(WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- Southeast Side residents are one step closer to seeing another hazardous industrial location cleaned up now that the U.S. EPA has proposed adding the old Acme Steel Coke plant to the Superfund National Priority List.
The EPA says the former plant on 110th and Torrence consists of about 104 acres where environmental assessments found exposed waste including cyanide, mercury and semi-volatile organic compounds.
The plant opened in the late-1800s on near an area where people live in the South Deering neighborhood.
In its heyday during the mid-1970s, the plant employed about 3,500 people. It closed in 2001.
Amateur urban archeologist Eric Williams stumbled on the site while riding his bicycle three years ago. He has spent countless hours going through the vacant buildings on the site and gathering documents, manuals and signs left behind.
Some of the documents go back to the 1930s.
“This is how steel was made for many, many years, and there was no other alternative. So, to make steel you needed iron and you needed coke and, if you made coke, you were left with some nastiness.”
Williams said the proposed major clean-up is a long-time in coming.
“People live in South Deering, people live on the Southeast Side and have voiced their disgust with sites like this and others that were left to rot, so they deserve that.”
Williams has scanned and posted hundreds of documents he’s recovered, on his acmecoke.com website.
“I go through these binders and I look at this stuff and I still go, ‘Oh my God, I’m holding something in my hand from 1932 that I personally recovered, put in a bag, rode my bike back to Hegewisch and then rode the train home.”
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