Environmental Protection Agency officials recently provided county residents with an update on its efforts to test for lead contamination and to remediate that contamination in water and soil on residential property.
About 20 people attended an Oct. 24 open house at the Hillsboro Community Civic Center to learn about the EPA’s efforts in the county and to take advantage of free, on-site lead testing, EPA spokesman Kellen Ashford said.
In January, the EPA lowered its screening levels for lead contamination from 400 parts per million to 200 ppm, meaning a wider pool of property owners may now be eligible for remediation efforts.
For Jefferson County, remediation projects include hauling away contaminated soil and providing water filtration systems and bottled water for residents who have private wells contaminated by lead.
Steve Sturgess, a project manager with the EPA who works out of Lenexa, Kan., said the federal agency began sampling residences for high levels of lead in the county 20 years ago.
Jefferson County is part of the Old Lead Belt, spanning southwest Missouri and including St. Francois and Washington counties as well. Lead mining in the Old Lead Belt dates back more than 300 years ago, with the mining dating back more than 200 years in the Jefferson County area.
“The mining in Jefferson County was mostly in the southwestern part of the county, so that’s where the contamination is most prevalent,” Sturgess said. “It’s also the most rural part of the county to this day. So, what we have are a lot of rural landowners who have built up properties on land that was subject to mining or milling, or even smelter waste, going back to the early 1800s. “In many cases, a person could be on living on top of an old mine site and have no idea, no record of it, really.”
Since 2004, the EPA has sampled 6,952 residential properties in Jefferson County for lead, and 1,760 properties have been completely remediated. More than 450 are still eligible, meaning the sample collected had lead levels higher than 400 ppm and the properties are ready to be cleaned up, according to EPA documents.
“We do have a backlog of properties awaiting cleanup at some of our sites, as the small communities can only support a finite effort in terms of heavy equipment, traffic, operators, laborers and backfill sources,” Ashford said. “We recognize that this can be frustrating for some property owners who’ve waited patiently for their properties to be addressed. As a general guide, we prioritize cleanups by properties with known child exposure issues followed by properties with small children, then by maximum lead concentration, and then finally by age of sampling data.”
The EPA estimates that more than 87,000 properties in the county remain unsampled.
Sturgess said the EPA is still assessing how much additional testing is needed now that the screening level has dropped to 200 ppm.
“In terms of how much additional work, we just don’t know yet,” he said. “That’s something we’re working on right now to determine – what the full impact of that will be on the projects that we’re working on. We’ve got hundreds of properties that we still need to work on, based on the old number of 400 ppm, and now that we’re going down to 200 ppm, that’s obviously going to result in a greater number of properties we need to look at.”
The EPA has found that about 8 percent of the private wells in the county have lead levels over 400 ppm. For eligible residents, the agency will provide bottled water on a regular basis until a filtration system can be installed in the home.
To date, the EPA has sampled 1,774 water wells, with 139 found to be contaminated with heavy metals.
“A big issue I personally work on is helping people with contaminated wells,” Sturgess said. Most of the people in the southwestern part of the county don’t have any access to public drinking water. There’s no city water, there’s no rural water districts, so they have to rely on a private well.”
The old Doe Run lead smelter site in Herculaneum is separate from the EPA’s efforts to test and remediate properties in southwest Jefferson County. Doe Run’s lead smelter plant, which began operation in 1892 as the St. Joseph Lead Co., shut down in 2013 after reports of high elevated blood lead levels in children living near the smelter.
As part of the company’s settlement with the EPA and effort to clean up the area, Doe Run bought and demolished more than 160 homes and other structures in Herculaneum.
According to the EPA, lead poisoning can cause severe health effects in infants and young children, including slowed growth, hearing loss, short attention spans and damage to the nervous system. Parents with children younger than 7 years old should have their children tested for lead poisoning annually.
To arrange for a lead screening for a child, contact the Jefferson County Health Department at 636-797-3737. The department has facilities in Hillsboro, 405 Main Street, and in Arnold, 1818 Lonedell Road.
To arrange for free lead testing on residential property and/or a drinking water well, call 636-797-8446.