Batimore, Maryland - Baltimore’s Curtis Bay, once a radioactive thorium extraction site in the 1950s, is now a contaminated site. Curtis Bay is in line for a clean-up, and the cost is estimated at around $100 million.

W.R. Grace has agreed to pay 40% of the cost, and will contribute an estimated $41 million according to the terms of the settlement agreement. The government has agreed to cover the remaining 60% of the clean-up costs.

W.R. Grace had been employed by the federal government in 1956 and 1957, using the company’s Curtis Bay site to extract thorium from monazite ore. Radiological tests carried out in the 1980s indicate that several spots at the site have significant levels of radiation, but the danger to the public is minimal.

The clean-up work will be carried out over the next five years. However, the plan must first be approved by Delaware’s Bankruptcy Court, where the former mining company’s bankruptcy reorganization is being supervised. The hearing is scheduled for April 21.

Chanel Weaver, a spokesperson for the Baltimore district office, has said that the deal has been in negotiations with the US Army Corps of Engineers for two years. The deal has been approved by the US Department of Justice, Weave says, and the clean-up site is not dangerous, but access is restricted and the area has been fenced off.

W.R. Grace has been in bankruptcy since 2001. The chemical manufacturing company, along with 61 affiliated companies, filed for bankruptcy to protect it from several thousand asbestos-related lawsuits.

Along with thousands of former employees, and others who had been exposed to toxic substances as a result of the company’s activities, the EPA filed against W.R. Grace in 2003.

The EPA’s suit was a bid to recover the costs of clean-up at several mining locations where W.R. Grace had once operated.

The worst of these was in the town of Libby, Montana, where the company had once operated a vermiculite mine. That vermiculite mine was found to be contaminated with asbestos, but not until the asbestos-contaminated substance had found its way into millions of American homes as a form of insulation known under the commercial name of Zonolite. The mine was closed in 1990.

During the last decades, more than a thousand Libby residents have developed asbestos-related diseases as a result of working in or simply living near the contaminated mine. Asbestos had contaminated the town to an enormous extent, and the EPA’s cleaning efforts have been ongoing since 1999.

Last week, W.R. Grace agreed to contribute a total of $250 million to help clean up Libby. This constitutes the largest Superfund settlement in history, and resolves one of the few remaining clean-up claims that the company must deal with. W.R. Grace has so far negotiated clean-up payments for 32 sites.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Asbestos Exposure, Maryland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. Responses are currently closed, but you trackback from your own site.