Clean bill of health

By Brad Stratton

When the Harborpark homes are occupied and sightseers are strolling the promenade along Kenosha's lakefront, will anyone remember that the site once was contaminated?

If not, that may be a tribute to how completely the 69-acre site once occupied by a Chrysler Corp. plant has turned around, going from an environmentally troubled property to a waterfront community with townhouses, businesses, plazas, a marina, a museum and an electric streetcar line.

The remediation and development are moving forward. Kenosha has already done curb and gutter work and expects to have the basic infrastructure in place by October. Some of the privately owned buildings might be up by next spring, City Administrator Nick Arnold said.

Harborpark shows that brownfields can have a second lease on life, Arnold said. In addition, "another lesson to be learned is that cities and the Department of Natural Resources can work cooperatively toward achieving these objectives. It doesn't always have to be an adversarial relationship," he said.

Industrial history

The property along Lake Michigan had been used for industrial purposes for over a century. From about 1870 to the 1960s, Simmons Co. manufactured mattresses and furniture there. Then, from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, American Motors Corp. and Chrysler leased the property from KAT Realty Corp. for auto manufacturing.

One enormous environmental problem dated from the Simmons era. The company had a brass foundry, a byproduct of which was a slag-like substance containing lead, said Pam Mylotta, a hydrogeologist with the Department of Natural Resources regional office in Milwaukee. Sometime before 1915, an "unfathomable" amount of this lead material was used to extend the land by about 20 acres into the lake itself, she said.

In some cases, this fill material was piled about 20 feet deep, Mylotta said. The cleanup removed the top layers where the lead levels were highest. Chrysler and KAT removed about 3,000 cubic yards of the stuff, as well as some soil tainted by old underground Simmons petroleum tanks, she said. There were no groundwater problems associated with the lead fill material.

In the early 1990s, KAT and Chrysler demolished the plant and cleaned up environmental problems before donating the land to the city. Soil was contaminated in the site from 20 underground fuel, paint and solvent storage tanks that were removed.

But there were still a few last environmental issues to be resolved. The DNR required Kenosha to monitor groundwater at eight locations, conduct a cleanup related to an underground storage tank still at the site, and install an integrated site barrier.

The barrier can be either a 2- to 3-foot layer of clean soil or an impervious barrier that prevents people from coming in contact with any remaining industrial material. In some locations, the barrier will be provided by roads, sidewalks, parking lots and the buildings themselves, Arnold said.

Self-cleaning

Some parts of the site still contain "some petroleum contaminants in such an advanced state of decomposition that its exact source cannot be determined, and the department is saying: Leave everything in place. Over a period of time, it will clean itself up," Arnold said.

To install the barrier, Kenosha had a "not insignificant amount of soil remediation" to do last summer, Arnold said.

"We're talking 260,000 cubic yards of additional material had to be transported. It took an entire summer. Last summer, we had our trucks running 10 hours a day, six days a week," he said.