Two commercial properties in Seminole County have been declared EPA Superfund sites because they are contaminated with hazardous waste. The EPA’s Atlanta office says toxic industrial chemicals have made their way underground and threaten the Floridan Aquifer — the region’s primary source of drinking water — but currently pose no immediate health risk.
If any area residents do become injured or sickened by the hazardous waste, the property owners could be held liable in court under a premises liability or product liability theory.
The EPA and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection are working to identify the party responsible for one of the properties and attempting to get the other, General Dynamics Corp., to cooperate with cleanup requirements. In addition to being required to pay potentially millions of dollars for the cleanup, the property owners could face federal fines and other penalties.
Sanford Dry Cleaner and General Dynamics Property Near Longwood Contaminated
Central Florida now has nine Superfund Sites, out of 53 sites in the state. Beyond the newly designated sites in Sanford and Longwood, other Central Florida Superfund sites include one in Orlando, two in unincorporated Orange County, one in Volusia County, two in south Brevard County and one in south Lake County. Superfund sites are designated the nation’s most dangerously polluted property.
Between the 1940s and the early part of this decade, several dry-cleaning businesses operated at the Sanford site, which is on Palmetto Avenue several blocks south of Lake Monroe in a historic part of downtown. Sanford took ownership of part of the site through code-enforcement proceedings, and the other part belongs to Metro Orlando Affordable Housing.
The contamination on the site is from the cleaning solvents tetrachloroethylene, or PCE, and trichloroethylene, or TCE, both of which are known to cause cancer.
According to the Department of Environmental Protection, “The long period of operation and the multiple owners and operators make it difficult to identify a responsible party.”
The property near Longwood, which fronts U.S. Highways 17-92 between State Roads 434 and 419, was once used by General Dynamics Corp., which operated an industrial site there from the mid 60s to the early 80s. Other companies have also used the property. Solvents from an adjoining property have complicated the contamination on the property.
As with the Sanford property, the Longwood property is contaminated with TCE.
Tom Lubozynski, a state Department of Environmental Protection administrator for hazardous-waste cleanups in the Orlando region, said “[f]or General Dynamics Longwood, we turned that property over to EPA because the responsible party was not responsive to us.”
Further investigation needs to be completed before a final determination of responsibility and an estimate of the cleanup costs can be released. Any toxic exposure claims by individuals would be handled separately through product or premises liability lawsuits.
Source: Orlando Sentinel, “EPA flags 2 contaminated sites in Seminole County,” Kevin Spear, September 28, 2010