Work, work, work

Today I'm in Wilmington, NC (as well as Castle Hayne and Riegelwood). Kyra asks me frequently what I did at work today. My typical response is "phone calls, e-mail, reading reports, writing letters, meetings." So, I thought I'd chronical my work day while I'm away on a business trip. My day started by waking at 6:27 a.m. (no I didn't set my alarm for this time) and checking work e-mail from my hotel room. I'm really glad I did, because the hotel internet was down in the evening. I mainly wanted to make sure there were no last minute emails announcing a change in my plans for the day. I was glad to read in the weekly progress report for my HoltraChem Site, that they were still on schedule for completing this portion of the project today.

I left the hotel at 8 a.m. and met a half-dozen people at the Reasor Chemical Co. Site at 9 a.m. The contaminated soil, sediment and surface water was removed from the Site in the summer of 2007. Land use restrictions have been added to the property deed to prevent someone from installing drinking water wells on the property until the groundwater remediation is completed. All that remains to be done at this site is annual groundwater monitoring and annual inspections to ensure natural revegetation of the areas where contamination was removed. The property is about 25 acres of woods. Spending the morning in the woods watching groundwater sampling was a lot more fun than sitting at my desk in the office! The yellow posts in the photo are simply posts to prevent a vehicle from running into the wells. The grey rectangular posts on either side of the barrel contain the two wells that the contractor is sampling. At this point in time, we simply monitoring the pH of the water. The water in these wells have historically had very low pH values and elevated metals concentrations. Because metal concentrations in groundwater are somewhat dependent on pH, the goal is to increase the pH of the water to a neutral range in the hopes of dropping the metals content. They installed a lime trench just upgradient of these wells in 2007. This sampling event noted an increase in the pH of the water in the shallow well, but it's still not close to the neutral range we're looking for. We knew it may take years for the lime trench to completely neutralize the water in the wells, so we're happy with seeing at least some progress in the right direction.

When we were finished with the wells, we walked over to the ponds to observe their progress. All three held water and had grassy vegetation growing around them. Small trees were also starting to grow. We heard frogs and birds and saw tracks of deer, racoon, and a big cat. It looks so much better than it did years ago.

If you'd like more information about this Site, feel free to click on the following link: http://www.epa.gov/region4/waste/npl/nplnc/reasornc.htm

Also, I won a national award for writing an excellent Record of Decision for this Site in 2002: http://www.epa.gov/superfund//accomp/awards/rods/index.htm. I took Kyra with me to accept the award in Washington DC in 2003. We stayed an extra day and visited the National Zoo and a few museums. Not sure if she remembers it, but it was a great trip...

We left Reasor at 12:30 p.m. and drove towards the HoltraChem Site (also known as Acme Alkali). We stopped at Roberta's Country Kitchen for a great meal of meatloaf and fresh vegetables. Yum! The weather forecast called for rain later in the day, but the clouds were getting darker and the wind was picking up. When we arrived at Acme, I could see workers on top of Engineered Stockpile #2 working on the liner. The purpose of my visit was to view the finished product, but they were still working on it. Drats... This site's primary contaminants are mercury and PCB Aroclor 1268. During 2003-2004, the property owner's contractor worked to remove all containerized hazardous chemicals under EPA's oversight. I spent roughly one week a month at the Site during that time period, while two other EPA staff covered the other weeks. After that was complete, we began sampling the groundwater, soil, surface water and sediment to see how deep and wide the contamination existed. In the process, the neighboring facility, International Paper, took samples in their former waste water treatment lagoon and found PCB Aroclor 1268. HoltraChem used to discharge waste water to IP through that lagoon. So, in May 2008, contractors began excavating the contaminated sediment. The plan was to temporarily store the sediment with PCB concentrations greater than 50 ppm on the HoltraChem property in Engineered Stockpiles, and place the rest of the material in IP's landfill. The third photograph in this blog entry is of Engineered Stockpile #1. The contractor estimated it would take two months to complete and that the volume to be placed on the HoltraChem property would be about 6,500 cubic yards, in one stockpile. They were way off... Eight months later, and almost 20,000 cubic yards, they finally finish this phase. I've spent roughly 2 weeks a month here since May (sometimes more, sometimes less). The last photo is of Engineered Stockpile #2, with workers seaming liner segments together to seal the PCB-contaminated material into a gigantic baggie.

During the next few years will be completing the ecological risk assessment and figuring how to treat or dispose of all the contaminated soil, sediment and groundwater. If you'd like more information on this Site, feel free to click on the following link: http://www.epa.gov/region4/waste/npl/nplnc/holtranc.htm

I had planned to run at the beach this evening, but the storm began about the time I arrived back at the hotel. I don't mind running in a light rain, but this storm had hard rains and wind gusts up to 40 mph, so I opted to do my tempo run on the hotel treadmill instead.