EPA to Conduct Additional Testing of West Lake Landfill

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it will conduct additional testing at the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, Mo., before a much-anticipated remedy is applied to the site.

The EPA said its design phase for planning how to excavate most of the site’s radioactivity is expected to take longer than the initial 18-month plan, according to St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Last fall, the owners of the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton sued Mallinckrodt LLC to help pay costs of the EPA’s cleanup. EPA ordered a $205 million cleanup to remove radioactive waste from the site.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch has more information:

Before a long-awaited remedy is applied to West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, the Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday that additional testing will be done at the radioactive Superfund site — satisfying at least one long-time wish of concerned local citizens.

But the EPA announcement also indicated that the “design phase” for planning how to excavate the bulk of the site’s radioactivity is now expected to take longer than the roughly 18-month window originally intended for it. Starting now, that planning process is projected to take two-and-a-half to three years, regional EPA officials say.

Activists tracking issues at the site interpreted the news as both promising and potentially troubling.

Read the full article here.