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By William M. Hartnett, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

FLORIDA, 14 June 2002 --In the 16 years since it was produced in a Philadelphia garbage incinerator, a 2,200-ton load of ash that now sits in a barge south of Stuart has criss-crossed the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea, accumulating an itinerary that reads like a traveler's delight.

Turned away from Bermuda, the Dominican Republic and other tropical ports of call, and after being abandoned on a beach in Haiti for more than a decade, the ash found a temporary home on the Treasure Coast in April 2000.

There it has rested ever since, piled deep in an oceangoing hopper barge moored on the St. Lucie Canal.

But now, finally, the saga of the infamous and supposedly toxic ash that no one wanted in their back yard appears to be limping toward an elegant, symmetrical resolution.

Final destination: Pennsylvania.

If all goes according to plan, the globe-trotting ash will be moved to the Mountain View Reclamation Landfill in Franklin County -- a scant 120 miles west of where it was first produced -- by mid-July. The move was approved by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection on Thursday.

"Out of all the options we've looked at for the past two years, it seemed like Pennsylvania was on the same train of thought as the rest of us" when it came to deciding where the ash should be disposed of, said Melissa Meeker, director of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection's southeast district office.

"It's Pennsylvania's ash, it was generated there, and we feel they should take responsibility for it."

Environmental regulators in Pennsylvania shared that view.

"The state believes that since this was originally Pennsylvania waste, that we should take it back and dispose of it here," said Sandra Roderick, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania DEP.

Environmental regulators in Florida and Pennsylvania worked together over several months to draw up intricate arrangements for moving the ash, now considered harmless by environmental officials.

The material will be loaded into a series of 20-foot-long, 8-foot-wide sealed containers and trucked to a railroad facility in Miami. The ash will require an estimated 100 truckloads to move, Meeker said.

The containers will then be transported by train to a site in northern Maryland, where they will again be loaded onto trucks and driven the final dozen or so miles to the landfill near the south-central Pennsylvania town of Upton.

Such meticulous measures are designed to reassure the public that the ash is being handled safely, she said. The misguided perception of the ash as hazardous, Meeker said, is what has prevented it from being disposed of permanently for all these years.

Workers have begun removing plants, weeds and trees that have taken root in the ash while it sat idle, and could begin unloading the ash as early as Monday, Meeker said.

The Florida DEP will pay the estimated $615,250 cost of moving the material, then will seek reimbursement.

From whom they will seek repayment, however, will have to be determined in court. Deciphering who is legally responsible for the ash is a murky proposition.

Waste Management Inc. became involved in the ash saga in late 1998 when it bought a company with ties to the firm that was awarded the original contract from Philadelphia to dispose of the ash.

State environmental regulators have said in the past, however, that the company's circuitous connection to the ash absolved it of any legal responsibility for its disposal.

Produced in Philadelphia in 1986 during a critical shortage of landfill space, the ash has been sampled and deemed safe over the years by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the city of Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania and Florida departments of environmental protection and an independent testing company.

But some environmental advocates, including Greenpeace, believed the ash was toxic, and every failed attempt to dispose of it, every Third World port from which it was turned away at gunpoint, only made the next attempt all the more likely to fail as well.

After it was turned away during the late 1980s from the Bahamas, Bermuda, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guinea-Bissau in Africa and the Netherlands Antilles, part of the original 14,000 tons of ash was abandoned on a beach in Haiti, where it remained for more than a decade.

The freighter carrying the remaining 10,000 tons of ash eventually made its way to Asia -- minus the ash, which presumably was dumped into the Indian Ocean.

The ash that remained on the beach in Haiti was brought back to the United States in March 2000 and found its way to the Treasure Coast in late April of that year. Since then, the material has sat in a barge tied up at Maritime Tug & Barge.

More than anything, it has been the ash's long, globe-trotting history that has scuttled attempts over the years to dispose of it in, among other places, Georgia, Louisiana and Oklahoma.

Environmental regulators also thought they had found a solution to the ash problem early last year, devising a plan to ship it to a waste-to-energy plant in Pompano Beach, where it would be reburned and buried in a landfill.

Broward County commissioners nixed the plan in a matter of days, however, angrily threatening Waste Management with economic reprisals if it was carried out.

After several such episodes in just the two years since the ash came to South Florida, Meeker is relieved to be getting rid of the material.

"I've had staff who have gone out there nearly every day to make sure it's OK, stable and not a threat to the waterway," Meeker said. "It's been a burden."

william_hartnett@pbpost.com