Yellowish liquid was present for years on property that forced closure of Bartram’s Mile Trail

Satellite photos produced by a nonprofit environmental and social advocacy group indicate that the presence of a yellowish liquid can be dated to at least 2018 on an old petroleum property off Bartram’s Mile Trail, which leads to the eponymous 50-acre garden, an urban oasis on the banks of the Schuylkill.

Several hundred feet of the trail has been closed since July 15 after a local resident spotted a discharge of yellow and greenish liquid from the property known as 51st Street Terminal onto the paved path and reported it to Bartram’s Garden officials. Sampling released last week by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection showed excessive amounts of hexavalent chromium at four locations along the trail, which is adjacent to the 51st Street Terminal property — the site containing the liquid.

The nonprofit advocacy group Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania said its maps, created using Google Earth, show the presence of liquid over years, raising questions as to why it had never been tested for chromium before reports of a discharge by a member of the public. There’s no way to state whether the liquid in previous years contained chromium, but the group says the maps raise questions.

Andy Switzer, a local resident, first reported the issue to the state Department of Environmental Protection in April. Switzer later reported more discharge in July directly to Bartram’s Garden, whose leadership immediately closed the trail as a precaution.

The property at 51st and Botanic Streets, with a 100-year history of industrial use, is being remediated for development of a warehouse. The adjacent trail is widely used by dog walkers, joggers, birders and cyclists.

The maps created using Google Earth by the Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania, and verified by The Inquirer by reproducing similar maps, show an approximately 200-foot-long stretch of the property where liquid can be seen at times parallel to the Baltimore & Philadelphia railroad tracks. The tracks are adjacent to Bartram’s Mile Trail. The photos also indicate what appears to be sediment fanning out from the property onto the trail over the years in August 2018.

Recent testing conducted by the current property owner, Alliance 51st LLC, and released by the DEP showed four samples taken along the trail area exceeded a residential cleanup standard of hexavalent chromium of 37 parts per million. The highest level detected was 77 parts per million. Some of the photos also show what appears to be sediment spilling into the Schuylkill. Contamination took place before Alliance’s purchase of the land in December 2021.

Officials, however, have stressed that the public had not been at risk and would have had to routinely make contact with contaminated material or ingest it over time. The Philadelphia Water Department has said drinking water was never in danger.

DEP officials, who received test results by the property owner showing the presence of chromium on the site, have not identified a source for the chemical, and it remains unclear whether it originated on the property. The surrounding area contains multiple businesses regulated by the DEP, including a recycling and metals facility and a steel facility, as well as a freight rail line.

“DEP continues to coordinate with PWD [Philadelphia Water Department] and the responsible party at the property to address the discharge issue,” the agency said Thursday in a statement, and provided a public presentation it gave during a recent virtual meeting.

Chromium isn’t typically a part of petroleum operations, and it’s the likely reason the site hadn’t been tested for it, though the compound is used as an anticorrosive for metals. Initially, it was believed synthetic dyes might have been the source of the yellow and green colored water found on the property.

» READ MORE: Excessive levels of chromium, a toxin, were found along a now-closed part of Bartram’s Mile Trail, tests show

The Google Earth photos by themselves do not confirm that chromium had been present in past years but raise concerns, said Christina Digiulio, an environmental chemist with the nonprofit Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania.

“If you go back to 2018, you can see the same yellow stuff there,” DiGiulio said. “And to me that’s concerning because they’re still trying to identify the source. But it’s clear that if you go back and do research on the maps that there were very strong signs of it in 2022, 2023, and 2024 also.”

The 12-acre property has had a long industrial history, and was also found this year to contain a cocktail of other chemicals including benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and other compounds. It was first used for lumber storage as far back as 1923. From 1923 to 1945, it was used to make cardboard containers, according to DEP records. Samples along the trail also tested positive for lead and arsenic at levels officials said presented little risk to the public.

From 1951 to 1975, 10 aboveground storage tanks were installed for use as a fuel terminal by Allied Oil Inc. and later Hess Oil & Chemical Corp. In 2009, the site was sold to Plains Product Terminals LLC, which sold it in 2016 to PBF Logistics, which removed 12 petroleum aboveground storage tanks in 2021.

At the end of 2021, Alliance 51st Street LLC purchased the property from PBF Logistics for $8.2 million, according to city records. Alliance 51st Street LLC is based at Alliance HP in Bryn Mawr. Alliance HP is a real estate investment firm. All the tanks were gone by the time of that last purchase.

Alliance 51st Street enrolled the property into the DEP’s Act 2 voluntary cleanup program, which is the state’s program to reuse brownfield properties. Alliance 51st Street is currently performing work to clean the property to Act 2 standards.

Kevin Feeley, a spokesperson for Alliance 51st Street, said the company does not know all of what took place on the property prior to its purchase.

“We knew from the beginning, however, that the site was a former petroleum tank farm and that it had a history of environmental contamination,” Feeley said.

The company hired Arcadis, a large environmental firm, to conduct comprehensive environmental assessments.

“To be clear, we were highly motivated to find any and all environmental issues at the property prior to buying it, so that we would know the extent of the cleanup costs, and because it would have impacted the purchase price,” Feeley said. “No chromium was ever identified.”

“There was no reason to suspect that there would be chromium on the site, based on the comprehensive historical assessment of the property, so there would have been no reason for anyone to test for it.” Feeley said.

“To our knowledge, at no time during the Act 2 process did DEP or anyone else ever identify the presence of chromium runoff at the site until April of this year. We remain committed to cleaning up the property and restoring it to productive use, and we will continue to work closely with DEP to address this issue and prevent it from reoccurring in the future,” he added.

Maitreyi Roy, executive director of Bartram’s Garden, who coordinated with the city’s Parks and Recreation to close the trail July 15, said she is “concerned that this has gone on so long.”

She’s worried about heavy rains that swept through the area this week, with more forecast as the remnants of Hurricane Debby make their way through the region Thursday night through Friday night. The rain, she fears, could cause more water to flow off the property, even though Alliance 51st Street has installed protective earthen berms and flexible tubes to prevent runoff.

“I suspect that just doing those berms is not going to be enough,” she said.

For now, and until the DEP produces more test results, she’s keeping Bartram’s Mile Trail closed.

Harrison Feinman, spokesperson for City Councilmember Jamie R. Gauthier, who represents the Third District that includes West and Southwest Philadelphia, said the “photographs concern our office” and have been told by the DEP they would factor into its investigation into discharges onto the trail.

“While we wait for the results, it is clear that there was an unacceptable breakdown in communication and oversight from responsible government agencies, dating at least back to April, if not long before,” Feinman said.

Russell Zerbo, and advocate with the Clean Air Council, said his group is monitoring cleanup activity at the site, particularly regards to storm water runoff. He said that testing for chromium was not part of the Act 2 cleanup because it had not been known to be used on the site, a fault of the process, he said.

“The whole thing would just have been figured out months or years ago if they had just been required to test for chromium,” Zerbo said.