FMC Corporation

FMC Corporation is an American chemical manufacturing company headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The company was originally founded by chemist John Bean in 1883 as the Bean Spray Pump Company in Los Gatos, California, producing piston pumps for insecticides. In 1928, Bean Spray Pump purchased two companies: the Anderson-Barngrover Co. and Sprague-Sells Co. At this time the company changed its name to Food Machinery Corporation, and began using the initials FMC. In 1941 the company FMC received a contract to design and build amphibious landing vehicles tracked vehicles for the United States War Department, and afterwards the company continued to diversify its products. FMC currently employs some 5,500 people worldwide, and had gross revenues of US$3.4 billion in 2011.

History

The Bean Spray Pump Company

Founded in 1883 as the Bean Spray Pump Company in Los Gatos, California by chemist John Bean. The company's first product was a piston pump. Bean invented the pump to spray insecticide on the many fruit orchards in the area. A Bean sprayer is on display at the Forbes Mill museum there. Bean Avenue in downtown Los Gatos is named after John Bean.

FMC Corporation (Fridley Plant)

The 18-acre FMC Corporation (Fridley Plant) is a United States Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site located in Anoka County, Minnesota, several hundred feet east of the Mississippi River. Solvents, paint sludge, and plating wastes were generated and disposed of in an on-site dump from the 1940s until 1969. Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) staff sampled site surface and groundwater in the early 1980s and confirmed that ground and surface water were contaminated by industrial solvents. In the 1980s, solvents from the site were detected in the city of Minneapolis drinking water system intake that is located downgradient of where the FMC site groundwater contaminant plume enters the river.

To address this, the Minneapolis surface water intake was moved further downstream and into the center of the river. Regular sampling of the water from the intake has shown no exceedences of contaminants since the 1980s. Because of the threat posed to Minneapolis drinking water, this site received one of the highest Hazard Ranking System (HRS) scores of all sites on the Superfund National Priorities List (NPL). However, that threat was mitigated by relocating the intake. Cleanup work at the FMC site was initiated in the 1980s, and the groundwater extraction wells that were installed as part of the remedy have been in operation since that time.