Cleaning Up the Aquifer: A Chore for the Ages

Written by Jim Kovarik and Sarah Houston, Protect Our Aquifer

Victories for the victors are short and sweet. The victory of Memphis and Shelby County over the multi-billion dollar Byhalia Pipeline was a triumph of common sense. The threat of an oil spill was an accident waiting to happen. All of us who live in this part of the world know that our drinking water is not worth the risk.

The community was galvanized by the fight – but this was a potential threat to our water supply. What about the existing pollution? Shelby County is littered with a toxic history and many accidents that have already happened. 

Locations of various known and potential contamination in Shelby County, TN. Credit: University of Memphis - CAESER

For over two hundred years, we have piled our wastes, excesses and unknowns on our soil in Shelby County, with little regard for natural laws like gravity and hydrology. Left to rot, the ravages of waste move through our soil and streams, seeping downwards—through the layers of sand beneath our feet into the groundwater. We only pay attention to a small portion of these mistakes. 

The Numbers Aren’t Pretty

The County is pock-marked with problem sites: 245 Superfund sites (4 active/high priority, 43 active/low priority, 198 archived), 165 (known) Polluters, 16 Brownfields, and 2,217 Tanks or Spills. Remediation of this pollution is conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC), various science consulting firms – or no one at all. Most Superfund sites are massive mistakes entailing years of work. Ongoing remediation projects for the last 30 years include removing chemicals in soil and water below the Carrier Plant in Collierville and the Defense Depot off Airways Blvd.

All these problems seep and slouch toward the Memphis Sand Aquifer. We cannot ignore the accidents, ignorance, or arrogance of our messy history. With the lessons of the Byhalia Pipeline fresh in our giddy heads, we must attend to pollutants and plumes that infect our soil and waters. In some cases, cleaning may be impossible or impossibly expensive. At the very least, we should know where harm lurks and which way it’s moving. 

Dry Cleaning Chemical Time Bombs

Here’s one small example in Shelby County where pollutants travel down and about, threatening our clean drinking water. The former Custom Cleaners at 3517 Southern Avenue is one of these active Superfund sites. Sitting behind the McDonald’s on Highland and across the train tracks from the University of Memphis, a local dry cleaner company used the dense liquid solvent Tetrachloroethene or “PCE,” for cleaning clothes. PCE is also remarkable for degreasing metals and used widely in our region. It can irritate the lungs, damage your liver, and even cause neurological problems. It is a well-known carcinogen. 

Drone image above the Former Custom Cleaners site at Southern Ave & Highland after the building was demolished.

Custom Cleaners operated from the 1940s through the 1990s, but the toxic soil remained. The new owner of the building, plagued by odd smells and regular headaches, convinced officials that something was wrong. By 2014, tests revealed toxic levels of PCE in the air, soil and groundwater. 

The EPA, with the aid of TDEC and numerous consulting firms in both geology and engineering, conducts the heavy lifting of remediation at this site. Here’s the sequence: tear down the building, remove the slab, remove 20 feet of soil (1,000 cubic yards) and replace it with clean dirt. Install monitoring wells on and off site, ask Congress for funding ($2.5 million), and wait—to actually remove PCE from the groundwater.

After taking soil and water samples at various depths, the concentrations of the contamination are modeled. Credit: EPA

All of this does not solve the sad and scary facts of this mistake on our drinking water. One of the monitoring wells revealed PCE in the shallow aquifer at 130’ down—and there’s a breach below. That’s a natural gap in the clay layer that separates the upper from lower aquifer – our Memphis Sand Aquifer. What’s even more concerning, this plume of PCE is less than a mile away from a pumping and treatment station that supplies drinking water to the surrounding East Memphis neighborhoods.

More study is necessary, but this is what Ken Mallary, EPA official from Atlanta, told a crowd in February 2018: “With the level of PCE in the top of groundwater just above the Memphis Sand (130’ deep), there’s a very strong likelihood the Memphis Sand has been impacted with PCE. We need to see if it has moved and how far.” At that point, there was a plan to dig 4 or 5 wells to 250 to 300 feet, directly into the deep aquifer. “With no confining layer, nothing is stopping that migration.”

Pipes now protrude from the ground to bring up traces of the chemical, expose it to air, and render it harmless. At the same time, the remediators chase a plume of PCE below ground as it seeps northeast. The toxic, legacy pollution of this small site is being pulled by the wells of the Sheahan Well Pumping Station, less than a mile away. Here it is in danger of being dragged into our drinking water supply.

EPA's diagram of the site showing the contamination immediately under the soil and where it has sunk all the way to the groundwater. Credit: EPA

This one example bodes ill for the aquifer as the polluted groundwater seeps closer each day towards our drinking water wells. It will take years of diligent work and effort, and access to a budget, to keep the PCE corralled and eventually removed. 

Cleaning Up the Aquifer

Contamination remediation is an ongoing necessity for Shelby County. We can avoid it—turning away from an onerous task—or grasp it as an opportunity. This starts with access to the information from our various utilities, state agencies, and leading scientists in order to bridge the gap that exists between them. 

Healing the land and keeping our artesian water its natural high quality are tasks for every generation. With over 50 years of waste disposal laws and EPA’s existence, the task at hand is about the pre-EPA era contamination. This legacy pollution has been slowly creeping deeper and deeper, tainting our pristine aquifer. 

Here and now it’s about turning land we avoid into land we reclaim and reuse. Here and now it’s about keeping our eye on these moving mistakes. We have to clean up the messes made in the past – our natural resources need protection, attention, and care. 

The flowing artesian wells and pristine aquifer water are remarks of the past – but they can once again become our future. They won’t return to that state on their own.  Building coalitions across numerous groups can better position Shelby County to secure federal funding for these extensive clean-up projects. Utilities can alter their pumping operations to work with the hydrology and slow the movement of contamination. Neighborhoods can continue to galvanize and take ownership of their land water resource. And we must all pay special attention to the communities that have been overburdened with pollution for decades. 

The Memphis Sand Aquifer and generations to come are relying on us.

Written by Jim Kovarik and Sarah Houston, Protect Our Aquifer

POA executive director Sarah Houston scouting out the Former Custom Cleaners Superfund Site in East Memphis where numerous groundwater monitoring wells are drilled to determine the depth of contamination.