EPA says no lasting elevated levels of harmful chemicals following East Jordan Plastics fire in South Haven

SOUTH HAVEN, Mich. -- A major environmental cleanup is underway in South Haven after a fire started outside of East Jordan Plastics before spreading to the building.

The Environmental Protection Agency was on site early Saturday morning after the fire until later that evening monitoring air quality around the site and the surrounding neighborhood.

According to the EPA, Saturday's results showed no lasting elevated levels of harmful chemicals.

They determined no further monitoring was necessary and Michigan's Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy will now oversee the remainder of the cleanup.

The other major concern is contaminated water.

"East Jordan's remediation crew is checking to see where contaminants have left the site, and they’ll be monitoring that with EGLE and providing that oversight to them. There’s water that could have left the site and has left the site. There could be debris left over. Any cleanup on the site will be taken up in trucks and disposed of in a safe way," shared South Haven City Manager, Katie Hosier.

Powerlines and a substation were de-energized across the city during the fire on Friday.

It was not a city-wide outage, according to Hosier, about 1/3 or approximately 200,800 people were without power for five hours.

"We did this to do several things. One, the safety of the firefighters that were on scene and then two, making sure that those lines did not have to be repaired because they caught on fire or transformers were damaged," explained Hosier.

Some utility poles will have to be fixed but cutting power quickly reduced the damage.

South Haven Fire Chief, Brandon Hinz, did another walkthrough of the site Tuesday morning.

"Fire damage in the building was very minimal. There was a fair amount of water damage in one affected area from the suppression system that had started due to the fire that made its way into that portion of the building," said Hinz.

The response to the fire required 17 fire departments, 14 long hours and about two million gallons of water.

The help from other departments came as far south as Sister Lakes and as far north as Fenville.

The EPA tells ABC57 the air quality monitoring results should be posted this week.