Witness: Union Carbide Landfill Leaking Toxics ‘As We Speak'

Union Carbide’s Filmont landfill in South Charleston is discharging 17,000 gallons a day of water that includes multiple hazardous pollutants.

That’s what Marshall University Professor Scott Simonton told the U.S. District Court in Charleston on Wednesday.

The discharge is polluting Davis Creek, a tributary of the Kanawha River, Simonton testified.

“It’s not even imminent,” he said. “It’s happening right now as we speak, those contaminants are oozing into Davis Creek.”

Previously, a remediation specialist for Union Carbide testified that there are no hazardous materials in the Filmont landfill.

However, an attorney for the company, a subsidiary of Dow Chemical, revealed in court that anyone who enters the site must have hazardous materials training.

An adjacent property owner, Courtland Co., has sued Union Carbide four times since 2018 alleging contamination from the Filmont landfill.

The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and the city of South Charleston knew Union Carbide was monitoring the site about a decade before it was revealed publicly.

On Tuesday, Simonton testified that the ecological and human health risk assessments Union Carbide performed in 2014 and 2015 were “junk.”