<\/p>\n
Contractors drill wells for groundwater extraction and the treatment system at the Valmont TCE Superfund site in Luzerne County, PA, in 2025. (Courtesy of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)<\/p>\n
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began building a $39 million thermal treatment system to clean contaminated groundwater at the Valmont TCE Superfund Site in Luzerne County, PA, on July 15.<\/p>\n
The site is a former upholstery manufacturing plant. Chromotex Inc. leased the property from 1978 to 2001 and applied fluorocarbon stain repellants to fabrics. These repellants contained trichloroethene, or TCE. TCE is a nonflammable, colorless liquid that\u2019s used as a solvent to remove grease from metal or as an ingredient in adhesives and spot removers.<\/p>\n
Groundwater contaminated with TCE was discovered around the Luzerne County site in October 1987 after samples were taken from private wells. Historical spills at the site have contaminated water 80 feet below the facility.<\/p>\n
The EPA added the facility to the superfund program\u2019s National Priorities List in 2001. The agency created a remedy plan in 2011, which restricted the use of groundwater, switched impacted residents to a public water supply and used chemical oxidants to treat groundwater.<\/p>\n
The EPA changed tactics in 2021 after three rounds of chemical oxidant treatments proved ineffective. The revised plan extracts groundwater and treats it for TCE and other toxic contaminants. The new thermal treatment system uses underground heating rods to vaporize the contaminants, and that gas reaches the surface through pipes.<\/p>\n
The next five-year review of the remediation plan is due this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Contractors drill wells for groundwater extraction and the treatment system at the Valmont TCE Superfund site in Luzerne…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263426,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29,111333],"class_list":["post-263425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news","tag-toxics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263425\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}