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DEP finds prison site free of arsenic contamination
Monday, June 05, 2000 By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Investigators have found no unacceptable levels of arsenic on the Clearfield County land where a Texas company is fighting to build the only private prison in Pennsylvania.
The finding came three weeks after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency raised concerns about arsenic contamination and asked the state to investigate -- opening another problem for a project steeped in controversy.
Daniel Spadoni, spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection, said that DEP took 26 soil samples and found all within normal ranges and considered the matter a closed case.
"These are even a little bit better than results we initially had," said Thomas Jenkins, senior vice president with Cornell Corrections Inc., the Houston-based company planning to build a 1,000-inmate prison just west of Philipsburg.
Christopher Bungo, a local resident whose Citizens Advisory Committee on Private Prisons filed a federal lawsuit last year charging that prison planners skimped on environmental studies, said he had not seen the DEP report and couldn't comment.
Cornell plans to build the prison and, under contract to the federal Bureau of Prisons, house inmates from the federal system. When the plan was announced last year, supporters cheered it as economic tonic for hard-pressed Clearfield County.
But site preparation work stopped last year when Bungo's group sued. And state Attorney General Mike Fisher has promised to sue, charging that state law does not allow a private company to hold prisoners in the commonwealth.
The possibility that the prison tract was laden with arsenic -- a poison and carcinogen -- was raised in a Bureau of Prisons environmental assessment that said the arsenic may have been a leftover from sludge-dumping on the reclaimed strip mines, where the prison would be built. EPA, in turn, took the matter to DEP.
Regulators' key to judging arsenic levels is based on how much arsenic naturally occurs in nearby soil.
DEP's samples showed arsenic ranging from 5 to 18.6 parts per million in some soil at the prison site and up to three miles away. The U.S. Geologic Survey said averages for the eastern United States range from 0.1 to 73 parts per million.
Bungo charged yesterday that Cornell's contractors may already have stripped away heavily contaminated soil when they did three weeks of site work before the project was stopped last year. But Todd Eads, Cornell construction manager, said last week that no dirt was removed from the site.
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