Contaminated soil from New York to be incinerated at Clean Harbors

Half of a shipment of contaminated soil is on its way to Kimball.

Approximately 1,000 tons total is being shipped from Niagara Falls, N.Y. to Clean Harbors in Kimball for incineration. Half the soil, from the Love Canal clean-up, will be incinerated at the local Clean Harbors Environmental Services site and the other half will be shipped to a similar incinerator in Utah.

“This is like digging up an old landfill. We are set up for it and it is no more or less hazardous than the stuff we get now,” said Jared Hunsaker, facility general manager at Clean Harbors in Kimball. “This all just seems to be political.”

Protests in Canada kept the soil, which was originally scheduled to be incinerated at the Clean Harbors site in Sarnia, Ontario, from crossing the northern border.

According to Hunsaker, the highly contaminated waste from the Love Canal disaster was taken care of long ago, and what is left is low-level contamination in the surrounding soil that the local facility is able to accommodate.

“It’s probably less hazardous than all the oilfield stuff we have around us all the time,” Hunsaker said. “We have all the permits in place. The NDEQ (Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality) has even called, I think just because it has the Love Canal name attached and is a high visibility project.”

According to a 1979 article in the EPA Journal, the future Niagara Falls neighborhood named Love Canal began as a municipal and industrial chemical dumpsite in the 1920s. In 1953, the Hooker Chemical Company, which then owned the property, sold it to the city for $1. Homes and schools were then built at the site. The Niagara Falls Gazette first uncovered problems with the area in 1976. It was later found that Hooker Chemical Company buried 22,000 tons of toxic waste there.