TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Suit filed over pollution from Bay Pines defense plant

Staff photo by TODD DAVIS

A trust called 4800 LLC owns the former APF Industries plant and now faces a class action suit over groundwater pollution there.

ADVERTISEMENT

By MARK  DOUGLAS | News Channel 8

Published: October 23, 2009

ST. PETERSBURG - In seven years of environmental detective work for the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, Bob Ankenbauer never saw anything as alarming as the abandoned chemical lab littered with open jars of acid and cyanide.

"I was worried about spillage from kids playing there. I was worried about them forming clouds in the building, worried about the building itself because these acids could eat through the steel," Ankenbauer said.

He would soon learn that the work done at the complex included applying the most destructive of chemicals to airplane materials to see if they'd hold up.

Seventeen years later, attorney Joseph Saunders has filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of neighbors because acids, poisons and toxic chemicals from that complex have contaminated groundwater and may have migrated to surrounding homes.

"We don't know how far the plume has spread and which direction," said Saunders, who filed the suit Monday in Pinellas circuit court.

For 11 years, Lee Harris has lived less than two blocks from the site at 4800 95th St. N, formerly owned by APF Industries. But Harris, lead plaintiff in the suit, said he didn't know anything about the pollution when health department workers knocked on his door recently asking to test his irrigation well.

"I didn't really know why they wanted to test it at all," Harris said. The health workers didn't give any explanation.

Now Harris knows the reason. It's the acids, solvents and toxic heavy metals such as arsenic and cadmium that detective Ankenbauer first uncovered 17 years ago.

A spokesman for the current owner of the site said testing so far indicates the migrating plume is a danger only to adjacent industrial properties.

But Ankenbauer, who retired from the sheriff's office a few years after investigating the APF site, said he concluded the complex was a public health threat the moment he walked through the laboratory door in 1993.

He stepped on a concrete floor so saturated with acid and other corrosive chemicals that it felt mushy under his feet.

"When you walked on it, it was like walking on marshmallows," Ankenbauer said. "The concrete was disintegrating, so that became a major concern for us that the contamination had gone to the ground."

An environmental investigator hired by the Resolution Trust Corp., the agency created by Congress in 1989 to help clean up the nation's savings and loan crisis, called Ankenbauer after she visited the lab and found shelves stacked with toxic chemicals.

APF had ceased operations at the complex site two years earlier.

"She was in tennis shoes and the rubber began to melt and her feet began to burn," Ankenbauer recalled. "That's when she left the area and contacted us and we started doing our initial investigation into substances in that facility."

Ankenbauer contacted a hazardous materials expert he knew at the federal Environmental Protection Agency. "The next day I met him out there and he had a response team already en route to the location."

Ankenbauer said he was especially worried because he'd been called to the complex a year earlier in response to complaints kids were scaling the fence and playing around the property. He said he believes transients who frequented the nearby Bay Pines VA Hospital were also using the abandoned buildings as shelter.

"We had different cyanides, different acids that were open," Ankenbauer said. "The problem that concerned us is acid with cyanides mixed, you get poisonous gas."

Ankenbauer said he later discovered why so many corrosive materials were stocked inside the lab. APF, known for the metal plating work it did at the site, also had a military contract to test the durability of airplane materials by using caustic chemicals.

The EPA spent almost $2 million removing chemicals from the lab as well as other solvents and tons of soil from the APF site. But the federal agency but did not finish the job. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection took over the case in 1995 but didn't finish it either.

No one from either agency ever told neighbors anything.

Neither did Ankenbauer, who thought the EPA had resolved the problem.

Nor did the owners as the property changed hands twice.

And nothing more has been done to clean up the site.

The current owner, a trust called 4800 LLC formed by Darrin and Collette Horst, faces a notice of violation and the threat of fines of up to $10,000 a day.

Ron Noble, their attorney, said his clients understand they are legally responsible and knew about the pollution when they bought the property in 2006 for $500,000. But he said they can't afford a major cleanup now because of a failed, unrelated land deal.

Saunders, the attorney in the class action suit, said owners still could have done more.

"Obviously cleanup is very expensive but it doesn't cost anything to let the residents know what is going on," he said.

Noble dismissed the idea that the neighbors Saunders represents are in any danger.

"All of the data that's been generated to date would indicate there's no impact to adjacent residential neighborhoods," Noble said.

Bay Pines Estates is to the west of the pollution site but groundwater flows to the southeast, Noble said. That's where the Harbor Lights mobile home park lies, but Noble said he doesn't think chemicals have traveled far enough to contaminate the park's central irrigation well.

Saunders is involved in a similar class action suit against the Raytheon Co., owners of a former defense plant in St. Petersburg where contaminated groundwater has spread into neighborhoods.

DEP also failed to notify neighbors in that case.

In the APF case, regional managers with the state DEP decided more than a year ago that testing residential irrigation wells for such toxins as TCE, vinyl chloride, arsenic, lead, cyanide and other chemicals was a high priority.

The agency is still waiting for the Pinellas Health Department to finish its well surveys before deciding which wells to test.

Harris, the neighbor, who makes his living as a financial planner, said he is concerned about the health of his son, 5, and daughter, 7, who have splashed through his irrigation water for years.

"The kids have run around and played in the sprinklers in the mornings and, you know, on summer nights and stuff like that," Harris said. "I never thought anything about it."

He said he wishes someone had warned him about the problem before he bought his home in 1998 — six years after Ankenbauer called in the EPA.

"I would have liked to have known about it."

Reporter Mark Douglas can be reached at (727) 451-2333

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT