The Environmental Protection Agency has offered to remove soils around a Columbia Heights family’s home after they sued the agency for $36.7 million.

In March, Luke and Leslie Sterling sued the EPA and the state Department of Environmental Quality claiming their home should never have been built on the Beaver Wood Products site, which used a variety of toxic chemicals, including dioxins and furans from the 1940s to the 1990s to treat wood products.

The Sterlings claim they were unaware the site was contaminated until the EPA began doing tests nearly a decade ago.

The site was not a federal Superfund site, but it was a state Superfund site and as such, it did see a cleanup from 2000 to 2005. The main strategy at that time was to clean up the site of pentachlorophenol, a wood preservative. The EPA, not the state, did most of the work through contractors at the time, as it had expertise in dealing with the contaminants.

According to federal court documents filed recently, the EPA has found that results from testing in 2023 that “indicated dioxins and furans in soil on your property exceed the updated residential action level of 51 nanograms per kilogram. The action level exceedance at your property occurred at zero to 2 inches below the ground surface. Action levels represent concentrations above which response actions to limit exposures are warranted,” EPA oil section supervisor Steve Merritt wrote to the Sterlings on June 6.

A nanogram is one billionth of a gram. However the “action level” for dioxin on residential property, according to EPA’s guidelines is 1 part per billion.

As such, the EPA “proposes conducting a removal action to excavate and remove dioxin and furan contaminated soils to a depth protective of residential exposures,” Merritt wrote.

The EPA would “dig up the contaminated soil, backfill with clean fill and top soil and re-grade and revegetate the surface spoils to ensure proper drainage away from structures and to prevent erosion,” the letter to the Sterlings says.

The Sterlings did not reply to a request for comment, but they have said in the past they feel like they should be compensated for their home and for their suffering, thus the suit. Leslie Sterling suffers from a severe form of hives, she claims, and Luke Sterling has said previously he gets sick if he cuts the lawn.

In addition, even if the land around the home was remediated, other parts of the 20-acre site, have far more contamination in the soils according to the EPA’s own tests.

Soil samples near Gordon Avenue homes and the God’s 10 display along Highway 2 have as high as 2,234 ng/kg for dioxins at one site and another site had as high as 2,620 ng/kg of dioxins.

That’s thousands of times higher than the action level for residential property. The Sterling’s home, however, is the only one actually on the Beaver Wood Products site.

The EPA says it is considering placing the entire site on the National Priorities List, also known as Superfund.

But that hasn’t happened yet.

Lucas Sterling bought the property in 2008 from Ben and Laura Wiedling. The Sterlings are unsure whether the Wieldlings knew the property was contaminated when they sold it.

Leslie Sterling said apparently the deed restrictions that were supposed to be placed on the property were never transferred when it was subdivided.

The Sterlings claim they didn’t even know they were on a contaminated property until years after they bought the place, when the EPA came to their house in 2016 and asked to do some tests. After several years and several more tests, the EPA notified them in March 2024, eight years later, of the furan and dioxin contamination at their home and the surrounding acreage.

Deed restrictions were placed on the capped portions of the property according to a 2007 agreement between the EPA and Richard and Loretta Grosswiler, who were the owners of the property at the time, before the Wiedlings and the Sterlings.

“The capped areas shall not be used for development or residential purposes,” the signed agreement stated. But there’s the rub: The Sterlings’ home is located on what was called a “Land Treatment Unit” not a capped area. 

Thus, there was no deed restriction, the EPA said in an email to the Hungry Horse News last year.

“The (institutional control) did not apply to the land treatment unit area which now includes a residential property,” EPA spokeswoman Katherine Jenkins previously told the newspaper.

But the lined land treatment unit, where the Sterling’s home is located, was the very place where contaminated dirt was treated, the EPA concedes. At one point in time, the area was fenced to keep people out.

The Sterlings are representing themselves in the lawsuit.