Contaminated soil cleanup near Park Crest Elementary School is underway.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced remediation plans for the school and nearby homes in August. The agency kicked off its cleanup process in early September.
The plans weren’t surprising for the community. Residents in the neighborhood have been concerned about the impact of industrial living for decades.
Longtime resident Mike Harbison addressed the community’s concerns at a joint EPA, community and city council meeting in August.
“We’re not hearing about the human side of things — we’re just hearing about properties,” Harbison said. “This has been hard.”
In 2019, they received grant funding to test soil in their community for environmental pollutants. The test’s results sparked the involvement of both state and federal environmental agencies and triggered a cleanup process earlier this year.
Here’s what we know about lead and arsenic cleanup in Garland.
The lead contamination probably came from a nearby factory
The neighborhood where residents and the Environmental Protection Agency found contamination is near several current and former industrial sites. Some houses are less than a mile away from multiple factories.
The lead contamination found on lawns and around Park Crest Elementary School is connected to the former Globe-Union battery manufacturing plant, which closed in the 1990s.
The EPA said it’s unclear why high levels of arsenic were found in the area. Inorganic arsenic pesticides were once used in agricultural practices, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It’s a Superfund site — but it’s not on the National Priorities List
Community members have had questions about the site’s classification.
The EPA addressed some confusion about the site: “The clean-up is a time-critical removal under the Comprehensive Emergency Response, Cleanup and Liability Act or CERCLA, commonly known as the Superfund law,” an agency spokesperson wrote in an email.
At this time, the project isn’t on the EPA’s National Priorities List, which is a directory of hazardous waste sites eligible for long-term investigation and cleanup. When NPL sites need to be cleaned, the project is paid for by the federal Superfund program, which is responsible for remediating some of the nation’s most contaminated sites, environmental emergencies, oil spills and natural disasters.
According to a federal database, Dallas County has three NPL sites: Delfasco Forge in Grand Prairie, RSR Corp. and Lane Plating Works in Dallas.
What’s been done so far
The agency has wrapped up the process in some of its target areas. All Garland ISD property was cleaned up by Thanksgiving, Delgado said.
But more can be done.
In the original study area that included 120 properties, 74 have had their soil sampled, 12 have been completely cleaned up, and four more have signed up to be sampled, Delgado said earlier this month. Twelve property owners denied the EPA access to their yards for testing and cleanup.
Garland ISD is also conducting its own soil testing at Sam Houston Middle School, which is directly across the street from Park Crest Elementary. The board of trustees voted in late September to spend $70,000 to hire a private contractor for soil testing. The results of those tests are expected to be available via a public information request in a couple of weeks, the district said earlier this month.
The EPA isn’t testing the middle school at this time.
More cleanup might be needed
The EPA’s remediation work comes after the agency identified soil with high levels of lead and arsenic at Park Crest Elementary, a stream adjacent to the school, a vacant lot and the yards of roughly a dozen homeowners.
The entire cleanup process was expected to take 10 weeks initially, but the agency found higher levels of lead when they dug deeper into the ground in the areas that touched the stream near the school.
Eric Delgado, the EPA’s site coordinator, said the cleanup should be wrapped up by mid-March. That timeline could be extended, though, if more homes in the area are identified for cleanup.
Around 50 more homeowners have signed up for soil testing, and the agency identified 10 additional properties for cleanup, Delgado said earlier this month.
Residents still seek more answers, data
The community near the cleanup site wants more information on pollution in their neighborhood. They’re also seeking reassurance that youth and future generations in the area will be living in a healthy place.
The state health department published a study in 2018 stating that the number of various types of cancer cases in the neighborhood wasn’t notably different from what would be expected based on its size. The agency controlled for demographic factors, but residents want more data.
They worry that the study’s results weren’t fair because the sample was biased. The neighborhood’s makeup has changed, residents said, and the health department couldn’t include people who had moved away in the study’s analysis.
