For more than a year, the leak of benzene from an abandoned coal-chemical plant at Sparrows Point has been the focus of government-company sparring.

Behind the scenes, efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency and Maryland Department of the Environment to require Severstal to install “skimmer” pumps — to prevent groundwater contaminated with cancer-linked benzene from leaking into Baltimore Harbor — have been fraught with disputes.

Severstal resisted efforts to install a full compliment of pumps, arguing it could contain the contamination by using air sparging and soil vapor extraction in a few locations. The company installed a small pump that collected all of three gallons of oil per month.

In a letter to Severstal on May 26, EPA criticized the company’s limited efforts to install the equipment, saying, “Severstal has repeatedly resisted EPA’s directions to propose a comprehensive IM [Interim Measures] strategy that will include groundwater pumping.”

The letter cited benzene levels that exceeded 100,000 times the limit considered safe in arguing that Severstal needed to “aggressively reduce the product source.”

The letter resulted in various conference calls among the parties last month and an agreement to install several prototype pumps over the next year.

Company Promotes Pump it Opposed

Forced to install the equipment, Severstal has turned the event into a display of its environmental commitment.

The company allowed a Baltimore Sun reporter and photographer to view a pump in action, which resulted in a front-page display of the equipment last Friday under the headline, “Cleaning up Sparrows Point.”

The article quoted Severstal’s chief environmental engineer, Russell Becker, lauding the company’s efforts.

“We’ve been aggressively identifying issues and getting systems in place,” Becker is quoted as saying, referring to a cleanup effort that has dragged on for 13 years.

No Barriers Along the Shoreline

The skimmer pump pictured by the newspaper is expected to extract 10-12 gallons of light oil a day. At this rate, even with more skimmer pumps and extraction “cells” installed over time, it will take years to recover the benzene-tainted oil under the former benzol plant, which is estimated at 11,000 gallons by MDE.

That is not the only spot with leaking chemicals at the mill. There are four more sites where high concentrations of benzene and naphthalene have been found dissolved in groundwater, with an undetermined amount of the chemicals leaking into Baltimore Harbor.

They are the former coal storage area, the former coal tar area, the cove area and the turning basin area. Recovering the carrier oil, treating the contaminated groundwater and stopping seepage into the harbor will take years to complete, especially since most of the equipment to do the work isn’t scheduled to be installed until July 2011.

Because regulators have not required Severstal to install barriers between the contaminated zone and harbor waters (the shoreline consists of dumped debris and porous waste material known as slag), the leak of benzene through groundwater discharges is expected to continue to run into the harbor.

The outflow of benzene was documented in a study last year for the Maryland Port Administration first reported by the Brew.

That study, which proposed containment barriers to keep toxic chemicals from the harbor, has been all but ignored by the steel company, EPA and MDE.

Mark Reutter can be reached at reuttermark@yahoo.com.