ALLIANCE, Ohio—Cleanup is underway at a former Crest Rubber Co. facility after an Environmental Protection Agency notice of hazardous waste violations in 2016.
The U.S. EPA is removing 55-gallon drums and smaller containers full of possibly toxic or ignitable materials from the facility in Alliance, Ohio, according to EPA documents.
Some of those containers showed labels for methyl ethyl ketone, acetone, Dicup 40C and VOL-Cup 40 KE, according to the original notice of violation by Ohio EPA dated Oct. 27, 2016. The department passed the site on to the federal EPA, which currently has authority over the cleanup effort.
Crest Rubber went into receivership in 2016 after its former owner, David Clark, died. Clark also owned C.F. Capital Investments, which owned the Alliance site. Both Crest Rubber, headquartered in Newton Falls, Ohio, and C.F. Capital are currently under the control of a receiver appointed by Huntington National Bank.
The 2.5-acre Alliance site was one of seven facilities within Crest Rubber when it went into receivership, and was abandoned as burdensome to the estate, according to a letter to Ohio EPA from Colin Skinner, lawyer to Steven Clark, David's son, who is not associated with the company.
The effort is in the waste identification phase, according to Jeff Kimble, EPA on-scene coordinator. The Alliance site consists of a warehouse building and a process building, which is structurally compromised.
"We've been focusing on shoring up that roof to make it safe for our workers to remove the waste underneath where the roof has already started collapsing," Kimble said.
EPA workers already have removed and disposed of about 300 cubic yards of environmental contaminants such as pigments, dyes and additives, to make room to physically access the more hazardous materials, Kimble said. The team is moving the drums and containers to the warehouse to sample and categorize the materials before removal.
"It's going to be a pretty big undertaking, just because several of the areas in both buildings, where there are drums, they're stacked three and four pallets high in some cases," Kimble said. "It's a slow process, just because of the way those wastes are stacked on top of each other at the site."