Posted on April 29, 2019
NEW BEDFORD — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to build access roads and staging areas this year in preparation for removing toxic waste from New Bedford Harbor’s northernmost shoreline.
Actual removal will begin over the winter of 2019-2020 on the east side, below Slocum Street, according to the EPA. Work was delayed from late 2018 on the highly contaminated shores on both the east and west sides near the former Aerovox site because of several factors, including the need to secure an access agreement, EPA spokeswoman Kelsey Dumville said.
The EPA Superfund program began full-scale dredging in 2004 to remove polychlorinated biphenyls from industrial waste.
To date, work has focused mainly on dredging below the tide line, which is expected to be finished in 2019, marking a major milestone for the project.
The agency has also done shoreline work in residential and recreational areas, including the cove at Riverside Park.
“Now what’s left is commercial, industrial and more remote,” said David Dickerson, an EPA manager on the project.
David Lederer, head of the New Bedford Harbor site for the EPA, said progress will be slower on land, because sediment must be dewatered on site, rather than pumped to the dewatering plant. Plus, the sediment has to be trucked out, instead of hauled by train.
“Everything’s more complicated on land,” he said.
Work on land also involves restoration of the shoreline, replanting native plants, and making sure the new plantings survive, “before the geese eat them all, for instance,” Dickerson said.
Toward the end of the year, the EPA and its contractors will begin demobilizing the equipment used for the subtidal dredging. Next year, the dewatering plant on Hervey Tichon Avenue will be closed.
To date, the combined EPA work and state-funded navigational dredging that removed contaminated sediment have pulled 1.35 million cubic yards of material from polluted locations. Although the majority of it — and the most contaminated — has been moved off site, a significant portion has been buried in sand-capped cells on the floor of the harbor.
The average concentration of PCBs in the “confined aquatic disposal” cell, or CAD cell, in the lower harbor is about 70 parts per million, according to the EPA.
That doesn’t sit well with some local environmentalists, including Karen Vilandry, president of the Hands Across the River Coalition. She said the term “CAD cell” creates the false impression that the toxic waste is in metal containers, when the cells are actually unlined holes.
She also said the use of average PCB concentrations could conceal high numbers balanced by low ones.
“We want to hear what the high levels are, not the average,” she said.
Average PCB concentrations in the upper harbor have dropped dramatically since 2004 — from an estimated 300 parts per million to 75 last June and 26 today. By the end of 2019, they should be less than 10, according to the EPA.
This month, workers finished installing a temporary underwater cap near the former Aerovox site, a continued source of PCB leakage. Dredging in that area will not happen until a state-supervised cleanup of the land is done.
AVX Corp., which owns the Aerovox liability for the land, and its environmental consultant are expected to submit an abatement plan within the next several weeks, according to Joseph Ferson, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. DEP needs to approve the plan. Once it does, the company has a year to begin implementing it, Ferson said.
Michele Paul, environmental director for the city of New Bedford, said that once the dewatering facility is closed, it will become an integral part of the working waterfront. The city is also looking for the highest and best use of the Sawyer Street facility farther north, which the city has been leasing to the EPA.
“We will eventually make a really good lemonade out of lemons,” she said.
Source: southcoasttoday.com
