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EPA adds Cedarburg, Wis., site to Superfund list

Release Date: 09/23/2009
Contact Information: Mick Hans, 312-353-5050, hans.mick@epa.gov Susan Pastor, 312-353-1325, pastor.susan@epa.gov

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
No. 09-OPA179

(CHICAGO - Sept. 23, 2009) U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has added the Amcast Industrial Corp. site in Cedarburg, Wis., to the Superfund National Priorities List of hazardous waste sites. Superfund is the federal program that investigates and cleans up the most complex, uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites in the country. A public comment period on the proposed listing of the site ended in June.

Amcast, at N39 W5789 Hamilton Road, was an automotive aluminum die-casting facility from 1939 to 2004, when the company filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. PCB contamination from Amcast's operations polluted the plant property, adjacent sewers, a pond in a nearby park, a retention pond, some private properties near the plant and sediment in Cedar Creek. It may also have reached the Milwaukee River, a distance of five creek miles away.

Until now, the Cedar Creek Superfund site encompassed both areas impacted by Amcast and Mercury Marine's now-demolished Plant 2 building (which also contributed PCB contamination to Cedar Creek). Now that Amcast has been added to the NPL, the various site areas will be managed separately from the ongoing Cedar Creek cleanup and are eligible for further analysis and development of cleanup options. EPA will work in partnership with Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Other EPA Region 5 sites added to the NPL today: the Lane Street Ground Water Contamination site in Elkhart, Ind. and the Little Scioto River near Marion, Ohio. Two other sites in EPA Region 5 were proposed for the NPL: Chemetco, a closed steel mill in Hartford, Ill., and Gratiot County Golf Course, a contaminated soil site in St. Louis, Mich. Nationally, 11 new sites were added to the NPL and 10 sites were proposed for addition to the list. Under the NPL process, sites are first proposed and public comments considered before a determination is made to formally add a site to the list.

To date, there have been 1,607 sites on the NPL. Of these sites, 336 have been deleted resulting in 1,271 sites currently on the NPL (including the 11 new final sites added in today's rulemaking). With the proposal of the 10 new sites, there are 66 proposed sites awaiting final agency action: 61 in the general Superfund section and five in the federal facilities section. There are a total of 1,337 final and proposed sites.

Links to the Federal Register notice, information on submitting comments, background on the NPL process and summaries of the sites newly added or proposed are at https://www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/npl/current.htm. Detailed information about the Amcast site is at https://www.epa.gov/region5/sites/amcast.