Dennis Frederick is looking for a group of suspected killers.
The targets of his search lurk silently below the ground at the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon near an explosives plant.
Like a detective closing in on a fugitive, the manager for Utah's Ground Water Protection Section is trying to round up and contain cancer-causing chemicals from the Trojan plant.
It's not an easy case to crack.
What Frederick and his team of scientists want to find and isolate is the result of six decades of contamination.
Utah health officials say the Trojan plant — now entangled in federal suits that claim the plant dumped cancer-causing chemicals into water sources — is one of the top five hazardous waste cleanup sites in Utah.
And it may remain that way for decades to come.
"This is not cheap work," Frederick said.
 | Deseret News graphic Trojan explosivesRequires Adobe Acrobat. |
Millions of dollars have already been spent by the current and former owners of the plant. Frederick said they should expect to spend millions more.
The Deseret News has learned that state officials have identified 44 separate hazardous waste management sites on the grounds of the explosives plant, ranging from waste storage tanks to manufacturing and lab facilities. A dozen different toxic chemicals contaminate the soil.
"Our focus is to go and look at the facility as a whole to determine what contamination there is," said Brad Maulding, manager of the state's hazardous waste facilities section.
The Illinois Powder Co. built the explosives plant near Spanish Fork in 1940, with operations beginning the following year.
The plant operated under its management until 1957 when it was sold to the American Cyanamid Co.
Over the next 30 years, the plant would be owned by several East Coast companies, including Cytec Industries of New Jersey, Mallinckrodt Inc. of Missouri and Ensign-Bickford Co. of Connecticut, the current owner.
In the plant's history, a variety of explosive products have been manufactured, including dynamite and nitroglycerin.
As with most explosives plants, keeping things watered down means keeping your employees alive. Residues from explosives can easily ignite in dry conditions, said Hao Zhu, environmental engineer with the Utah Division of Solid and Hazardous Waste.
Zhu said plant workers for years regularly hosed down the floors of buildings. In later years, the runoff was collected and stored in retention ponds.
State scientists believe these ponds became the major source of groundwater contamination. A 1986 breach at one pond released hundreds of gallons of waste water into the ground.
Over time, many hazardous chemicals seeped into the aquifer, including a variety of nitrates and RDX, a suspected carcinogen that has been shown to cause cancer in some lab animals.
The contaminated water found its way into wells that were used by residents to water gardens, take showers and other culinary uses. The wells also supplied drinking water.
Six local families filed federal suits against Ensign-Bickford, Mallinckrodt and Cytec, convinced that the plant's contaminants are making area residents sick.
Although the families last month reached a secret settlement with Ensign-Bickford, three of the plaintiffs did not live to see the settlement. Three more are currently battling cancer.
The controversy over the groundwater contamination prompted state epidemiologists to determine if there was indeed a link between cancer cases in Mapleton and the plant.
In a study of cancer incidents between 1978 and 1995, the Utah Department of Health compared various types of cancer cases to statistics in Salt Lake County. They concluded that incidents of prostate, breast, colorectal, soft tissue, lung and chronic lymphocytic leukemia cancers had increased in Mapleton at a greater rate than in Salt Lake County.
But Dr. Wayne Ball, who helped write the study, said that although they noticed increases, the rates were not "statistically significant."
"There were increasing cases at a greater rate, but they weren't increasingly different statistically," Ball said.
The study drew the ire of local residents, who said they knew there were more cancer cases than reported in the study.
In addition, experts at the Utah Cancer Registry pointed out that some cancer cases may have not been included in the study due to the migration of residents.
Ball confirmed that some Mapleton residents moved to different cities before being diagnosed with cancer. When that information was sent to the cancer registry, the case was flagged with their new addresses.
Dr. Chuck Wiggins, director of the Utah Cancer Registry, said he was one of the first people to raise questions about the health department's study.
"We found that the state hadn't actually reviewed any of the data," he said. "In fact, there were literally dozens of cases that weren't in the report but should have been," while a few other cases should not have been in the report.
When Wiggins took over the registry at the University of Utah two years ago, the state's cancer data was rife with errors, he said. It's been a challenge to correct the figures.
Wiggins said there are literally tens of thousands of individual cancer cases that must be reviewed by hand, located on a map and entered into a modern computer system.
The new system is similar to software used by marketing companies, Wiggins said, and is used by a large number of cancer registries across the country. The effort is time-consuming.
"You have to go back and look at every single case, and we just don't have the resources to do that," Wiggins said.
Five years after the release of the last study, Ball said the Utah Department of Health cannot start a new cancer study of Mapleton until they receive the raw data from the registry.
And even after they receive the data, it will take another four months to process.
In the meantime, Frederick and his team want to make sure the contamination is stopped. Progress has been made over the past year.
Ensign-Bickford has been very cooperative on the issue since receiving a violation notice in August 1990, Frederick said. About two years ago, two specially designed water-filtering systems were installed to pull contaminants from the groundwater, which continues to be used for irrigation by residents.
Six wells that pump up to 1,000 gallons a minute feed into the charged carbon filters which cleanse the water to the point that it is drinkable, Frederick said. He acknowledges that few residents would trust its safety, however.
Ensign-Bickford has drilled more than a dozen monitoring wells to keep track of the contamination. State data show the chemical plume has not grown in the past few years and is considered contained for now — but that could easily change.
Officials with the state's Division of Solid and Hazardous Waste have the job of overseeing the cleanup of the plant grounds.
Maulding said state-employed scientists are working with Ensign-Bickford to get a clear picture of what kind of cleanup lies ahead. State officials say Ensign-Bickford has shown model behavior in the cleanup effort.
Fearing liability for the contamination, Ensign-Bickford teamed with Mallinckrodt and Cytec to help pay costs for cleanup and legal defense. But there's a kink in those plans.
Last June, Cytec pulled out of the agreement to pay 25 percent of costs, sparking a federal suit by Mallinckrodt and Ensign-Bickford. According to the suit, Cytec officials claimed the company, which has not owned the plant for 39 years, has paid more than "their fair share."
Cancer victims in Mapleton have filed a separate federal suit against Cytec, mainly because the company refused to participate in settlement talks.
Maulding said the legal battle has not delayed the cleanup plan or Ensign-Bickford's funding.
Both Frederick and Maulding estimate it could take up to 30 more years to bring the contamination within acceptable federal levels. But the feds are turning up the heat.
Maulding said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is requiring 90 percent of all hazardous waste sites across the nation to have groundwater contamination contained and immediate threats to employee safety solved by 2005.
The directive comes in reaction to numerous reports of foot-dragging by companies and state agencies alike in cleaning up contaminated sites.
Maulding said he is convinced that the Trojan site, which is considered a high priority site by the state, can meet the EPA directive this year. "We're kind of under the gun," he said.
E-mail: gfattah@desnews.com