Arlene Lautner still remembers the day when Norris Elementary Principal Merle Bredehoeft talked about problems with the drinking water at the school.

AN EXCAVATOR with shears was used Thursday afternoon to knock down the former Grand Traverse Overall building.“He said, ‘Arlene, when you take a glass and get it out of the faucet, it looks like beer,’” Lautner recalled Bredehoeft saying. “Our kids were drinking that water.”

That was in the mid-1970s and Bredehoeft has since died, but the problems with groundwater contamination at the adjacent site, where the Grand Traverse Overall (GTO) firm was formerly located, still linger 30 years later.

Eleven contractors, one from as far away as Kentucky, have spent the past week razing the building that served as the hub of the laundry/drycleaning business operated from the early 1950s through 1987.

“As of noon Monday, the building was down and the materials shipped off site,” said Michelle Jasper, on-scene coordinator of the project for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Region 5. The waste from the Superfund site was transported to Glen’s Landfill in Kasson Township for disposal. “The majority of the crews are gone. We’re buttoning up the site and will be holding some scheduling meetings,” she said.

Likely on the top of the agenda will be the timeframe to drill through the cement slab floor where the old structure stood. A small steel rod will be used to bore through the cement to sample soil as much as 50 feet below grade, which the agency has been “unable to characterize,” Jasper said.

An estimated six to eight weeks will be needed to collect samples and compile data that will be used to determine the extent of soil removal needed at the site, where a dry well, discharge pipe and several lagoons discharged wastewater from the laundering and dry-cleaning operations into the ground. That was prior to 1977, when the facility began discharging wastewater to the sanitary sewer system.

“Nobody paid much attention (to disposal practices),” said Lautner, whose well was one of 10 found to be contaminated with volatile organic compounds typically associated with dry-cleaning operations. “The house next door, across the road, the church, the (former) town hall and the school all had to drill new, deeper wells. Contamination was unheard of … not here. I used to think we had the best darn drinking water in the county.”

Lautner said the discovery of groundwater contamination along the Cherry Bend corridor was a key factor in the township’s decision to request Traverse City to extend sewer service to the township.

“We knew we had a problem — it was just common sense,” the former township clerk said.
Looking back, the woman who has lived for nearly 60 years along Cedar Creek across from the school and the laundry said it was the wastewater lagoons between the building and creek that “bothered” her the most.

“The lagoons were along the school fence. My kids would come home and tell me about someone who had to go over the fence to retrieve a ball out of the lagoon,” Lautner said. “When I think of it now, it kind of makes me sick.”

The cleanup also included pumping materials from sumps and trenches within the building in which water and sludge remained.

MICHELLE JASTER, the EPA on-scene coordinator at
the Superfund site in Greilickville, is shown on a cement
slab at the now-empty parcel that housed the former
Grand Traverse Overall building until last week.

A standard 6-foot chain-link fence will remain in place during excavation and soil removal. The soil will be collected in piles, covered and then transported to a hazardous waste disposal site in the Detroit area at costs estimated to run $1.5 to $2 million.

Completion of the cleanup is slated for this spring. However, soil vapor extraction equipment, put in place at Norris and maintained by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, will remain in place through July.

The next step in the process — remediation — will likely include additional cleanup with groundwater extraction equipment that will treat the groundwater and return it to the aquifer. However, the extent of activities at the site will be dictated by a “priority panel” that will meet at EPA headquarters in Washington D.C., this March to determine funding.

“(Funding) will depend upon what other projects are in the queue,” said Linda Martin, EPA remediation manager for Region 5 who will issue a recommendation based on agency findings and public input received before the comment period expired Monday. “Most everything has been getting funded.”

The EPA held a November public hearing on proposed remediation activities in Elmwood Township at which it confirmed for the first time that contaminants from the site had been detected in West Grand Traverse Bay. Martin said the chemicals were detected in “very low levels” and material found was a “breakdown” product that shows the chemical to be deteriorating naturally. She termed it a “good thing.”

Meanwhile, Lautner is hoping for more good things to happen across the creek — not only for the GTO plant, but Norris School, which is slated to close at the end of the current school year.

“Isn’t it too bad it took so long?” she said of the cleanup process.