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Another expensive mess for Ford: Cleaning up its Twin Cities site
Ford's recent Q2 good news shows that it's making progress in cleaning up its own messes. Still, there are plenty of messes that need to be addressed -- a literal one being the land under its Twin Cities production plant in Highland Park, Minnesota. The factory, in use since 1925, will be closed next year. Before Ford can sell the land to developers, the company needs to clean up eight decades of toxic contamination and get the land environmentally certified by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) so that its value can be assessed.
There are more than 70 "hot spots" on the 138-acre plot where pollutants including oil, solvents, paint, batteries, gasoline, diesel, lead, ethylbenzene, toluene, and xylenes have contaminated the ground. The startling variety is partly due to the fact that many of the chemicals were dumped on and in the ground before modern environmental regulations prevented such behavior -- like when an unpaved testing track was sprayed with waste oil to prevent dust, standard practice in 1942. Yet those are just the contaminants that Ford knows about. The company is awaiting results of more soil and groundwater samples recently taken.
[Source: Star Tribune via The Truth About Cars]
Ford might not have to, or be able to, remove absolutely everything. The MPCA has to sign off on the job, but it can allow for certain levels of pollution to remain as long as those levels fall within a safe range. And once Ford gets the land cleaned and certified, it will still be liable if any other contaminants are found even after it is sold. No matter what, the cleanup is going to be time consuming and expensive, which has become a familiar refrain of the Way Forward turnaround plan.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Rambo 7:37PM (8/03/2007)
Jonathon Ramsey is cashing another Toyota paycheck. Maybe Toyota (made $11 billion last year) can help Ford save the environment by cleaning this site up. Then again, maybe Toyota shouldn't help because they didn't even exist is 1925 when this mess happened!
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Blake 9:24PM (8/03/2007)
Holy crap are you ever dumb.
USofA 10:03PM (8/03/2007)
Rambo is right. You would have to be dumb not to realize this post has no news value and it even so it is old news from June '07. This was posted simply to discredit Ford.
Robert 11:41AM (8/04/2007)
It's true, sadly. When have your read about Ford's clean manufacturing processes using external combustion, recycling efforts or living roof at the Rouge? All of these efforts saved millions of pounds of CO2 last year.
Instead, I'm going to paint Ford as a enviro disaster because of chemicals spread in 1942 when people actually thought it was safe.
Imp 1:21PM (8/04/2007)
Rambo, don't be jealous that Mr. Ramsey is making easy money. Maybe Ford can be just a little more competitive and try to relive its glory days of being #1 again.
It's just some land that needs rehabilitation. It's just news. It's just some money to fix a problem. Don't get so retaliatory.
MiniMe 9:11AM (8/05/2007)
Ever been to Japan?
After living there for many years i can tell you from first hand experience that Toyota has been a first class polluter in it's own right. The toxic organics and heavy metal compounds Toyota has dumped at sites on Honshu, both on land and in the water, have had a devastating effect. The problem extends to the many small "mom and pop" suppliers that Toyota strong arms into cutting corners on safe waste disposal in favor of a lower price and "just in time" availability.
Your suggestion that Toyota can somehow help any other company in environmental safety is laughable.
Most of the pollution at Ford's sites happened in the 20's-40's when not much was known about the hazards of these chemicals. Toyota on the other hand, continued these dirty practices at least up to the mid 1990's. What's thier excuse?
MadeinDetroit 8:12PM (8/03/2007)
Wrong Highland Park in that Picture. That picture is of the Highland Park Plant in in Michigan.
http://www.detroityes.com/industry/02modelt.htm
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Mulad 1:25PM (8/06/2007)
Yeah, it's a bit confusing since the plant is in St. Paul, in the Highland Park neighborhood.
Terry 8:46PM (8/03/2007)
Workers at the Ford plant in St. Paul were informed early next week they will remain open through 2008 to complete a 2009 model line run. This is confirmed and i am working obtaining the official memo from my sources inside.
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Mal Fuller 9:33PM (8/03/2007)
Hey Terry,
How do you already know what workers won't be informed of until next week? Have you got some kind of crystal ball?
Belinda Carlilses 7:13AM (8/04/2007)
Ford has learned a valuable and costly lesson about building great cars and trucks. Ford's quality has greatly improved. I think they will come back in a big way. They may not be among the most prominent leaders in the industry, but they certainly will not be followers when it comes to quality. cudos to Ford for laying down and giving up to the transplant car manufacturers.
http://magnumshops.org
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Belinda Carlilses 7:18AM (8/04/2007)
cudos to Ford for laying down and giving up to the transplant car manufacturers.
There was word left out of that statement. I meant to write: cudos to Ford for not laying down and giving up to the transplant car manufacturers
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ttruck 11:52AM (8/04/2007)
Anyone that thinks this story was posted just to discredit Ford has got to be a total idiot, all the car manufacturers have or will have this problem in the future no matter it's a Chevy plant or an old BMW plant. USofA , you can tell that you are dumb enough to be a Ford fan, but not smart enough to realize that the entire auto industry faces this problem, but you would think that being a Ford fan you would be used to catching crap from everyone.
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Ralph 9:50PM (8/04/2007)
Not to nitpick, but there is no such place as Highland Park, Minnesota. There is, however, a St. Paul Minnesota that has a neighborhood in it called Highland Park that just happens to be the location of the Ford plant in question.
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