The soil in a neighbourhood in Chicago appears to be contaminated with a dry cleaning chemical which has been used for decades by a dry cleaning business.
On 1st of August a federal judge in the United states ruled that the fault is of the owners Edward Ditchfield and Helen Ditchfield. They have been in charge of their dry cleaning business for 35 years. It is considered that during the first 15 years, there was an old machine used for cleaning which let huge amount of perchloroethlene to spill.
The perchloroethlene is mostly known as perc. This is a carcinogen which spilled in the soil can be hardly cleaned. The machine used for dry cleaning from 1978 until 1992 had used 100 gallons of perc in comparison to the new machines which use 50 gallons per year. Using such a huge amount of perc led to the evaporation of it in the air which is the reason for the contamination of a whole neighbourhood.
What had happened became clear after Forest Park National Bank & Trust owned a nearby property. Now the bank is incapable of selling the property because the contamination of the soil and groundwater is higher than the standard levels of EPA.
