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19 years ago, APF site stunned detective

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By MARK DOUGLAS mdouglas@wfla.com

The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 24, 2009

ST. PETERSBURG - In seven years of environmental detective work for the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, Bob Ankenbauer says, he never saw anything as alarming as the abandoned APF Industries 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 soon would learn that work done at the complex included applying destructive chemicals to airplane materials to see whether they would hold up.
Seventeen years later, Joseph Saunders, a lawyer, has filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of neighbors, saying acids, poisons and toxic chemicals from that complex have contaminated groundwater and might 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-Pasco 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 lawsuit, said he didn't know anything about the pollution when health department workers knocked on his door recently asking to test his irrigation well.

The workers wanted to look for acids, solvents and toxic heavy metals such as arsenic and cadmium that Ankenbauer first uncovered 17 years ago.

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

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.

"It was like walking on marshmallows," Ankenbauer said.

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 two years earlier.

Ankenbauer said he was especially worried because he'd been called to the complex a year earlier in response to complaints that children were scaling the fence and playing on the property. He also thought transients were using the abandoned buildings as shelter.

Ankenbauer said he later learned why so many corrosive materials were stored in 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 exposing them to caustic chemicals.

The EPA spent almost $2 million removing chemicals from the lab as well as 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 and didn't finish it either.

No one from either agency told neighbors anything.

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

Nor did the owners - as the property changed hands twice.

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.

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.

News Channel 8 reporter Mark Douglas can be reached at (727) 451-2333.

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