We Are "Winging It" When It Comes to Water Contamination

TCE Plume In Kansas Is Connected to A Legacy of Toxic Waste.

Photo by madeleine craine on Unsplash

As many of you know, I grew up in Kansas, ­the land of sprawling wheat fields and bright yellow sunflowers. My family lived in in Lawrence, just a few hours north of Wichita, the state’s most populous city.

I recently got a note from Sarah in Wichita:

Thank you for writing Superman's Not Coming. You encouraged and inspired me to keep pushing this issue. We successfully filed a class action lawsuit against Textron Aviation last week and the local news has covered it heavily.

Up to 300 homes in east Wichita sit above a toxic plume* of chemicals, putting their health at risk and damaging their property values, according to attorneys representing the group.

While everyone else is talking about the possibility of President Trump accepting Qatar’s gift of a luxury jet, let’s talk about the aviation industry and its impact on Sarah and her neighbors in Kansas because this story is all too American.

First, did you know that Wichita is considered the “air capital of the world”?

In January 1925 four aviation pioneers, Clyde Cessna, Lloyd Stearman, Walter Beech, and Olive Ann Mellor Beech, linked up in Wichita to form Travel Air Manufacturing Company. Wichita went on to become a global leader in corporate, commercial, and defense aerospace, and it continues to be a hotspot for aerospace engineering and manufacturing.

Why Wichita? After the Wright brother’s first flight, more people wanted to emulate their experience and take to the skies. Those trailblazers needed large patches of flat land, and that’s why many of them flocked to Wichita. It became home to airfields and eventually some of the industry’s most renowned aerospace manufacturers, including Textron Aviation (Cessna and Beechcraft), Bell Flight, Bombardier Learjet, Spirit AeroSystems, and Airbus.

In the early 1990s, I was working in Hinkley, California, discovering that a carcinogen called hexavalent chromium (also known as chromium-­ 6) had contaminated the water in town,­ leading to a years-­long environmental investigation and lawsuit that would eventually turn into a movie.

I thought Hinkley was one-off incident, but I soon started to learn that there were “Hinkley’s” everywhere. As our manufacturing industries were building their companies and profits in small towns and cities throughout the country, the contamination of our soil and drinking water began to rise with their toxic chemical leftovers.

Starting in the 1990s, trichloroethene (TCE), a colorless, nonflammable, liquid solvent was used in both industrial and household items and became a popular metal degreasing agent. Said in a different way, manufacturers used it to remove grease and dirt from metal parts. It was a favorite in the aircraft industry.

Most people get exposed to TCE by consuming contaminated drinking water. The water becomes contaminated from some combination of industry discharge or spills and existing hazardous-­waste sites. TCE breaks down slowly and can move through soil to find its way into drinking water sources.

TCE is a known human carcinogen and prolonged or repeated exposure can cause kidney cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and liver cancer. It can also cause damage to the central nervous system, liver, kidneys, immune system, reproductive organs, and fetal heart defects.

TCE is still a problem.

In December 2024, the EPA issued a final rule regulating TCE. The rule bans the manufacture (including import), processing, and distribution in commerce of TCE for all uses.

But… the EPA has received multiple petitions for review of the final rule. Also… due to a January 20 memo from President Trump, entitled “Regulatory Freeze Pending Review,” the EPA temporarily delayed the effective date of the rule. So, we’re not in the clear yet.

Let’s get back to Kansas.

In the early ‘90s, defense contractor Raytheon, then owner of an aviation plant in Wichita, discovered solvent contamination in the soil and groundwater.

The solvents were tracked back to three buildings on the campus where employees used equipment like vapor degreasers to clean and prepare metal for manufacturing.

The chemicals seeped into the groundwater, creating a chemical plume that started at the plant and flowed outward. Among the chemicals discovered in the plume? TCE. The plume now stretches beyond the plant property. Now, neighbors of the plant are launching a class action lawsuit.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) monitors the situation and has designated the area as the Textron Aviation Site.

Let’s get clear. The groundwater contamination gets discovered in 1993. The levels in the groundwater below the facility are up to 20,000 times higher than safe levels, according to facility reports.

In 2007, Raytheon is sold to Hawker Beechcraft Corporation, which declares bankruptcy in 2012, emerging from bankruptcy in 2013 as Beechcraft Corp. Textron, Inc. then purchases the facility and is now known as Textron Aviation.

In 2025, neighbors file a lawsuit. More than 30 years later, and people are still trying to get this one manufacturing plant to clean up its mess.

I mention this company hot potato because it’s just one of the ways that corporations shirk environmental responsibility. Companies move on—whether they declare bankruptcy, spin off into a new organization, or move locations—while the contamination stays put (or grows).

People pick a neighborhood to live in because it’s quiet, has tree-lined streets, or it feels like a nice place for their kids to ride their bikes. They don’t think about whether a chemical plume will go unnoticed for years and then potentially cause their whole family to get sick or their property values to plummet.

Environmental pollution is not easy to detect or prove. It’s part of why regulating industry can be so difficult. It takes years to build a scientific case to prove the harmful effects certain chemicals have on our health. Many toxic chemicals have latency periods of 10, 20, or 30+ years.

But bad players need to be called out, and dots need to be connected.

Throughout the 1990s, Raytheon bought out companies and inherited environmental headaches, as they discovered that chemicals used by those companies had seeped into the soil and groundwater, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

In 2008, the paper reported that more than 90 federal lawsuits sought to make Raytheon pay for removing or cleaning up tainted soil. Residents in the Azalea neighborhood in St. Petersburg sought legal help back then to get a quick cleanup.

They soon found out that the company was running remediation programs in 45 locations, costing about $149-million, according to company reports.

Something very similar happened in Arizona.

Hughes Aircraft opened a manufacturing plant in Tucson in 1950, using chemicals like TCE to degrease metal parts. Let’s assume at the time, people didn’t know it might cause cancer.

Time goes on, chemicals leak into the soil and the contamination spreads.

In 1978, water pollution turns up in residents' private wells, which is often where we find these toxic chemicals. By 1981, an “unusual cluster of health problems,” including cancer, sprout up near the plant.

The site goes on the EPA’s Superfund list in 1983. By 1991, Hughes settles a class-action lawsuit for $84.5-million. Raytheon buys the plant in the mid ‘90s, knowing the pollution is still there. In 2006, the EPA finds that Raytheon's cleanup facility has been allowing unsafe levels of TCE in water being used by 50,000 Tucson residents.

And the cycle continues.

(Shout out to Andrew Dunn’s excellent reporting in the Tampa Bay Times in 2008 that helped us create the summary above).

Let’s go back to Florida. In 2023, city leaders in St. Pete approved a new condo project with 1,000 homes at the old Raytheon site in the Azalea neighborhood. We continue to build homes on documented toxic sites! Residents signed a petition in opposition to the new development and it gained more than 1,500 signatures before the city council meeting.

Why don’t we listen to the people??!! We all know housing is another huge issue in this country, but no one wants to live at a toxic waste site.

*What is a Plume?

A contaminated groundwater plume exists when hazardous substances, pollutants, or contaminants are present within an aquifer system. A plume of contaminated groundwater may be formed when substances are released to groundwater from a source at a facility. The contaminated plume can spread horizontally, vertically, and transversely through the aquifer system by means of infiltration, migration, interaquifer exchange, and interaction with surface water.

Source

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My biggest hope is that our communities can find relief. In Kansas. In Florida. In Arizona. Everywhere. We need better technologies to help us remediate contaminated sites. We need private industry (usually the polluters) to foot the bill, not their neighbors. Remember, we fund the EPA with our tax dollars. These companies post billion-dollar profits while people suffer.

It’s time for a change. It starts with more communities understanding that they are not alone in these toxic incidents.