Every once in a while, I am reminded that the messes we humans make can be really hard to clean up.
In the past, the context was my sons’ rooms. Until they left for college, I would just rake everything into a corner and hope for the best.
But Thursday, when I attended a forum called “Brownfields to Parks,” the thought took on a vastly broader scope. Brownfields, FYI, are stretches of land that have become contaminated by hazardous industrial waste and chemicals. Not so hazardous that they are Superfund sites, which only the sturdiest cockroaches can survive, but places that need some clean-up before they can be reused. If you take take even a short drive around town, you’ll spot them immediately: abandoned factories, commercial buildings or rail yards, or the sites of former dry-cleaning stores or gas stations.
For the past 20 years or so, there’s been an effort underway to redevelop such land. “Before, we would abandon these places and move out to new green land in the suburbs,” says Martha Faust, executive director of Minnesota Brownfields, a private nonprofit that’s been promoting the investigation, cleanup and redevelopment of brownfield sites.
Now, with the drive to stem urban sprawl to save fuel and commuting time, among other things, city planners and pollution control agencies want to reclaim the sites. On Thursday, the group got together with the Twin Cities branch of the Trust for Public Land, the parks and conservation organization, to present case studies of successful brownfield-to-parks projects to show what’s involved.
Converting empty land into empty land with trees, I thought; how hard could that be? You scrape off the gross stuff on top, bring in some sod and, voilà, a park.
Newark example
It took only the first speaker, Scott Dvorak, director of the Parks-for-People-Newark program of the Trust for Public Land, to convince me otherwise. The very first park he helped develop belonged to the city’s Central Ward, which had been partly destroyed during six days of rioting in 1967. (Newark, by the way, has only three acres of parkland for every 1,000 residents while Minneapolis has 14 acres per 1,000 people.) The city bought a nine-acre parcel for a park in the 1970s but then did nothing with it. Even though new development had grown up around the plot, including a new high school, the “park” was no more than a mud field when Dvorak started working on the project.
So what had to be done before the land could be transformed? Well, a bazillion things, but here are some of the highlights. Underneath the surface, Dvorak and his team found 27 huge tanks that once held heating oil for residential buildings. They had to be removed at considerable extra cost. Another problem was what Dvorak calls “historic fill,” which is debris left by whatever was there before. In Newark, that was the remains of apartment houses, tanneries, smelting operations and “all kinds of things stuck in of concrete,” said Dvorak.
“Like Jimmy Hoffa?” I asked.
“Exactly,” he said.
Some debris might be contaminated with toxins, so it has to be tested — another time- and money-consuming effort. Then polluted stuff has to be hauled away to a landfill and replaced with “clean” dirt. After that, the whole lot is “capped” with more clean dirt. All that had to happen before Parks for People-Newark (N.J.) could get to the stuff that people could see and appreciate: a soccer field, a running track, playgrounds, trees, walkways and a small amphitheater.
The end result, Nat Turner Park, says Dvorak, has now become the center of the neighborhood instead of a stretch of urban desert that everyone avoided.
Dvorak described the challenges his Newark group endured in their efforts to develop two other parks: the emergence of oozing oil patches, highly polluted “hot spots,” slag composed of molten lead, which can be poisonous through skin contact, and removal of tons of dirty dirt.
After that, we moved on to two brownfield projects in the Twin Cities, which I thought, would be nowhere near as difficult to redevelop as anything in Newark. After all, Newark has since its founding served as New York City’s industrial hind end, by which I mean that practically everything really ugly, smelly and messy wound up in New Jersey, often in Newark.
Minnesota sites
But as I learned, Minnesota is not so spanking clean either. According to Minnesota Brownfields, the state has reclaimed 4,000 sites with a total of 32,000 acres. But at least 10,000 contaminated or potentially contaminated spots remain.
One of those, the Scherer Lumberyard site, is in Minneapolis on the Mississippi above the falls near the Plymouth Avenue Bridge and part of the city’s River First initiative to turn riverfront into parkland. Cliff Swenson of the Park and Recreation Board itemized the tasks that had to be completed on this parcel: demolition of lumberyard buildings, removal of a railroad spur and an 1,100-gallon fuel-oil tank, completion of nine different investigations of the soil, remediation five areas contaminated with lead, arsenic and other goodies, the hauling away 800,000 yards of contaminated soil and the the testing and importation of three feet worth of “clean” soil to cover the area.
Only after all that was done could seed be laid down. The Scherer Park project will eventually restore adjacent Hall’s Island and become what, from the slide, looked like a kind of beachy area with views of downtown. Also to be added: a community arts center, a pool and and a promenade along the water.
For the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary, which has a fascinating history — it was a Dakota holy site — on the Mississippi in St. Paul, came the usual problems (a buried tank farm, debris, contamination), but a major hang-up was legal. Burlington-Northern used the 27-acre plot for maintenance and repainting of its cars. But by the ‘90s, it had fallen into disuse and become an eyesore. When there was talk of building an asphalt manufacturing plant on the site, the local Phelan Creek community puts its collective foot down and demanded a park.
The railroad wanted to sell the land, but it wouldn’t take a discount for the cost of making it usable. And, it wanted to be indemnified against any future injuries people might suffer from contact, with say, toxins or pollutants that hadn’t been safely removed. St. Paul didn’t want that responsibility either. Ultimately, using insurance to indemnify both parties was a solution worked out by Mike Zender, senior counsel of the Trust for Public Land Twin Cities. The railroad would have no liability beyond known contaminants. The city was also liable up to a certain limit; anything beyond that the insurer would pay.
These days, the site combines restored prairie land and savannah with biking and walking trails that wind through wetlands. The work isn’t done. Future plans include the renovation of an old depot to an interpretive center and addition of a bridge to connect the park to the Mississippi River trail. But just as it is, it’s been a success at retrieving an ugly contaminated property into something beautiful.
A question
How/where did they get rid of the old contaminated soil that was removed as well as the other “toxic junk” that had to be hauled away?
Gub-mint
For those who don’t think we need government regulation of businesses, just look at the huge number of brownfields and superfund sites around the state and country. Each and every one of those came about because we either didn’t have regulations or because enforcement was lax and businesses choose to ignore those regulations.