The federal government has officially removed the Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant site in Arden Hills from its list of “priority” Superfund sites, saying no further cleanup is required to safeguard residents’ health.
On Monday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency removed the site from their “Superfund national priorities list,” after more than 30 years of cleaning the 25-square-mile site.
The national priority list contains the country’s “most contaminated sites that threaten human health or the environment,” according to a written press release by the EPA.
Sites are removed, the release added, when the agency decides “all the remedies are successfully implemented and no further cleanup is required to protect human health or the environment.”
From 1941 to 1981, the U.S. Army dumped waste at over a dozen locations at the site, contaminating soil, sediment and groundwater.
In 2018 under President Donald Trump, the EPA deleted all or part of 22 sites from the list — the largest amount of deletions since 2005, and far more have been removed in recent years.