Monday morning, when the air was cold and damp and the wind only made it worse, I found Jim Schermbeck climbing a giant pile of dirt behind a West Dallas 7-Eleven under construction. The environmental activist was wearing a lightweight jacket, blue jeans and beautifully stitched boots with sharp points.
“I am not dressed for this,” Schermbeck said as we poked through the freshly dug-up mounds, extracting from the soft brown soil shards of hard black plastic that look like remnants of the car batteries once smashed and buried in contaminated soil on this very land. “And I can’t believe I am doing this without gloves.”
Here, beneath our boots, once stood Murph Metals and then RSR Corp.’s enormous lead smelter, which, from 1934 to 1984, poisoned West Dallas. That was “a battery wrecking facility,” as the Environmental Protection Agency called it, where workers crushed car batteries to drain the acid and extract the lead.
At this moment, construction workers are finishing a 7-Eleven on the southeast corner of North Westmoreland Road and Singleton Boulevard, the first thing to be built on the 6.6-acre site since the plant was closed and carted off. This is not a bad thing. Projects are built atop Superfund sites all the time — like, say, American Airlines Center and Victory Park, constructed on “brownfield” once home to a city dump, a railroad maintenance facility and a power station.
But one week ago, Schermbeck forwarded me an email he received from a West Dallas native named Diane Smith, who said uncovered, easily accessed piles of dirt lie behind the construction site. Smith wrote that she walked right up to the work site — “like it was a magnet drawing me to it” — and found what she believed to be pieces of battery casings in the dirt. Just like the old days.
“RSR … has come back to the surface,” she wrote. Smith lamented that the churning of soil had resurrected “the ghost factory” that haunts this area still and will for generations, no matter what is built on top of the land.
She and countless other West Dallas residents will always look at that intersection and see the 300-foot-tall smokestack that once spread across 13.6 square miles of West Dallas “at least 269 tons of lead particles each year,” this newspaper wrote in 1986. And they will always feel beneath their feet the broken batteries and lead slag that wound up in hundreds of residents’ yards, given away as “fill.”
“Is there a poison in the air?” this newspaper asked four decades ago. Yes. In the air. In the soil. In the lungs. In the brains of children who were especially susceptible to the poison linked to IQ loss and behavioral issues. And in the bones and teeth, where lead finds its way.
Eventually the city stepped in; then, the courts; then, finally, the feds. The plant was razed and the smokestack topped some 20 years ago. And, according to EPA documents, the land — filled with lead, arsenic and cadmium — was “capped” with 2 feet of clay soil.
On May 10, 2005, the EPA declared the old RSR site was ready for “industrial use.” But there were caveats, among them: “Future users should comply with ... the implemented remedy which includes maintaining the soil cover to prevent exposure to contaminants that remain onsite in order to ensure the continued protection of human health and the environment.”
Fourteen years later, that cover was breached by contractors hired to resurrect this dead land. But before that could happen, a Plano environmental consultant crafted in June a 19-page soil and groundwater management plan meant to mitigate the impact. And the EPA had to sign off.
That document says that “all soils beneath 2 feet from existing pre‐development grades should be assumed to contain elevated lead or other metals.” That plan, too, says “workers with young children at home should change clothes before entering the house and wash work clothes separately from other clothing.” And it warns there could be short-term effects from exposure to the dirt “such as dizziness, headache, or other irritation.”
Behind the store, workers are now carving a trench for new sewer pipes and water lines. It’s long and deep, far below the 2-foot-deep cap. On Monday, the removed dirt sat in tall piles behind the under-construction convenience store but a minute’s walk from the Thomas Edison campus, now filled with students from the tornado-socked Thomas Jefferson High School.
Two of the piles were covered with black tarps, in keeping with the consultant’s plan. Two others were not.
Smith contacted Schermbeck because of his work with Luis Sepulveda and the West Dallas Coalition for Environmental Justice. She also called Dallas City Hall’s Office of Environmental Quality, whose director James McGuire confirms that staff was dispatched to the site last Thursday. City Council member Omar Narvaez, who represents West Dallas, said a concerned constituent called state Sen. Royce West’s office, which then called the council member. Narvaez then called McGuire and was assured the city and EPA were on it.
Said McGuire via email, the EPA-reviewed soil and groundwater plan “anticipates that impacted soils may be encountered at depth,” which is why it requires those tarps be kept “on and around soil stockpiles.” But when staff visited the site Thursday, McGuire wrote, “the plastic covers were not being used.”
McGuire said his office called the EPA Friday and again Monday to address their findings and Smith’s concerns. Staff also “pointed out to U.S. EPA that plastic covers and perimeter fencing should be used, and fill materials appropriately handled,” McGuire said. “EPA reported that they are working directly with site representatives and will ensure protective remedies are immediately implemented.”
On Monday, EPA officials said they are working with the city, 7-Eleven and its construction contractor “to make sure excavated soils are covered and backfilled,” and that “EPA personnel will oversee further construction activities until completion.”
Derek Williams, who is overseeing the project for Southlake-based Verdad Construction Services, said Tuesday they’re well aware that this is “a super-dirty site,” and “we’ve been trying to take every precaution available, including sampling the air to make sure we don’t let anything blow into neighboring yards.” He said some 2,000 cubic yards of dirt have been carted off to a landfill that handles industrial waste.
Williams and colleague Moises Castro said the EPA visited the site Dec. 4 and found everything was in compliance.
“We are on top of our guys to make sure from here on out, everything is covered up,” Williams said.
Both men said, again and again, they were aware of residents’ and activists’ concerns. “A touchy subject,” Williams called it. A profound understatement.
Diane Smith was born 67 years ago in the shadow of the RSR smokestack — the “big cigar,” she calls it. In 2002, she was a member of the Citizens for Environmental Justice Committee, collecting soil samples, going to City Council meetings, recording oral histories of those who lived and died alongside RSR’s poison machine.
“There was always a grayish smoke that infiltrated the community, especially at night — I never knew it to close,” she said Monday. “As a child, you didn’t know what other type of environment you were supposed to be in, because that was the only one we knew. A horror story.”
She wound up moving away — and settled near what would become yet another EPA Superfund site at Lane Plating, its soil, too, contaminated with arsenic, hexavalent chromium, cadmium, mercury and, of course, lead. When she heard from an old friend from the committee about what was happening behind the 7-Eleven, she drove over and began sifting through the old soil.
“I couldn’t stop digging,” Smith said Monday. “It was an obsession. When I saw those old casings, I couldn’t believe it.”
On Dec. 17, 2012, this newspaper published one in a series of stories about how the residents of West Dallas are still demanding answers, justice. Seven years later, it seems as though nothing has changed. Just the fear of churned dirt on the RSR site proves only that old demons can never remain buried for too long.
Today, the only time most of us hear anyone mention lead and West Dallas is when lifelong West Dallas resident William Hopkins comes to council meetings to remind them of the “people dying in West Dallas.” He has been doing this for 20 years — so long, I don’t think anyone hears the anger and anguish in his regularly scheduled plea. A decade ago, Diane Smith and others, too, went to council meetings. Then they stopped.
“Because,” Smith said, “no one listened to us.”
