ROCKFORD, MI — A popular stretch of the White Pine Trail will be closed and torn up this fall while excavators remove contaminated soil and buried leather from the former Wolverine World Wide tannery site in Rockford, according to federal regulators.
Excavations at Wolverine’s former tannery and sludge dump on House Street NE in Belmont are expected to begin soon to remove soil and waste that officials say may pose a health hazard to people because it’s close enough to the surface to potentially make contact with.
Contractors also plan to remove contaminated near-shore sediments at two spots in the Rogue River next to the former tannery.
“There’s going to be some work out there and it’s going to be obtrusive,” said Brent Ritchie, a Mannik & Smith Group contractor for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “It’s going to take some time, but we want it to be done properly.”
Wolverine is paying for the cleanup work. Crews are expected to begin moving into place after Labor Day.
“It should be done this fall,” Ritchie said.
Ritchie spoke at the first public meeting of the Wolverine Community Advisory Group (CAG), held Thursday, Aug. 15 at the Rockford High School Freshmen Center. The body of local citizens and civic leaders was formed this summer by the EPA as a liaison between the public and regulators making decisions about pollution cleanup.
The meeting lasted two-and-a half-hours and drew about 35 people.
Regulators with EPA and the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE, formerly DEQ), explained the results of last summer’s extensive contamination surveys at the former tannery and Wolverine’s House Street dump.
Betsy Nightingale, an EPA on-scene coordinator, said additional fencing is planned around much of Wolverine’s 76-acre House Street property, where the company dumped sludge waste laden with, among other things, toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS compounds.
Wolverine dumped waste tainted by 3M Scotchgard into unlined trenches and lagoons on House Street in the 1960s. The resulting contamination created a groundwater plume that state regulators say extends almost two miles southeast to the Rogue River and has likely spawned smaller offshoots that extend further south into the Belmont village area.
The waste is still almost 20-feet thick along the dump’s southern boundary, where there’s a noticeable depression next to the road.
“A 20-foot boring was basically 20 feet of waste,” Nightingale said.
Chromium, a heavy metal used to convert animal hide into leather, was found at levels that warrant removal due to concern it may be leaching into the groundwater, she said.
In Rockford, signs warning White Pine Trail users to avoid contaminated sediments and toxic surfactant foam on the river went up this summer near the former tannery site, which was razed over the objection of citizen activists in 2010 after the tannery closed.
Hand-washing stations and large information kiosks with EPA and EGLE information about the cleanup have also been posted along the trail.
Leather scraps littering the riverbank near the Wolverine Footwear Depot building, which used to be the tannery shoe manufacturing plant, are expected to finally be removed this fall as part of the EPA-ordered cleanup along the river.
Buried leather hides under the trail itself will also be excavated.
A groundwater treatment system Wolverine is installing at the tannery is expected to begin cleaning extremely high PFAS concentrations from groundwater entering the river after the North Kent Sewer Authority this month agreed to take the discharge.
Cleanup at the tannery follows several years of local debate about whether or not the tannery warranted evaluation for listing on the EPA’s Superfund toxic site list. The EPA stepped back into tannery oversight after drinking water contamination was discovered around the company’s House Street dump and another alleged sump site in what’s today the Wellington Ridge neighborhood west of Rockford.
Because PFAS are not yet formally classified as “hazardous” substances at a federal level, the EPA has jointly overseen the Wolverine investigation with EGLE, which adopted enforceable state groundwater standards for two PFAS compounds in 2018.
Abby Hendershott, EGLE remediation division director in Grand Rapids, said new state public drinking water standards under development for PFAS, called MCLs, could lower the state’s groundwater cleanup standards from 70 parts-per-trillion (ppt) to match whatever levels are finalized for public drinking water through state rulemaking.
Standards proposed by a state science advisory panel are the strictest in the U.S. for some of the seven compounds being considered.
Hendershott said the state wants more many monitoring wells drilled around the 25-sqaure mile zone in northern Kent County where groundwater is polluted by PFAS chemicals.
The Wellington Ridge neighborhood is built atop an old gravel pit that EGLE says was a dump for liquid tannery waste. The state calls it the “Wolven-Jewell area” based on nearby roads.
“We probably have five or more plumes that come off Wolven-Jewell itself, all at different depths,” Hendershott said. The area also sits on a divide in groundwater flow, which “makes it very difficult for investigation. It’s going to be a long time before we get that all figured out.”
“We need a lot more wells.”
