Stockpile at Champion facility troubles waste district official

By Ed Runyan

CHAMPION — After making a few visits to the Diversified Resources International facility on Refractories Drive and learning what materials are being stored there, Robert Villers of the Geauga-Trumbull Solid Waste Management District says he hopes he never has to go there again.

Learning that the company has stockpiled between 8,000 and 10,000 tons of a manufacturing waste product called steel swarf on the grounds for more than a decade and knowing that the material is now unprotected from the weather gives Villers cause for concern, he said.

“I wouldn’t want to be working there,” said the waste management district director.

Trumbull County Health Department officials have been concerned about the facility for a couple years now, Villers said, culminating in a health department notice of violation in May 2008 for failing to remove the material.

Things only got worse around September, when the company started to dismantle the huge metal building that kept the material out of the weather, Villers said. Mixing the material with water is dangerous, Villers said, because it can catch fire and because it can leach into the groundwater.

A message left on Diversified Resources’ voice mail Thursday was not returned.

Swarf is the grinding leftover or byproduct of certain manufacturing operations. Some of the steel swarf Diversified Resources has accepted since 1993 came from companies such as Crossman (a BB pellett manufacturer) and Caterpiller (heavy equipment), Villers said.

Swarf can ignite on contact with air or water and produce flammable hydrogen gas, according to a National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The plant, which was once used in the manufacture of bricks, is located just across the state Route 5 Bypass from the former Copperweld Steel mill. Diversified Resources’ remaining buildings and piles of swarf are visible from the highway’s westbound lane.

The facility, about three-quarters of a mile south of Mahoning Avenue and the Kent State University Trumbull Campus, is accessible at the end of Folsom Drive.

Detective Harold Firster, the environmental enforcement officer working for the county sheriff’s department, said in a police report that he will charge the company’s owner, Edgar C. Knieriem Jr. of Cockeysville, Md., with one felony and one misdemeanor offense concerning the steel swarf.

No court date has been set for Knieriem to answer to the charge, Firster said.

Knieriem also faces financial implications dealing with the material, officials say. Firster and Villers estimate it will cost $600,000 to remove it.

Villers said he recently has learned that some loads of steel taken from the site were rejected at a scrapyards in Niles and Youngstown because of readings of radioactivity that exceeded allowable levels.

That led the Ohio Department of Health to visit the site in late February to measure the radioactivity. State health officials found radioactivity in the area of the swarf piles but determined that it was “not high enough to cause problems,” Villers said.

Firster, a retired physician, said the site is full of potential danger but is not an “imminent danger” to the community around it.

“The longer the rainwater gets on this, it could spontaneously combust or leach into the water table,” Firster said.

runyan@vindy.com