Fox River PCB Dredging will go Extra Year

Cleanup of the Fox River concluded for the season this week with the news the dredging and capping operation will extend one more year than originally thought.

This was to have been the second-to-last season for PCB cleanup that began in 2009, but Tetra Tech, the prime contractor for cleanup, determined the operation will need to continue for an additional year, company spokesman Scott Stein said this week.

“The project will go into 2018,” Stein said. “There is more dredging taking place than originally expected.”

It’s not a setback nor has any particular problem arisen, but it has just become clear that remediation plans had to be adjusted to include an additional season, Stein said.

That means workers from J.F. Brennan Co., the La Crosse-based subcontractor doing the dredging and capping work, will be on the river again in the spring, finish for the season in November 2017 and then get back onto the water again in spring of 2018.

The company has been hired to remove or cover polychlorinated biphenyls on the bottom of the Fox River. The toxic chemicals were used in the production of carbonless copy paper in the 1950s and 1960s and were spread through the process of manufacturing recycled paper products. Several paper companies located up and down the river are still hashing out who will ultimately be responsible for the cleanup cost.

The cleanup operation, directed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, involves dredging and landfilling sediment from the river and treating the water removed from the dredge material and discharging it back into the river. In some areas of the river, the EPA has approved a process of covering, rather than removing contaminated river sediment.

The cleanup has taken place over a 13-mile stretch of the lower Fox River. It began as an upstream, six-year cleanup wound down on Little Lake Butte de Morts.

This season, which Stein characterized as an average year, workers dredged 540,000 cubic yards of soil, which produced 325,576 tons of processed sediment. More than 15,000 truckloads transported 359,843 tons of dried material to a special landfill, and 906 million gallons of treated water were returned to the river.

Since the project began, that’s more than 3.8 million cubic yards of material dredged from the river, 2.1 million tons of dirt hauled to the landfill and 6.1 billion gallons of water treated and discharged. Workers have capped about 560 acres of river bottom.

Source: Green Bay Press-Gazette