfund/superfund-task-force-recommendations-and-accomplishments
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