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 Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information.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.
LARAMIE, Wyo. (AP) — Contaminated flue dust from a mining and metallurgical Superfund site in Idaho may be headed to a Colorado landfill as part of a plan to clean up a waste site south of Laramie.
The cleanup also includes high levels of arsenic in groundwater.
Environmental contractors plan to begin removing a roughly 1,000-ton pile of flue dust from the property Nov. 17, according to emails from the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality.
The 31-acre site sits about 2 miles south of Laramie and is owned by Englewood, Colorado-based L.C. Holdings LLC.
The company joined the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality Remediation Program in 2011 to clean the site under the agency's oversight. When the cleanup is complete, the company expects to get a release from future environmental liability.
The contaminated flue dust was transported to the site from the Bunker Hill Mining and Metallurgical Superfund Site in northern Idaho, according to the documents.
The dust was supposed to have been treated or removed within 90 days, but it has likely been there since the 1980s, the Laramie Boomerang reported Sunday (http://tinyurl.com/k3h5fp5).
P.J. Wilber, DEQ Voluntary Remediation Program site manager, said cleanup efforts would likely focus on groundwater and soils on-site.
LT Environmental Inc., an Arvada, Colorado-based environmental contractor, recently submitted plans to truck the contaminated flue dust to a hazardous waste landfill in Deer Trail, Colorado.
The landfill limited the shipments to three trucks per day, according to an email from Wyoming officials.
To remove the flue dust, LT Environmental plans to set up misters within the building, wetting the dust to keep it from going airborne, Wilber said.
The dust will then be wrapped in several plastic packages and placed into trucks also lined with thick plastic. Workers will then wrap the second layer of plastic around the first, and the flue dust burrito-shaped packages will be shipped to Deer Trail for offloading.
"Then they basically tilt up the trucks and lay that big burrito on the ground, and it just gets buried like that," Wilber said.
___
Information from: Laramie Boomerang, http://www.laramieboomerang.com
Copyright © The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
