An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site clean-up of an empty lot adjacent to the driveway of the Church of the Brethren General Offices in Elgin, Ill., was completed last month.
During the weeks of work earlier this spring, the EPA rented space in the General Offices as offices for its staff and used a portion of the parking lot for vehicles related to the project. The General Offices warehouse and truck bay hosted overnight storage of equipment, including a vehicle with temperature sensitive equipment.
Salvador Campero, director of Buildings and Grounds-Elgin, was the church staff relating to the EPA during the project
The project represented a long-overdue clean-up of a mid-20th century worksite where employees of a watch company had used radium to paint glow-in-the-dark watch faces. Radium is a radioactive substance, and it contaminated the ground. For many years the lot has been uninhabitable. The Silbert Watch Company painted watch faces with radium for several decades at the site, from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s, according to the EPA.
Superfund is the informal name used for the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) passed by Congress in 1980 to allow the EPA to clean up contaminated sites. “Thousands of contaminated sites exist nationally due to hazardous waste being dumped, left out in the open, or otherwise improperly managed,” says an EPA Superfund website. “These sites include manufacturing facilities, processing plants, landfills and mining sites” (www.epa.gov/superfund/what-superfund).
In the case of the empty lot adjacent to the General Offices in Elgin, “Leftover radium was disposed of on the property and never cleaned up,” said Shawn Flory Replogle, executive director of Organizational Resources for the Church of the Brethren. “The watch company went out of business, and the building was sold and made into a mattress showroom. That building burned down and was never replaced. The status of the property was only rediscovered (officially) a few years ago and the EPA got involved.”
In negotiating the rental of space to the EPA, Replogle received assurances of the safety of having the clean-up project with its equipment, and vehicles in proximity to those who work at the General Offices and those living in the neighborhood. “I have been given assurances that there is no immediate risk to the public,” he said. “Only prolonged (multi-year) exposure to the disposed-of chemicals would cause significant bodily harm.
“Our cooperation in this EPA clean-up effort is an opportunity for us to be good neighbors to our surrounding community, especially the Blackhawk Neighborhood.”
The Church of the Brethren does not own the empty lot but is simply a neighbor to it, Replogle emphasized. “Because of the close proximity of our property to the former Silbert Watch Company site, over a long period of time some of the pollutants disposed of on that property have migrated onto a very small portion of the property we occupy, necessitating some EPA attention to that part of our property also,” he said.
The clean-up project took place from late February through early May and included installation of a tall fence and signs around the empty lot, delivery of EPA trucks and equipment, removal of a tree and other vegetation, excavation and removal of contaminated soil, and back filling with clean soil. An EPA press release said that it anticipated removing approximately 10 to 15 truckloads of radium-impacted soil and debris to a licensed hazardous material facility.
Find the EPA release at www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-begins-hazardous-waste-cleanup-former-silbert-watch-co-site-elgin-illinois
Find the EPA site profile at https://response.epa.gov/site/site_profile.aspx?site_id=16861
Find a Courier News/Chicago Tribune story at www.chicagotribune.com/2025/04/03/epa-starts-work-removing-radium-tainted-soil-debris-from-former-silbert-watch-co-in-elgin
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