Look out below

By Steve Schultz

When a contractor starts digging, perhaps the last thing he expects to find is an environmental time bomb from the turn of the century, right in the heart of the city.

But that was the case in Waukesha in 1991, when a high-profile project along the Fox River turned up blue-green soil that turned out to be contaminated with cyanide.

The subsequent teamwork by the contractors, the city and its consultants not only brought the problem under control, but also serves as an example of how a project deadline can be met even in the face of an alarming discovery.

The project was a new city park overlooking the Fox River, situated near the regional headquarters for the state's transportation department. The general contractor, Burkhart Construction Corp., contracted out for the digging, and it was this subcontractor that struck the unusually colored soil next to the bluffs of the Fox River.

"When I got the original call that the contractor hit this blue material, at first I didn't believe it," said Katie Jelacic, city project engineer and the project's construction manager. "Then I went there and saw this whole bucket was dyed a beautiful teal blue."

Truckloads of the blue-green soil were carted off-site to another city-owned property before a consultant was called to identify the material.

"I did a waste-profile analysis and found it was cyanide waste from a manufactured-gas plant that operated there in the early 1900s," said James S. Drought, of Arcadis Geraghty & Miller Inc. in Milwaukee, who worked for a different firm when hired for the soil analysis. Made from coal, manufactured gas was burned in street lamps.

A contractor who took initial soil samples at the site missed the contamination because the cyanide was concentrated in one underground pocket, Jelacic said.

Removal of the soil was halted because transporting it was an unwitting violation of Environmental Protection Agency requirements that permits be obtained to move hazardous waste, Drought said. What couldn't be stopped was the ticking of two clocks.

Deadline pressure

First, the city had 90 days under hazardous-waste rules to move the contaminated soil to an appropriate treatment facility. The nearest one Drought could find was in Texas. Second, the city was committed to opening the park in four to six months as part of a stated goal to improve public access to the riverfront, Drought said.

What followed was expeditious, effective and well-coordinated. A special contractor was brought on board, and workers wearing protective clothing and air tanks installed a temporary containment system over the exposed waste, Drought said. Groundwater monitoring wells were dug to determine if cyanide had leeched into the sandstone aquifer from which Waukesha draws its drinking water (it hadn't), and soil boring began to learn the extent of the contamination, he said.

"We didn't know if there was 100 tons, 1,000 tons or 10,000 tons," Drought said.

Burkhart crews were relocated to work at safe areas of the large site, and extra hand- and eye-wash basins were brought in, said Michael Spanheimer, company vice president. City officials reassured workers that the noncontaminated areas were safe, easing some of the stress that could have existed at the scene, he said.

From start to finish, from investigation to remediation, the process lasted about 90 days, Drought said. Several hundred tons of contaminated dirt was removed, at a cost of around $300,000, Jelacic said. And the park opened on time.

"What we learned was, in our type of construction, when we encounter subsurface material that was really unforeseen, we always need to be perceptive as to what we're involved with," he said. "If anything looks different, we should pay heed and investigate the material. That, more than anything, was driven home by this whole process. We had something dissimilar, and I thank the Lord that He allowed us to seek the proper direction."