$75-Million Toxic Waste Suit Settlement : Westinghouse Agrees to Cleanup

In what is apparently the biggest toxic waste case of its kind, Westinghouse Electric Corp. agreed Monday to a $75-million cleanup of six Indiana waste dumps--including four sites on the federal Superfund list--that are laced with cancer-causing PCBs.

The unusual settlement requires Westinghouse to build a $25-million incinerator that will burn not only 650,000 cubic yards of dirt contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls but also the garbage generated by the 100,000 residents of metropolitan Bloomington, Ind.

Construction of the incinerator will take about five years. Burning of the soil could require another 11 to 14 years and cost up to $50 million, officials at the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency said.

Westinghouse also will repay the federal government $1 million for cleanup and enforcement costs already incurred by the EPA and the Justice Department.

The settlement, outlined in a consent decree filed in U.S. District Court in Indianapolis, is roughly twice as costly as any previous toxic waste cleanup agreement, said F. Henry Habicht, assistant attorney general for land and natural resources.

In a statement, Westinghouse officials called that estimate of cleanup costs too high, saying the firm will recover some expenses from its garbage-burning operations. Bloomington utilities official John Langley praised Westinghouse for its willingness, “without going to court, to take care of our major environmental problem.”

The cleanup plan covers six Bloomington-area dumps that were strewn from 1958 to 1972 with PCB-laden wastes from an old Westinghouse capacitor factory. The PCB content of soil from some of the dumps ranges as high as 38%, analyses show, and small quantities of the chemical have also leached into ground water.

PCBs have been linked to cancer, immune system disorders, skin diseases and a wide range of nervous system and other disorders. Federal studies concluded that Bloomington residents run a slightly higher than average risk of harboring elevated levels of PCBs, but no deaths have been linked to contamination from the dumps.

All six of the PCB sites are in south-central Indiana, in or near Bloomington. Four have been on the federal Superfund list of the nation’s worst toxic waste dumps for as long as 3 1/2 years. Westinghouse also has agreed to remove PCB-laden sediment from five streams near the dumps.

The contaminated soils will be burned in a high-temperature incinerator designed to destroy 99.9999% of PCB wastes and other burnable toxic chemicals. Only three such incinerators exist now, Habicht said, and none is also equipped to burn municipal garbage.

Proposals to build other PCB incinerators in locations ranging from Oregon to South Carolina have met with fierce resistance, in part because cities and towns fear becoming magnets for an increasingly lucrative but risky toxic waste disposal business.

Langley said that Bloomington officials have an “agreement spelled out in black and white” that will restrict Westinghouse to burning only wastes from the Bloomington dumps.

The EPA and the Justice Department have reached more than 200 settlements, totaling $461 million in cleanup expenses, in other toxic waste cases.