HOUMA, La. (AP) — The site that once housed Terrebonne's largest employer has been added to the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund National Priorities List.
The EPA announced its intent to add the old Delta Shipyard site to the list earlier this summer.
Superfund cleans up the most complex, uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites.
In the '70s and early '80s, earthen pits on the 165-acre site in Houma were used to store oily waste and oilfield drilling mud. Brenda Cook, who evaluated the site for the EPA, tells The Courier the pits may contain some 30,000 cubic yards of hazardous material but do not represent the extent of the contamination.
Concentrations of potentially dangerous contaminants, such as benzene, barium, arsenic, lead and chromium, were also detected in a ditch that runs alongside the pits. That ditch drains into the canal where investigators found contamination had spread into local wetlands.
The pits were a component of the yard's gas-freeing process. Before any work was done on a vessel, a marine chemist had to certify it was free of explosive vapors. So the barges and boats went through a washing process. Any residual oil was separated and sold, and the remaining oily waste dumped into a series of open pits.
With the site now added to the list, the EPA will conduct a further study to determine the complete extent of the contamination and characterize where the waste has gone in order to build a cleanup plan, Cook said in July.
"Sometimes we evacuate and remove the waste on site and sometimes we stabilize it," Cook said. "It is premature to say what it will be here, but there are myriad different ways to deal with pits."
At the same time, investigators will seek to find a responsible party that would pay for the cleanup. It's unclear how that will go as Delta Service Industries, the shipyard's parent company, went bankrupt during the '80s oilfield bust. It's former owner, Lynn Dean, died in 2006.
