Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
PAROWAN — The view across the street from the Foothill Community mobile home park is finally becoming more clear.
"The place became quite an eyesore to the community," property manager Gayle Lister said. "It looked like a trash pile."
And in many respects it was.
The open field was previously run by Stone Castle Recycling, and according to the EPA some seven million pounds of older standard-definition TVs and monitors have been abandoned by the company at sites in Parowan, Cedar City and Clearfield.
Thursday, an EPA cleanup team was focused on clearing out the field in Parowan.
"That's a huge concern for us from the standpoint of exposure to folks," EPA On-Site Manager Steven Merritt said. "Everything starts to break down and all those metals and all the other chemicals that are inside these products tend to migrate off-site."
The biggest problem, Merritt said, is that the now-outdated cathode ray tube, or screens, contain lead that can seep into the groundwater.
Everything starts to break down and all those metals and all the other chemicals that are inside these products tend to migrate off-site.
–Steven Merritt, EPA On-Site Manager
The Parowan facility is just the start of Stone Castle's problems. In total, four sites run by the company have all mysteriously caught fire, starting with a recycling yard in Ogden in 2008, which was later moved to Clearfield. The Parowan location burned last March; another one in Cedar City in July; and finally Clearfield in November.
In each case, fire inspectors told KSL the causes are still undetermined. Both the Environmental Protection Agency and Utah's Department of Environmental Quality said Stone Castle owner Anthony Stoddard stopped communicating with them several months ago.
Materials recovered in Parowan are being ground up, and will later be contained in concrete before being dumped at a landfill. Afterward, workers with the EPA will scrub the soil for contaminants. Total cost for the cleanup there is estimated at around $450,000.
"This particular site of all the Stone Castle locations that they operated at was the highest priority because of those residential exposure pathways," Merritt said.
