Owners Ordered To Clean Up Superfund Site By June

A Federal judge ordered the owners of the Barkman Landfill, located in Honey Brook, PA, l to clean up their seven-acre Superfund site and relocate their auto-sales business by June 1 or face imprisonment.

The order, announced earlier this week by the U.S. District Attorney's Office in Philadelphia, calls on Ernest Barkman and his wife, Grace, to clean up a junkyard used by their trash-hauling business, truck-repair company, metal-salvage yard and sales lot since 1963.

The junkyard, in Honey Brook Township, was declared a Superfund site in 1984 after testing revealed arsenic, lead, cadmium, mercury, benzene, chloroform, and other hazardous substances in nearby groundwater.

Federal and state environmental officials have been trying to get Ernest Barkman to clean up his site for a decade. The same judge, Clifford Scott Green, in 1998 ordered Ernest Barkman to pay $8.7 million to state and federal agencies for clean-up costs at his site.

The couple's lawyer, Wayne C. Buckwalter, said the Barkmans intend to comply with the order, pending "unforeseen circumstances." Buckwalter also said Ernest Barkman probably would not be able to pay the 1998 fine. Philadelphia Inquirer