FORT SMITH - Fort Smith officials renewed their request Tuesday that Whirlpool Corp. consider buying out residents in a neighborhood with contaminated groundwater after learning a company in Little Rock in similar circumstances recently made just such an offer to residents there.
Mayor Sandy Sanders pointed out to Whirlpool Vice President for Corporate Communications Jeff Noel an article that appeared in Saturday’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that Timex Corp. has offered to purchase 40 properties in east Little Rock that sit above groundwater contaminated with trichloroethylene.
Sanders and some city directors have persistently called on Whirlpool to buy the homes of residents just north of the closed Whirlpool plant to compensate them for the contamination that they say has ruined the property values of those residents.
The Sebastian County assessor last year devalued the homes of many residents in the contaminated area by 75 percent and their land by 50percent because of the hazardous chemical contamination beneath their properties.
“They’re looking at these other companies that are making these people whole, and they’re looking at you and saying, ‘Why aren’t you doing that?’” City Director Kevin Settle told Noel. “That’s what we’re hearing.”
Settle was referring to the Timex offer to buy the properties in east Little Rock and the Exxon-Mobile purchase of homes damaged when a company pipeline in Mayflower ruptured and dumped 12,000 barrels of crude oil into a residential area last year.
Sanders said the situation at the former Timex plant was similar to Whirlpool in Fort Smith. Both sent operations overseas and closed their plants. And both had trichloroethylene that leaked from their plants and contaminated the groundwater in adjoining residential areas.
“The response from the [Timex] company was that it was the right thing to do,” Sanders said of the buyout offer.
Noel said he was not familiar enough with the details of the Timex buyout offer to comment Tuesday.And he said he was barred by commenting on what discussions the company is having with residents in the contaminated neighborhood in Fort Smith because of two lawsuits the residents have brought against the company in U.S. District Court in Fort Smith.
“All I can tell you is that, as we have said from the beginning, we look forward to finding a path to successful resolution with the residents,” he said.
He said Whirlpool officials meet weekly with its attorneys to review what discussions are taking place with the residents’ attorneys and what residents are saying through their attorneys. The issues are complex because different residents are in different situations and have different views.
The two federal court lawsuits are a class-action suit and one involving individual property owners. According to court records, the individual property owner suit is scheduled for a jury trial to begin Feb. 23, 2015. The class-action suit’s jury trial is scheduled to begin June 29, 2015.
Noel led a small team Tuesday to Fort Smith to update city directors on efforts to treat the contamination. The company’s consultant on the project, Environ International Corp., has begun injecting a chemical oxidation agent into the ground at four sites on Whirlpool property to neutralize the trichloroethylene in the groundwater.
Environ engineer Mike Ellis told city directors the first chemical oxidation injection was on March 25, about six months earlier than the company had anticipated in the remediation plan it submitted to the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality last year.
Data from the injection wells are being collected and will be evaluated to determine the effectiveness of the oxidation treatment, Ellis said.
The next oxidation injection is set for next month, with two more in the summer and fall, he said.
The oxidation injections are being limited to Whirlpool property. The chemical under the neighborhood is to be eliminated by natural decomposition. Whirlpool officials say the treatment of the chemical on company property will hasten the decomposition of the portion of the plume under the neighborhood.
Whirlpool and the Department of Environmental Quality continue to say that the trichloroethylene under the ground is not a danger to the residents because there is no pathway for the chemical to come in contact with residents either by contaminated water or by vapors rising from the ground, Noel said.
Noel said Whirlpool is talking with two companies that have shown interest in buying the 152-acre Whirlpool property. He said in a memorandum to city directors that he hoped the sale would be finalized soon and expected the property would be used for a combination of green space, industrial, commercial and retail.
He said he did not believe that the contaminated groundwater would hamper the sale of the property.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 04/09/2014