UE OFFICIALS: CAPE PLANT SITE NOT A THREAT

Union Electric officials say they won't remove hazardous waste that might lay beneath the site of the old Cape Girardeau Water Works' coal gasification plant, because the waste poses no environmental risk.

The Cape Girardeau gasification plant once manufactured methane and hydrogen gas from coal that was used to illuminate street lights and used in the home before natural gas was available.

Through a series of mergers and acquisitions of smaller municipal and private utilities companies, Union Electric acquired the sites of 11 former coal-to-gas plants, including those in Columbia, Jefferson City and Cape Girardeau.

The Cape Girardeau site was acquired through UE's merger with Missouri Utilities Company, which acquired the site from the Electric Light and Gas Company, the parent company of Cape Girardeau Water Works.

Union Electric plans to spend about $2 million to clean up a portion of the estimated 20,000 cubic yards of coal tar located at the site of the Columbia coal gasification plant. UE also plans to clean up 11 other sites in its service area.

But John Pozzo, supervising engineer with Union Electric's Environmental Safety office, says the Cape Girardeau site is not among them.

"When we learned of the possible existence of coal tars under the gas plant at Cape Girardeau, we sent people down to survey the site," Pozzo said. "We found the earthen river levee built by the Corps of Engineers in 1957 now covers much of what was the site of the old coal gas plant."

Pozzo said there were no visible signs of any coal tar contamination in the surface soil. He said, "If contamination is present, it is underground, and under the compacted clay base of the levee where it poses no threat to anyone."

Pozzo said studies have shown that coal tars left undisturbed do not present any immediate health concerns because they are in the subsurface soil - not where people would come into contact with them during the course of normal activities.

Allen Hatheway, a University of Missouri-Rolla professor of geological engineering, said because most of the coal tars are usually underground, most of the coal gas manufacturing plant sites are harmless if left undisturbed. "The danger comes when the hazardous waste is exhumed," Hatheway said. "The toxins then can turn to gas, blow away in dust or get carried off by rainwater."

Pozzo said remedial action to remove soil contaminated with coal tar in Columbia, Jefferson City, Keokuk, Iowa, and other sites, is necessary because of excavation that will occur due to new construction.

"There is very little likelihood any excavation will occur at the Cape Girardeau site because it is buried under the earthen river levee," he added.

Pozzo said any underground contamination at the Cape Girardeau site should not affect drinking water supplies because the site is not near drinking water sources.

The city obtains its drinking water Cape Rock water treatment plant, about one-half mile upstream from the gas plant site. The Cape Rock plant takes water from the Mississippi River.

In addition, the water system has two very deep wells, both three miles north and east of the site. These wells are much deeper than the site of the contaminated soil at the gas plant.

Also, the Ramsey Branch (South Sprigg Street) Water Well and Treatment Plant is four miles south of the gas plant site, and draws its water from wells far removed from possible contamination, Pozzo said.

According to Union Electric records and information from the Southeast Missourian archives, the manufactured (coal) gas plant was built in 1907 and began operation in 1908.

The plant produced gas from coal for lighting, cooking and heating. When it first was built, the plant used the coal carbonization (heating) process to produce gas, but it was later converted to the carbureted water gas process around 1928.

The plant remained in operation for around 40 years, and was finally retired in 1948, when natural gas became available from the Texas Eastern Transmission Corporation's pipeline terminal on the Mississippi River, at Gray's Point, east of Scott City.

The plant was next to the old North Main Street power plant, south of Sloan's Creek in the Red Star area of Cape Girardeau.

Immediately south of the coal gasification plant were two large tanks where the manufactured gas was stored. The concrete slab at the bottom of one of the holding tanks is all that remains of the gasification plant.

One of the byproducts of the manufacture of coal gas is coal tar, which now is considered hazardous waste because it contains the carcinogens benzene, benzopryene and toluene, plus other harmful substances.

In many coal gasification plants, coal tar often seeped from the gas generators and pipes, and oozed between loosely fitting bricks in the floor of the gas house and through the tamped-earth bottom of the large gas holding tanks.