Neighbors of the Belmont, Mich., property are worried about the safety of their wells after learning that tannery waste from Wolverine World Wide is buried four feet under the golf course’s range sand and topsoil. This summer, another nearby Wolverine tannery sludge dump created a plume of hazardous chemicals discovered at extremely high levels in wells.
Neighbors of Boulder Creek Golf Club in Belmont, Mich., say they didn’t know until recently they were living near a toxic waste dump, Michigan Live reported.
By the shed where golfers fill buckets of yellow balls is a small stone marker partially overgrown by grass, which instructs anyone digging in the area to contact the property owner first and see a Kent County deed restriction file. The marker says nothing about the 12 acres of Wolverine World Wide tannery waste buried four feet under range sand and topsoil, Live reported.
That waste was no secret to state and county health officials in the 1970s, when the Michigan Department of Natural Resources clamped down on hazardous waste dumping at the former Northeast Gravel pit. The site was redeveloped in the late 1990s into the Boulder Creek golf course and adjoining apartments, homes and condos, Live reported.
Now, neighbors are worried about their water wells, which they’d like tested for the same toxic chemicals leaching through the groundwater elsewhere in Plainfield Township. Not far away, another old Wolverine tannery sludge dump has created a plume of hazardous chemicals discovered at extremely high levels in Belmont wells this summer, Live reported.
Those chemicals, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances called PFAS, (also called perfluorinated chemicals, or PFCs), are linked to cancer, thyroid problems and other illnesses. They were in Scotchgard, which Wolverine used in the shoe-making process, Live reported.
The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality is still investigating how far the Belmont PFAS plume goes amid an expanding investigation into old Wolverine dump sites that’s prompted the Kent County Health Department to launch a cancer study. The list keeps growing, but some worry that a site where Wolverine dumped tannery sludge for years is being lost in the shuffle, Live reported.
“I’m reading all of the articles in the news and not hearing anything about testing around the Boulder Creek Golf Course,” said Deb Brase, who bought her home about 12 years ago. “I believe that we’re within a range of proximity to that site that we definitely deserve to have our wells tested.”
Brase and neighbors aren’t the only residents near the course on well water. Just east of the golf course is an 89-acre, 55-and-older mobile home community called Leisure Village, which also sources its water from five wells. The tannery waste is a quarter mile from the nearest village lots, Live reported.
Wolverine is not doing any well testing around the golf course, and is waiting on direction from the DEQ on where to expand testing, according to Amanda Passage at Lambert Edwards & Associates, a public relations firm that handles external communications for the shoe company, Live reported.
DEQ managers say they aren’t worried about Leisure Village or the homes along Chauncey Drive because modeling in a 1995 engineering report concluded groundwater flows south to the Grand River and does not veer southeast toward those private wells. Nonetheless, two irrigation wells that are part of new home construction at Boulder Creek are being tested, Live reported.
David O’Donnell, West Michigan field operations manager for the DEQ remediation division, said that he’s 100 percent certain Leisure Village and Chauncey Drive wells, Live reported.
Despite DEQ assurances, independent scientists are concerned. “Those wells should be checked,” said Richard Rediske, an environmental chemist at Grand Valley State University’s Annis Water Resources Institute who helped alert DEQ last year that Wolverine used Scotchgard and waste sites might be a problem. “Any house on the periphery of the golf course should be checked.”
According to court documents from past litigation involving the landfill, Wolverine dumped tannery waste at Northeast Gravel for nearly a decade. The company made daily trips to the site between 1970 and 1979, when the DNR stepped in and halted the dumping over contamination problems. The Northeast Gravel landfill was the second large dumping ground for Wolverine’s tannery waste after the company stopped taking sludge to House Street, according to state documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Live reported.
While in operation, the landfill area accepted primarily general refuse, tannery waste, electroplating waste from the former Keeler Brass company and some detergent waste from Amway Corp., according to state records. The waste was dumped into unlined pits, Live reported.
The primary tannery contaminant of concern at the time was trivalent chromium, which Wolverine used large quantities of in Rockford to chemically alter leather hides into material that wouldn’t decompose. According to a 1991 DNR letter to then-Wolverine CEO Tom Gleason, a 1986 investigation by DNR and EPA found chromium, chloromethane and 1,1-Dichloroethane in groundwater at Northeast Gravel. The 1995 report also lists arsenic and lead as tannery waste contaminants, Live reported.
Wolverine started using PFAS in 1958, but the compounds didn’t generate EPA scrutiny until the late 1990s. Scotchgard was reformulated in the early 2000s after the EPA determined the key chemical ingredient, perfluoroctanesulfonic acid, or PFOS, was toxic to humans, bio-accumulates in wildlife and persists in the environment, Live reported.
A different team at DEQ, the Superfund section, plans to drill monitoring wells on the north side of the river to determine whether waste from under the golf course is polluting the township wells, which extended deeper than the bottom of the Grand River bed. The DEQ has about $135,000 to conduct that work, said DEQ project manager Judith Alfano. Investigators hope to tease out whether the Versluis wellfield is being polluted by PFAS from Northeast Gravel, the State Disposal Landfill to the south along the East Beltline, or both. Both were known places where Wolverine dumped tannery sludge, Live reported.
In contrast to chromium, PFAS compounds are highly soluble in water. Their persistence and mobility underground can cause large plumes. Rod Mosier, a retired DNR site enforcement supervisor who worked on the Northeast Gravel case in the late 1970s and early 80s, said it doesn’t take expert credentials to know that a sand cap over toxic waste is likely to exacerbate groundwater contamination, Live reported.
State records show Mosier argued for a clay cap decades ago. “If you have an impermeable seal like clay, that will help prevent rainwater from getting into the waste and creating seepage,” he said. “Sand is certainly not going to do the job, no matter how much you put on there. That’s just logic.”
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