Federal agency resumes sending hazardous waste to Michigan from Ohio

VAN BUREN TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) — A federal agency says it has resumed sending hazardous waste to a Michigan landfill in Ohio, as communities in suburban Detroit continue their legal battle to ban waste from a site from the Second World War period in New York.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sent material from Luckey, Ohio, where beryllium, a toxic metal, was produced for weapons and other uses after World War II.

The effort stalled last week when a Detroit-area judge signed an order temporarily freezing plans for the landfill to accept low-level radioactive waste from Lewiston, New York.

Wayne County Judge Kevin Cox amended his order Tuesday to limit the ruling to Lewiston and clear up any ambiguity. The next hearings are scheduled for early October.

Wayne Disposal in Van Buren Township, 25 miles (40.23 kilometers) west of Detroit, is one of the few landfills in the U.S. that can handle certain hazardous waste.

“We have safely resumed moving supplies” from Ohio to Michigan, said Avery Schneider, a spokesman for the Army Corps.

Republic Services, which operates the landfill in Michigan, said it meets or exceeds guidelines for the safe handling of hazardous materials.

Nothing has been sent to Michigan from New York yet. Lewiston’s contaminated soil is a legacy of the Manhattan Project, the government’s secret project to develop atomic bombs during World War II.

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