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Explosions rocked Bellingham’s waterfront last week, but they were planned and anticipated.
The 93-foot red brick building that formerly housed bleaching operations for the Georgia-Pacific West tissue mill came crashing to the ground in sections, each peeled away by heavy machinery. The demolition was perhaps the most dramatic transformation in recent weeks of high-paced activity along Whatcom Waterway.
“We’ve gained momentum, both in the cleanup and clearing the ground for future redevelopment,” Mike Stoner said. Stoner is the director of environmental programs for the Port of Bellingham. “We have a Master Plan that is still working its way through the city and port processes, but there’s still a lot we can do while that is happening. The port and city are trying to do the work that we can while the master planning moves forward.”
The port authority intends to work with the City of Bellingham and state agencies to redevelop 220 acres of inactive industrial waterfront property. The result could be a revitalized waterfront and a centerpiece for downtown Bellingham.
Activity slowed on the waterfront as agreements between the city and port stalled. Elected officials reassessed their priorities. Work continued, however, Stoner said, as the port continued to line up its funding for environmental cleanup. The Dept. of Ecology kickstarted work, as the state environmental agency authorized several near-term actions that form the center of recent activity.
That activity has several moving parts.
One part involves the dredging of Squalicum harbor and dewatering those materials on the old Georgia-Pacific pier. Dredged materials are dried and trucked to an area south of the mill site, an area south of Cornwall Avenue that used to be a municipal landfill. Dredged soils cover contaminated soils.
A second part includes the demolition of certain buildings to prepare the waterfront site for eventual redevelopment. The work is being done by Scrap-It Recycling Services, a division of Parberry, a company based in Whatcom County.
A third piece is the environmental cleanup of a few areas of contained contaminants. The work is being overseen by the state Dept. of Ecology.
While all this is going on, the port has a new tenant at their shipping terminal constructing a barge. Greenberry Industrial of Corvallis, Ore., has bought a 42,000-square-foot facility in Ferndale and is in negotiations with the Port of Bellingham to lease 45,000 square feet of space on the Bellingham waterfront. The company recently landed a major contract to build modules for a safety response ship that will act as a fire engine during offshore Alaska drilling.
“There are about 50 people working on-site right now doing cleanup and building demolition,” Stoner explained. “There’s probably another 40 or 50 employed by Greenberry. Those are really terrific jobs in this economy.”
The action really began when the state Dept. of Ecology proposed several interim actions on the central waterfront.
This cleanup phase will cost about $1 million, with about half that cost reimbursed by the state. The state’s remedial action grant program helps pay to clean up publicly owned sites. The state Legislature funds the grant program with revenues from a voter-approved tax on hazardous substances known as the Mobile Toxics Control Act (MTCA). The program is similar in concept to the federal Superfund.
“We’re under consent decrees and agreed orders with the Dept, of Ecology to work on six different MTCA sites down on the waterfront,” Stoner explained. “The process takes a really long time. What we’ve been doing in the meantime is finding areas where we can carve out what Ecology calls ‘interim actions.’ If an opportunity arises or there is a reason to take early action, then we can do that under MTCA interim actions.”
The port is continuing to develop a comprehensive environmental study of the entire site, their remedial investigation, followed by an analysis of cleanup options. The work is controlled by a 2009 legal agreement, called an agreed order, between the Port of Bellingham and the Dept. of Ecology.
Of particular concern for early action were two sites with mobile materials near Whatcom Waterway. Ecology saw an opportunity to remedy those sites, according to Brian Sato, Ecology’s site manager. These actions are considered “interim” because they are limited in scope and do not involve the entire site, he explained.
Contractors for the port have completed the first phase of an interim cleanup action at the site. In December, workers removed an estimated 8,000 tons of petroleum-contaminated soil and debris from an area called the Bunker C tank area at the northeast end of the site. The bunker contained a heavy fuel oil Georgia-Pacific used in some of their industrial operations.
“We’ve completed the Bunker C cleanup. It went very smoothly. We got that dug out and backfilled,” Stoner explained. “The way these kinds of bunkers were built in the ‘good old days,’ they wouldn’t seal the bottoms on Bunker C tanks because the petroleum product is so thick you have to heat it to move it. But it does move, slowly, so these days you need to go in and clean up that saturated ground.”
Stoner explained that the site was well contained.
“You’d take a bucket scoop down the side of where the tank was,” he said. “One side of the bucket would be bunker fuel product and the other side would be essentially clean sand.”
In the spring of 2012, crews will complete the second phase of work. During that phase, workers will remove an estimated 400 to 500 tons of mercury-contaminated soil and debris, and demolish a building that contains contaminated materials in what is called the caustic plume area at the west end of the site.
Georgia-Pacific used mercury to separate seawater into elements that could be used in their bleaching and other industrial processes. Elemental mercury and associated compounds would escape and be deposited in this plume area.
Cleanup of the caustic plume area may be technically challenging, Stoner predicted.
“The Bunker C cleanup is really a pretty straightforward, standard product cleanup,” he said. “It tends to be rather easy, as the product doesn’t tend to migrate very far in the soil. Whereas in the caustic plume area, we will take out the old mercury cell building. There’s a few mercury hot spots. They’re isolated, but there are areas in the ground where we have high concentrations of mercury we need to be very careful with. It has to be managed with careful procedures, with Ecology leading every step of the way.”
Sato agreed there are a few areas of particular concern.
Stoner said the agencies expected no surprises, but were prepared.
“There are a couple of different things you run into when you do these kinds of projects,” Stoner explained. “We do a remedial investigation, really searching hard for where the legacy contamination is in the ground and groundwater. Those investigations tends to be very thorough, so no surprises when it comes to digging in contaminated ground at this point. What you do find, however, are what tend to be old buried industrial infrastructure—pipes, tanks.
“We try to map those,” Stoner said. “We have protocols in place so that when a backhoe bucket uncovers something we have procedures in place to respond to it.” he said.
Work began in 2011 on the port’s Gate 3 project at Squalicum Harbor. The work includes dredging approximately 40,000 cubic yards of sediment to increase the depth in an underused mooring area followed by dock and pier improvements.
Contractors are removing sediment from the harbor floor with a barge-crane equipped with a large bucket, Stoner explained. The sediment is then hauled to a staging area on the old Georgia Pacific property, where wet material is dewatered. From there, material will then be transported to the Cornwall Avenue Landfill and placed as beneficial reuse on the cleanup site. Stoner said the dredging portion must be completed by the end of the month to accommodate fish spawning cycles.
“A lot of people have noted vacant docks out at Gate 3 for several years,” Stoner said. “Those docks have been essentially condemned. We finally got the funding and permitting in place to take out the old docks, that allows us to dredge that area back down to necessary navigation depths for the marina. That includes 30,000 to 40,000 cubic yards of dredge material from that area. It’s material we can use as the basic cap material to cover the Cornwall Avenue landfill. it’s the right consistency, the right grain size and it has been thoroughly tested and will work well there.”
The total cost of the Gate 3 replacement project is approximately $8.4 million, which includes construction, dredging and engineering. The cost for this project has been funded through the issuance of a revenue bond that will be paid back by moorage fees.
“What you’re seeing on the GP site right now is mostly a containment area for all that material, because it is really a soupy, pudding-like material when you dredge it,” Stoner said. “They amend the material, drying it out by adding about 5 percent cement to the mixture. They have something called a pugmill that blends in dry cement to dry out the soil.”
The pugmill is a fast, continuous mixer in the shape of a tower.
Some of the material may also be used by the City of Bellingham when they begin to remediate the old RG Haley property, an area near—but distinct from—the port’s work at the Cornwall Avenue landfill.
“Both the city and the port are signed up for the agreed order on the Cornwall landfill” Stoner explained. “But by interlocal agreement the port is in the lead on that project, whereas on the RG Haley property, the city is in the lead.”
Linville said the city working with Ecology to assess the levels of cleanup necessary for the RG Haley property. At the same time, the city is working to put funding in place for the work required there, she said.
Bellingham was treated to a dramatic sight in June, when crews took down the old Georgia-Pacific steam plant and associated smokestack adjacent to Whatcom Waterway. Workers toppled the deteriorating stack with a piece of heavy equipment after securing it with cables to control its fall. Georgia-Pacific contracted the work after the City of Bellingham issued a permit for the demolition.
“When the port and city negotiated the property transaction, what we ended up negotiating who would be responsible for what buildings,” Stoner explained. “GP was responsible for taking down the entire tissue mill. They took down the steam plan and the smokestack last year.
“That was on their side of the ledger. The remaining structures on site are the port’s responsibility,” he said.
The port continued the demolition inland. The port intends to leave two large tiled tanks on the site in what the agency refers to as “robust industrial icons,” Stoner said. Other artifacts of the city’s long history as a milltown may also remain, he said.
“What you’re seeing right now is the demolition and removal of three separate buildings that are all loosely connected,” Stoner said. “Many people perceive there’s just one unbroken wall of buildings. Those buildings were the pulp screening room, and the pulp storage building. The building being taken down this week is the bleach plant.”
Contractors with Scrap-It have been carefully taking apart these buildings, many of which are made of potentially valuable materials that may see reuse.
“In our initial environmental impact statement, we did an assessment of each of these buildings, looking for opportunities for adaptive reuse,” Stoner said. “We took a serious look at the remaining buildings. Unfortunately, very few of them are the kinds of buildings that readily lend themselves to adaptive reuse. They’re not like an old Carnegie library or school.”
The tallest building remaining on the site is GP’s old digester, used for pulping operations. The port plans to save some portion of that to offset the tiled tanks.
“We’re hoping to preserve some of the history of the site by keeping some of those tanks and structures,” Stoner explained.
“What we’re proposing right now is that we take most of the digester down but we preserve some of the eye-catching pieces of it that are inside,” he said. “Inside that structure is a big steel armature where they hung equipment. Within that armature are nine tall vertical tanks, which were the digester tanks. Some have that old 1930s Flash Gordon kind of riveting.
“There’s a round steel acid tank that we’ve saved as well,” Stoner continued. “What we’re proposing s to take down the building but leave that steel armature and two or three of those big tanks to complement the tiled tanks within what we call the ’commercial green,’ the public park planned to go through the center of the site.”
Despite the flurry of cleaning and site preparation, important agreements remain unsigned between the Port of Bellingham and the City of Bellingham, including a master plan that will lay out where work should begin and how it should proceed. The master plan and development agreements have been slow to emerge and remain unsigned, a delay Mayor Linville has pledged she will end.
“The port and the city have goals to take important steps this year,” she said.
Some erosion of energy had occurred as the city and port differed on the scale and staging of early action projects, particularly on Bellingham’s Central Avenue. The roadway over the waterway must be reinforced for heavy equipment, but city officials were reluctant to approve the improvements without formal agreements between the city and port authority.
“The project team has always been on the same page on improvements to Central Avenue,” Stoner explained. “To us it always made sense that the city would move forward and rebuild Central Avenue on that existing pier because we need it, initially, as a heavy-haul truck access. It was ultimately planned to afterward be converted to a public access walkway after permanent roads are constructed elsewhere on the site.”
Several City Council members want to better understand the broad agreements between the city and port before committing to action.
“This has taken a lot longer than we’d hoped,” Stoner admitted. The port had expected these agreements would come before the Bellingham Planning Commission last year.
Mayor Linville said she and Port Executive Director Charlie Sheldon have agreed to hold a joint meeting between City Council and the Bellingham Port Commission “to bring the whole group up to speed prior to giving those documents to the planning commission.
“That will also give the citizens an opportunity to know how they can weigh in and understand what we are starting with,” Linville said.
“We are working together, the port and the city. We are reviewing the documents. We will brief the council, and then we will get that subarea plan to the planning commission,” she added, expressing her hope they might come before the planning commission as early as this summer.
“The master plan is a big, complicated proposal,” Stoner agreed. “What we found is we put forward the draft plan and reviewed it with the Waterfront Advisory Group. It was the second round of documents that have turned into much more of a grind than we anticipated.”
One of them, he said, is a planned action ordinance, which is a way of doing a more comprehensive environmental review up front rather than project-by-project.
“It’s been done in a number of communities throughout the state, but Bellingham has never done it. So this is something the city wanted to take a careful look at,” Stoner said, noting that the mayor’s office had hired a consultant who had managed similar planned action ordinances in Seattle.
“The expectation is that later on this spring we will have the full package of documents ready to go forward,” Stoner said. Some documents go to the planning commission. Some are provided to them for perspective. The planning commission’s main focus will be on the actual master plan document that we published with the city back in September 2010.”
Following that, Stoner said he expects a few preliminary planning sessions between Port of Bellingham commissioners and Bellingham City Council members, culminating in final binding agreements.
“I think people are ready,” Linville said. “Going to the planning commission is the first step, not the last step. I am interested in moving forward, but we are not going to push anything forward without adequate discussion. We need to agree, and put our agreements right up front. And then we can start doing something exciting.”
Photos by Marie Duckworth, courtesy of Port of Bellingham.
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