After 23 years of clearing political, financial and engineering hurdles, the Army Corps of Engineers has announced that the last of the uranium-laden soil at the former National Lead site in Colonie will be shipped west.
It marks the end of extensive community and legislative efforts to clean the industrial site, surrounded by West Albany and city of Albany homes.
This month, Army Corps engineers announced that funding had been restored to the estimated $200 million cleanup, after the federal budget shorted the project $6 million last year. That loss of funding resulted in tons of contaminated soil sitting on cement pads waiting for the funds to cover the cost of shipping the waste soil to a storage site out west by rail.
Engineers had hoped that they would be able to complete the cleanup in September 2006. Nearly a year late is better than never, officials said.
This is it. We have commenced loading soil, and we are not going to stop until all the soil is moved from the site, said James Moore, project manager for the New York District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. `We expect to be finished shipping in mid-August.`
Moore is the third Corps project manger at the site.
Extensive cleanup of the 11-acre site began in 1991, with the cleanup of homes and properties adjacent to the site. The U.S. Department of Energy took over the site in the early 1980s and immediately began razing site structures. The contaminated soil was left behind.
In its heyday, National Lead contracted with the Department of Energy to fabricate aircraft ballast constructed of depleted uranium for post-World War II aircraft. The company continued to work with nuclear materials until 1984, when remediation of the site began.
The site will be turned back over to the Department of Energy once cleanup is completed, said Moore. If it has no use for it, it will be offered to other federal agencies, then on to state agencies and finally local agencies.
As of September 2006, the end of the federal fiscal year, the site had cost $172 million to clean up, $33 million of which had gone toward shipping waste out west.
In April 2006, the engineers had cleaned 80 percent of the site when they hit a large pocket of Uranium 238 contaminated soil. Engineers estimated that roughly 600 cubic yards of soil would have to be removed. By the time they had cleaned the parcel, they had dug up 3,000 cubic yards and found themselves with no additional funding to ship it off site.
It was the second such hurdle for the dig. In 2004, engineers ran into another deposit of contaminated soil nearly double what they anticipated. It set work crews back nearly a year.
Working from west to east, workers remove contaminated soil from half-acre sites at a time. In total, about 200,000 cubic yards of soil has been removed.
It has been a long time coming for Colonie, said Kevin Bronner, a town board member who will not seek re-election this year for a third term on the board.
Bronner said he is pleased to see the site clean. For him and his family, the cleanup of the National Lead site, a half-mile from where he grew up in Albany, has been something of a personal mission.
Bronner grew up on Rosemont Street in Albany. His father, David E. Bronner, an Albany area attorney, began looking for answers about the site after some urging by neighbors.
`My father theorized that a lot of people on our street were dying predominately of cancer,` said Bronner. `It’s never been proven.`
The number of people suffering from various forms of cancer in the area of the site surprised his father, said Bronner. He and another prominent Albany attorney, Stephen R. Coffey, took the state and federal government to task. Their fight started in the late 1970s and came to an end when initial steps toward cleanup began in 1984.
David Bronner was later diagnosed with lymphoma. He died in 1991 at age 81. His wife, Marjorie, died at age 67 of leukemia.
Bronner said he still remembers walking the family dog, a boxer, at the site. The dog used to sniff the grass as it walked along, he said. The dog later died of leukemia.
When first elected to his town post, Kevin Bronner attended the public meetings the Corps would hold to update the public on the clean up efforts. He and board member Tom With acted as de facto liaisons between the town and Corps.
Since 2000, the town has taken a tough stance on the project and has done what it could to keep the Corps and state on task. When the announcement came last year that soil would be sitting on the site because there was no money to haul it off, the town demanded the funds be reinstated and that the work continue. Local, state and U.S. representatives joined in the fight to help secure the necessary funding.
Moore praised their efforts in getting the funding restored.
Funding for the cleanup is through the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, a line item of the Energy and Water Development appropriations bill in Congress. The program was established to clean up sites used as part of the Manhattan Project and other federal nuclear research sites.
`We were made aware that we were going to receive the extra dollars to finish the project in January,` said Moore.
It’s been a challenging process that couldn’t have happened without a lot of people supporting, he said.
`This is a big milestone,` Moore said.
Army Corps engineers will monitor the site for up to a year after the last of the soil is shipped off. They will monitor ground water for any further contamination before the site is deemed 100 percent clean, he said.“