A United States Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site in Palmerton is closing in on the last steps of its remediation, but it doesn’t have support from borough authorities.

The over 30-year project is set to conduct its final phase, a remedial investigation that would require drilling near wells at the former New Jersey Zinc East Plant. The drilling, combined with soil collection and surface water testing, will assess how deep — if at all — heavy metal contamination has seeped into the ground.

But drilling at the plant could contaminate public water sources close by, the Palmerton Municipal Authority contended at its meeting earlier this month. Borough council could draw a similar conclusion, as members determined in September that they’d wait for the municipal authority’s ruling before making their own.

Still, even if the borough and municipal authority voice opposition, the EPA doesn’t need their permission to go ahead with the drilling.

“They’re never going away here,” council President Terry Costenbader said at a meeting in late September.

Back in the 1980s, EPA identified Palmerton and surrounding areas as a Superfund site. The borough had been contaminated by heavy metals, the national authority ruled, raising health concerns.

The same company that helped build the town — New Jersey Zinc — had also dumped 33 million tons of slag (that is, a stonelike waste left after a metal is separated from its raw ore) in Palmerton over a near 70-year period.

The company’s sweltering procedures released “huge quantities” of heavy metals in the valley, resulting in a bare side of Blue Mountain. And runoff flushed contaminants into Aquashicola Creek and the Lehigh River.

Site history

The first of four restorative phases kicked off with a consent decree between EPA and Zinc Corporation of America, certifying that potentially responsible parties — which, in the case of this site, EPA identified as CBS Corporation — revegetate more than 3,000 acres of Blue Mountain. CBS also created 70 acres of “resource islands” — fenced-in properties where trees and seedlings are grown as potential sources, for the mountain.

The EPA website pinpoints 2013 as the first phase’s end year.

The next stage, which tackled a 2.5-mile debris pile known as the Cinder Bank, was completed in 2002. It included the installation of a system that redirects surface water away from the bank, the treatment of contaminated water and the revegetation of part of the Cinder Bank.

The third phase, which wrapped in 2005, consisted of soil cleanup for residential properties whose grounds tested positive for elevated levels of lead.

In 2009, five companies — including CBS — also settled with the state for their part in polluting Palmerton. They handed over more than $21 million in cash and property to the game commission and the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration Trust Fund, among others, according to the United States Department of Justice.

Last phase

Now in the fourth and final phase of remediation, CBS plans to extract groundwater data from wells at the former New Jersey Zinc plant, the current home of American Zinc Recycling, Terri White, chief of the EPA’s regional communications office, wrote via email to the Times News.

White wrote that the groundwater monitoring wells CBS plans to drill will be more than 3,000 feet away from any owned by Palmerton Municipal Authority. For bedrock wells, the company will also install an outer casing to prevent contamination.

If the municipal authority well were to be contaminated, and CBS failed to address the issue, White noted, EPA has the authority to conduct an emergency cleanup.

But William Smelas, a Palmerton Municipal Authority member, said Oct. 3 that he wasn’t interested in “having them poke more holes in to rewrite history.” He added that the EPA’s “so-called guarantee” to respond to possible contamination “doesn’t mean anything.”