The city acquired and razed the troubled Electro Plating Services building on 10 Mile Road last year. Cleanup of tainted soil expected by early 2024.
Four years after an almost fluorescent green ooze coming out of an embankment startled motorists on Interstate 696 in Madison Heights just before Christmas in 2019, a more than $4 million cleanup is nearing the finish line. The ooze included potentially health-harming chemicals including hexavalent chromium, trichloroethylene and nonstick "forever chemicals" known as PFAS, emanating from the defunct Electro-Plating Services property above the freeway on East 10 Mile Road. The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy is currently treating and removing contaminated soil from beneath the now-razed building, and expects to complete that work "in the first quarter of 2024," said Joseph DeGrazia, an incident management specialist in EGLE's Remediation and Redevelopment Division. "Long-term monitoring will continue after these remediation actions are completed," he said. An environmental house of horrors Electro-Plating Services, owned by Gary Sayers, had a history of run-ins with local officials and environmental regulators. But it was in 2016, during a fire marshal inspection, that an environmental house of horrors was discovered. Inside were more than 5,000 containers of toxic waste stored so haphazardly, in a building in such disrepair, that authorities feared an imminent explosion or poisonous gas release into the nearby residential neighborhood, federal court records and state agency documents show. The former site of Electro-Plating Services in Madison Heights on Nov. 21, 2023. The business was a plating shop that worked with copper, tin, bronze, cadmium, nickel, chromium, gold, silver, zinc and lead. A green substance oozed from the business onto the side of eastbound Interstate 696 in late December 2019, forcing a major cleanup by the state. Amid the squalor were leaking barrels of sodium cyanide, stored next to uncovered, corroding plating baths full of acids, all "exposed to precipitation from the holes in the roof and windows,"…