TerraTherm to Clean Up Superfund Chemical Contamination

Environmental remediation company TerraTherm has been awarded a $6.9 million contract to clean up chemical contamination at the Spectron Superfund site.

The site is located about 6 miles north of the Town of Elkton, Cecil County, Maryland.

TerraTherm will use its patented form of thermal conductive heating to heat soil and shallow groundwater at the site to approximately 100 degrees Celsius, the boiling point of water, enabling chemicals to be removed from the subsurface as vapor prior to final treatment/destruction using a thermal oxidizer. The company expects the process to remove 99 percent of the contamination present in the subsurface.

From the mid-1800s through 1946, the property was occupied by a water-powered paper mill. From 1962 to 1988 the site was used as a recycling and treatment facility for wastes generated by the electronic, pharmaceutical, paint, lacquer, coatings and chemical industries.

Facility management practices resulted in impacts to soil and groundwater. The EPA added the site to the National Priorities List in 1994.

A group of companies whose waste was recycled at the site in the ’60s to the mid-’80s are undertaking investigation and remediation activities. The work is being conducted pursuant to an agreement with the EPA and the Maryland Department of the Environment.

More than $14 billion will be spent in 2015 to remove metals, volatile organic compounds and other contaminants from groundwater, largely because of the presence of contaminants at Superfund, EPA Resource and Recovery Act and Department of Defense sites, according to a report published last October by the McIlvaine Company.