By Michael Pedersen
The city of Mapleton filed a $34 million lawsuit to force the owners of the Trojan Powder Plant in southern Utah County to repair soils contaminated with chemicals some residents believe have poisoned them.
City leaders also want the company, Connecticut-based Ensign-Bickford, to build the city a new municipal water well.
The lawsuit, filed in 4th District Court Wednesday, comes after Mapleton Mayor Dean Allan asked Ensign-Bickford to pay for a well to be dug a safe distance from a contamination trail that contains the compound RDX, produced during the manufacture of explosives.
Mapleton citizens suspect there is a link between RDX (Royal Demolition Explosives) and cancer in humans through the contamination of water.
Mapleton is concerned RDX is leaching toward the city''s remaining municipal water wells.
Although this has yet to be proven, Ensign-Bickford settled seven federal lawsuits filed by current and former Mapleton residents for six cases of cancer and one case of an unspecified ailment.
Trojan denies there is any link between the contaminants and cancer and claims did not meet any admission to the cases in the settlement.
Fears that contamination at the plant had not been sufficiently mitigated prompted the lawsuit, said Mapleton City Councilman Don Walker.
'We have found that contamination was far greater than what we knew,' Walker said. 'They haven''t come forth and offered any help to our citizens. All we are trying to do is protect the citizens of Mapleton.'
According to company attorney James Holtkamp, Ensign-Bickford has done everything requested by Utah to ensure the safety of Mapleton''s drinking water.
'The water, as it leaves the treatment facility, has all that stuff taken out of it, and we believe it meets the standards of safe drinking water,' Holtkamp said.
'We do not admit, concede or believe the water containing the RDX is the cause for any cancer,' he said.
Since the late 1990s, Ensign-Bickford has undertaken a huge million dollar process and built a treatment system to remove the RDX, which was a problem before the company ever acquired the Spanish Fork plant in 1980.
As part of the treatment, water is pumped out of the ground and treated with a carbon-based treatment to take the pollutants out.
Mapleton City attorney Douglas Thayer says Ensign-Bickford is cleaning up too slow and ineffectively.
Ensign-Bickford collects their own samples from the plant, wherever they choose, according to Thayer.
Subsurface soil samples were collected at the edges of the former waste disposal trenches and hot-spot samples were not collected, containing several more parts of contamination, Thayer said.
A letter sent to Ensign-Bickford from the State of Utah reported that the data collected would not be adequate for a human health risk assessment under an industrial scenario.
Ensign-Bickford refused to comply, said Thayer.
Mapleton is concerned if the problem is not taken care of in a more timely manner, no culinary water will exist, said Allan.
According to Holtkamp, the water is clean and safe to drink and the citizens have chosen not to drink it.
'We vigorously disagree we''re not confronting the problem,' Holtkamp said. 'We hope we can pass this an continue to work with the city.'