As any kids would be, the Morenos were inexorably drawn to the little stream behind their house.
For years, the flowing water about a mile east of downtown was a playground for the four children, the wild strawberries that grew on its banks were their snacks, and the pond that formed in their yard when the water was high became their personal swimming pool.
And all that time, the green, blue and yellow goo that floated in the water and filled the bottom of the stream would cover their clothes, coat their skin and get in their hair.
“We pretty much wallowed in that stuff,” Anthony Moreno said. “We just didn’t freakin’ know.”
They did know, even in the late 1960s and early 1970s when they lived there, that the water in the ditch flowed from Hassan Barrel Co.’s property to their yard. The company had been recycling used industrial barrels since 1954, and the kids sold the watermelons they grew in their vegetable garden to the employees who worked there.
But they didn’t know the water was poisonous and the goop was not mud – it was hazardous waste.
Government officials said they were shocked by what they found in October 2004 – seven acres of leaking, rusting industrial barrels, thousands filled with hazardous waste.
When an emergency response team from the Environmental Protection Agency arrived at Hassan Barrel Co., 1605 Summer St., it found open pits of hazardous waste where chemicals had apparently been dumped, and more than 10,000 barrels, about half of which contained chemicals.
EPA testing showed that soil at the site – in a residential neighborhood just blocks from an elementary school to the southeast and a middle school to the north – was filled with hazardous chemicals. The ditch flowing across the north end of the property was contaminated with traces of PCBs – 30 years after they were banned – plus poisonous barium, cadmium, chromium and lead.
The operation, which cleaned and repainted used industrial barrels, had apparently been shut down and abandoned a year before, and regulators at the time said they had no idea what had happened.
But a series of events raises questions.
In August 1994, the Fort Wayne-Allen County Department of Health received an anonymous complaint that hazardous waste was “running into a ditch” behind Hassan Barrel. An inspector found a pipe that ran overflow water from the company’s boiler to the ditch – “clean water,” the notes said – but nothing else.
There was apparently no testing of the water in the ditch or the sediment, no checks on whether chemicals were dumped. The inspection report comprises one sentence.
That wasn’t the only red flag.
EPA officials said in 2004 that storm sewers on the site had been covered with concrete years before because the company had apparently been caught dumping hazardous waste down the sewers. City officials responded to the violation of local laws by plugging the sewers, but there’s no indication environmental officials were notified. Improperly disposing of hazardous waste is a federal crime.
State regulators also looked past a history of violations:
•In 1982, the Indiana State Board of Health cited the company for not having detailed analysis of the waste it handled, not conducting the required inspections of its own operation and not having a contingency plan in case of emergency.
•In 1987, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management cited the firm for not determining whether the waste it handled was hazardous, storing waste more than 90 days and having hazardous waste not marked as such.
•In 1992, IDEM found paperwork problems, training problems, misidentified substances, problems with the contingency plan and sediment from a caustic bath stored in a 20-cubic-yard trash container and 160 steel drums, none of which was labeled as hazardous. The inspection also found no internal communications or alarm, phone, fire extinguishers, fire control or spill control where the hazardous waste was stored.
•An IDEM inspection in 1993 found many of the same problems as the year before.
•IDEM inspectors visited the site in both 2001 and 2002 in response to anonymous complaints and each time found violations, but inspectors said the issues were resolved while they were there.
While government inspectors failed to see any contamination, documents show Hassan Barrel Co. knew it was polluting the soil.
Records apparently seized by the EPA in October 2004 and copied to the Allen County health department show Hassan Barrel contracted a local laboratory to test soil samples in February 2002, a year and a half before officials believe the facility was padlocked.
Those tests showed the subsoil – not just the topsoil, which would indicate only recent contamination – was polluted with about a dozen hazardous materials. At least three of them were beyond state thresholds for cleaning up on industrial land, and four were beyond the threshold for residential land. Though the site is considered industrial, it is surrounded by homes.
Three of the four chemicals over the cleanup threshold cause cancer, and all of those found are suspected of causing numerous health issues, including brain damage and liver problems.
Company officials, though, apparently did nothing.
According to the federal indictment against Alan D. Hersh, who has owned the company since at least 1982, instead of cleaning up the site – or properly handling the waste that continued to be sent there – the company kept cleaning out barrels and dumping poisons until July 2003, when Hersh locked the gates and moved to North Carolina.
Monday, Hersh was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison for mishandling hazardous waste and ordered to pay $1.7 million in restitution for the cleanup costs incurred so far. He could have been fined up to $50,000 a day for each day of violation – which would have totaled $42.7 million – but because he said he has no money, he was not fined.
Today, 40 years after the ditch was their playground, all four Moreno siblings have skin problems, and almost every chemical found contaminating the Hassan Barrel site is linked to disorders of the skin.
Twins Anthony and Mitchell, who live in California, have Dupuytren’s disease, an abnormal thickening of the tissue beneath the skin in the palm of the hand and sometimes the feet.
There is no known cause of the disease, but researchers think it might be genetic because it usually occurs only in people of northern European descent, which is why it’s sometimes called Viking’s disease. The Morenos are Hispanic and have no family history of the disorder. The other two Moreno siblings have severe cases of psoriasis.
Chris Schoenle, who grew up on the east side of the Hassan Barrel site and still lives in Fort Wayne, said he hasn’t had any skin problems except for the tumor that was removed from his hand three weeks ago.
“There were always bubbles on top of the water. I can recall that,” Schoenle said of the ditch. “It was almost like glue floating on top.”
Schoenle’s oldest brother has skin problems, he said, as did his late father, who also grew up there and had a huge garden Chris and his siblings would tend until the soil would no longer grow anything.
Maurice Smith, who grew up on the south edge of the site and also still lives in town, said he has no health problems he knows of, except that he gets so much dead skin on his feet, it occasionally has to be cut off by a doctor.
“I was in the muck just as much as the Morenos the whole time,” Smith said. “We never thought nothing about it.”
The problems aren’t limited to skin issues.
Mitchell Moreno has lesions and crystal formations in his lungs and has liver and chronic blood problems. Anthony may have kidney problems and has gone colorblind. Some of the siblings have thyroid problems.
“(A doctor) found all these metals and toxins in my blood. I’m just full of it,” Anthony Moreno said. “This is like an ‘Erin Brockovich’ without the Erin.”
Unlike the movie “Erin Brockovich,” which ends with a multimillion-dollar verdict in favor of contamination victims, there appears to be no one to sue.
Hersh’s plea deal with federal prosecutors included dropping charges against Hassan Barrel Co. because it no longer exists and Hersh was the sole owner. Hersh apparently has so little money, he had a public defender.
In October 2004, when the site was discovered, the EPA removed about 5,000 empty barrels from the site and stored about 5,000 full barrels inside the building. A year later, the full barrels were removed. It might appear from the weed-choked site that nothing has happened since.
But behind the scenes, the EPA has identified dozens of companies that sent waste to Hassan Barrel and negotiated an agreement with them to pay for the cleanup. Though those companies did nothing wrong, federal law makes them responsible for the substances they create, regardless of where they end up.
“The way this system is designed is cradle to grave, and (the substances in this case) didn’t quite make it to the grave,” said Randy Ashe, the special agent in charge of the EPA’s criminal investigation division in its Chicago office.
That means the companies that created the hazardous waste – about 85 in the proposed settlement agreement – get to pay for cleaning up the site, even though they didn’t create the mess.
As of Nov. 30, the EPA had spent about $1.7 million cleaning up the site; removing contaminated soil is expected to cost about $1.3 million more.
Bill Simes, EPA’s on-scene coordinator for the site, said the agreement should be signed with the companies in the next few weeks. Work is set to begin in about 30 days and should be completed before the end of summer.
Simes said the work will remove about 4,000 cubic yards of soil from the site. Most of the topsoil will be removed, the ditch will be excavated and the area that became the Moreno’s pond next door will also be excavated.
The vast majority of the soil will have to go to a special hazardous-waste landfill, Simes said.
EPA spokeswoman Amy Hartsock said it’s unfortunate that regulators had no idea there was an environmental time bomb left untouched for nearly a year and a half, but it is the owner’s responsibility, not the state’s. Still, she agrees the situation should have been prevented.
“I guess the message is, if a member of the public sees something they think is not right or something that concerns them, they should let us know,” Hartsock said. “Had we received information sooner, I’m sure we would have acted on it.”
Officials point out that there were few laws regarding hazardous waste until the mid-1970s, about the time the Morenos moved away after 10 years of playing in the ditch and pond. Dumping waste into the ditch was probably legal until the Clean Water Act became law in 1977.
“I remember pulling our feet out of the water with yellow goo on our feet,” Anthony Moreno said. “I can’t believe we were allowed to play in that crap.”