Officials overseeing the Freedom Industries bankruptcy on Tuesday touted progress on cleanup of the companys Elk River facility, but acknowledged that answers to other pressing issues that have stalled the resolution of the case remain elusive. <\/p>\n
Still unclear are crucial decisions regarding how or when Freedom might obtain an insurance payment of more than $3 million for the January 2014 chemical leak, how victims might eventually be compensated, and whether additional funds can be recouped for the bankruptcy estate from various parties, including former Freedom owners and executives. <\/p>\n
Weve got to make some progress on these things, said U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Ronald Pearson. Lets get these things teed up. <\/p>\n
Pearson spoke Tuesday morning to a courtroom full of lawyers representing Freedom Industries, various companies Freedom owes money to, victims, state agencies, West Virginia American Water and former Freedom officials. <\/p>\n
The judge called a status conference of interested parties after observing in an early February order that the case was at a crossroads. At the time, Freedom had dwindling resources, with just $1.5 million in cash and $200 million in claims, and a liquidation plan that Pearson said he didnt think could ever be approved as written. <\/p>\n
In a status report submitted on Friday, Freedoms court-approved chief restructuring officer, Mark Welch, said that the company currently has about $700,000 cash in hand. The report said Freedom hopes to get Pearsons approval to put about $450,000 of that into an escrow account to fund the rest of the remediation of the Elk River facility, site of the leak that contaminated drinking water for 300,000 residents across the Kanawha Valley and surrounding communities. <\/p>\n
The report said that Freedom has spent no less than $10.5 million on matters relating to environmental compliance, testing and remediation since it filed for bankruptcy more than a year ago. After tearing down and removing more than a dozen chemical tanks at the Etowah Terminal along the Elk River, Welch also oversaw the removal of 600 tons of contaminated soil and construction of retention berms around the former footprint of the facilitys Crude MCHM tanks, the report said. <\/p>\n
Shortly before Welch filed his status report with the bankruptcy court, the state Department of Environmental Protection accepted the Freedom site into its voluntary industrial cleanup program. The move gives the company 31 days to negotiate with the DEP on a schedule for developing its final cleanup plan. <\/p>\n
Welch said in his report that he believes Freedoms only remaining remediation work involves capping the MCHM portion of the facility, monitoring, ongoing stormwater collection and additional water and other testing. <\/p>\n
Acceptance into the voluntary DEP program allows Freedom to clean up the site based on some as-yet-undetermined risk-based contamination standard, as opposed to previous state agency orders that required all MCHM contamination at the location to be removed. DEP Secretary Randy Huffman has said, though, that Freedom must clean up the site so that the risk of this stuff getting back in the water has been eliminated -- not just minimized. <\/p>\n
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Answers remains elusive in Freedom Industries bankruptcy case<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Officials overseeing the Freedom Industries bankruptcy on Tuesday touted progress on cleanup of the companys Elk River facility, but acknowledged that answers to other pressing issues that have stalled the resolution of the case remain elusive. Still unclear are crucial decisions regarding how or when Freedom might obtain an insurance payment of more than $3 million for the January 2014 chemical leak, how victims might eventually be compensated, and whether additional funds can be recouped for the bankruptcy estate from various parties, including former Freedom owners and executives Continue reading