The Great Bend City Council Monday heard a report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 7 on the Superfund remediation efforts at the former Plating Inc. plant in Great Bend’s Industrial Park west of town. Originally planned for October, it has been moved to this week’s meeting due to the threat of a federal government shutdown at the time.

Clint Sperry, Lenexa-based site remedial project manager with the EPA, led the presentation involving the ongoing EPA cleanup, or remediation, project near the Great Bend Municipal Airport involving the former Plating Inc. location. 

“We’re finally coming to some closure on the Plating Inc. site,” Sperry said. The issue dates back 35 years. 

With roots in the 1980s, this is a former chromium and zinc plating facility at 8801 West Sixth St.  Chemicals, including hexavalent chromium, from the now-defunct and bankrupt business (which operated from 1968 through 2005) have contaminated the surrounding groundwater and are the subject of an ongoing cleanup effort.

Working with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, an EPA-approved cleanup plan underway, Sperry said.  

Over the next several months, EPA will be conducting cleanup work under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, commonly known as Superfund, Sperry said. In April 2023, Plating Inc. was one of three Superfund sites in Kansas on the National Priorities List (NPL) to receive funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to begin or expedite cleanup projects.

“We’re sorry it takes us this long,” he said. He’s sure the public thinks this has been “taking forever.”

The Plating Inc. Superfund Site dates back to 1988 and sits within the airport industrial area in Barton County, 1½ miles west of Great Bend. An inspection from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment determined that 6,400 gallons of chromic acid was on-site in 2007, along with other acids and hydroxides. The EPA took over the site in 2008.

The secondary containment was inadequate and chromic acid was found to have discharged into the soil, the EPA reported. A two-mile-long groundwater plume of hexavalent chromium has impacted domestic water wells and is moving toward Great Bend’s public water supply wells.

However, he said the concentration of the contamination fades quickly as it drifts towards town, he said.

EPA has selected remedial designs for addressing the soil and groundwater contamination, Sperry said. Sperry turned the floor over to Stan Schultz, project manager with Better By Design, the  Brookfield, Mo., firm contracting with the EPA for the remediation.

“It’s a simple project,” he said. But, “it’ll be slow moving.” 

They have started removing the myriad trash that has accumulated in the building. Come the first of the year, they will demolish the building and start excavating the contaminated soil.

With the groundwater table around 12 feet deep, they will dig up dirt down to 20-plus feet. The dirt will stabilized by mixing it with a “reductant” that reduce the hexavalent chromium into the harmless trivalent chromium so it can be hauled to a landfill in Oklahoma for disposal.

They should be planting grass on the site by fall of next year or spring of 2025. In the meantime, there will be plenty of large machinery at the site.

Despite this, testing will go on for several years, Sperry said. It is hoped that the location would be available for redevelopment at some point.