City assessing Balloon Track, waterfront contamination
Eureka has received a sizable grant from the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency to assess contaminated sites that can be cleaned up and redeveloped within the Balloon Track and waterfront areas.
This year, the city of Eureka received a $300,000 communitywide grant from the EPA’s Brownfield Program to assess sites between the Balloon Track and Waterfront areas and determine how contaminated they are with petroleum and other hazardous substances. Once sites are assessed, they’re eligible for cleanup grants.
“Many brownfields end up becoming parks,” said Paul Wisniewski, of SCS Engineers, a national consulting firm that specializes in brownfields assessment and redevelopment and is working on the project.
In addition to SCS Engineers, Arcata- based consulting firm Freshwater Environmental Services will be assisting in the environmental site assessments and Craig Communications will be doing community outreach for the project. This past Thursday, the group held the first of three community meetings set to take place over the life of the project, which is expected to last through 2022.
“The city’s responsible for the overall management and administration of the project,” said Eureka’s Deputy City Engineer David Caisse.
The grant is expected to fund:
• the creation of a list of eligible properties, which is currently underway;
• the first phase of an environmental site assessment that will include non-invasive, paper-based research on the property;
• the second phase of the site assessment that will include testing suspect sites;
• preparing documents related to cleanup planning and redevelopment;
• preparing a final report of the findings for the EPA;
• community outreach meetings throughout the process.
“We’ve already confirmed some sites as being eligible,” Wisniewski said. “And now we’re starting to just now work with property owners to see if they want to become a part of the project.”
The project is currently in Stage 1, inventorying sites, and the group expects to move into Stage 2, conducting the first phase of the environmental site assessments, in January or February, Wisniewski said.
Phase 1 of the environmental
site assessments usually take four to six weeks to complete and include visiting and photographing the site, reviewing historical documents and public records related to the site, and interviewing those knowledgeable about its history, among other things, he said. The group will be assessing about a dozen sites for a Phase 1 assessment.
“There is no sampling in Phase 1, so it’s really a desk exercise, so to speak,” Wisniewski said.
The Phase 1 assessments could potentially include a recommendation to conduct a Phase 2 environmental site assessment, he said. Stage 3 will be the second phase of those assessments and they would
be expected to take three to eight months because drilling may be required, Wisniewski said.
“This will involve sampling, investigating and reporting,” Wisniewski said. “And we’ll share the results with the community and what steps to take next.”
Stage 4 will be cleanup planning, Wisniewski said.
The city already has one “brownfield success story,” Halvorsen Park near Samoa Bridge, formerly known as the Foundry area of the Old Carson Mill Site, Caisse said.
“It was an old lumber mill with mixed industrial uses,” Caisse said, “which ultimately led to contamination in the soil and groundwater.”
Using an EPA grant, the city cleaned up the area from 2005 to 2008 and turned it into a park, Caisse said.
For more information
or to view the community outreach meeting, visit bit. ly/34caILP.