Source: http://www.times-standard.com, February 17, 2017
By: RUTh Schneider
What started out as a very contentious situation has morphed into something more collaborative.
That’s how North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board engineering geologist Dave Parson portrays the situation at the former site of Norman’s Dry Cleaners in Henderson Center in Eureka.
“It’s quite a success story overall. It’s been a little bumpy along the way, but it’s pretty good now,” Parson said. “In the past when we’ve had bumps in the road, we’ve been able to straighten them out.”
The multi-million dollar project — a repercussion of a saga that started more than 40 years ago when contaminants from the dry cleaning business and a former gas station began seeping into the soil — appears at this point to have less than a year of work remaining.
But that’s just for the cleanup portion of the work as well as some city work on replacing century-old sewer lines.
After that comes the redevelopment of the site, and options are on the board.
The owner of the site, Ken Daer, who is also the owner of the dry cleaning business, said one thing is certain, he’s not relocating his dry cleaning business back to Henderson Center.
“I won’t move the dry cleaners back there,” Daer said. His business is now located in Burre Center.
But a business of some kind or another will be on the site.
“It will be zoned commercial,” he said. “We’re going to develop it … we have several people who are interested in it.”
At one time, the corner of E and Grotto streets in Henderson Center was a Unocal gas station. That was in the mid-1960s and the fuel station — now owned by Chevron — left the site in 1979.
The company had a 10,000-gallon underground fuel tank that was removed before the gas station closed, but not before it started to leak. And some of what is being cleaned up today, nearly four decades later, is petroleum contaminants from those days.
The property was purchased by Daer in 1977 and a few years later, in 1980, he opened Norman’s Dry Cleaners and Commercial Laundry at the site.
His business was doing well but his equipment was more problematic.
Daer told the Times-Standard in 2015 he believed the “major spills” occurred in 1982 and 1983.
“In those days, we didn’t know what was going on,” he said at the time. “We didn’t know the dry cleaning solvent was a problem either. Obviously, it was becoming a problem.”
The problems were discovered much later. Daer himself paid for testing in the late 1990s, checking the soil and the groundwater for contaminants beneath his property. What was discovered was dry cleaning solvents as well as the petroleum from the gas station had seeped into the soil and groundwater.
A cleanup was ordered by the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board in 2003. Daer didn’t move Norman’s Dry Cleaners out of the site until December 2014.
The cleanup began roughly a dozen years after it was ordered — delayed in part by litigation over who was responsible for the bill and who was at fault.
In the end, a fund was created that was contributed to by multiple parties including Daer’s insurance company, the company that made the faulty dry cleaning equipment hoses and Chevron among others.
The cleanup work itself was divided into three parts — what are called “operable units.”
OU-1 is the area where the dry cleaners building once sat; OU-2 is the area mostly within a portion of E Street that extends into the intersection of Grotto Street. OU-3 is an underground area extending in the direction of St. Bernard’s High School that affects deep groundwater.
In August 2015, work on the cleanup began, but within the first six months of the cleanup effort, there were delays.
“Because OU-1 and OU-2, have, in-part, significant construction-related activities, there have been some delays toward actual cleanup implementation,” Parson, who oversees the case for the water control board, wrote in a letter to interested parties dated Jan. 20, 2016.
Parson’s second update letter, dated Aug. 1, 2016, stated the work done on OU-1 and OU-2 was more than 60 percent complete.
The third and most recent update letter, sent out earlier this month, indicated most of the treatments in the first two operable units have been successful, although there are still a few problem spots.
“What they are going to do is focus in on the areas that are still too high,” Parson told the Times-Standard this week. “They are turning the system back on to get those numbers lower.”
The process, called electrical resistivity heating, basically heats the soil and groundwater so the contaminants evaporate. That is why the site has high-voltage warning signs surrounding it.
The hope is that portion of the work will be completed soon.
“We’re hoping this work will be done in the next 60 days,” Parson said.
That’s when work on OU-3, which will treat deep groundwater, and replacement of the sewer and water lines along E Street will begin.
While the work now slated to replace the sewer and water lines was not part of the initial project, the city thought it was a good time to get the work done.
The sewer lines themselves in the area date back to before 1920, Public Works Director Brian Gerving said.
“It’s not part of the cleanup in that the sewer line itself wasn’t contaminated,” Gerving said. “It does make sense as they are reconstructing the street to take care of the sewer line at the same time.”
Gerving said some of the pipes found during the course of working on the project are so old they were made of redwood trees, a practice that has not been used for many decades.
The goal, Parson said, is for the work on all three operable units, as well as the upgrades to sewer and water lines along E Street, to be completed before the end of 2017.
Within a 500-foot radius of the sites, there are dozens of businesses that operate and have watched the process move along.
Joe Filgas, CEO of Cafe Nooner Enterprises, which run Cafe Nooner Too directly across from the work site on E Street, is one of those businesses and he has been taking an active part in the progress and speaking up for the needs of the local businesses in Henderson Center.
“Within the last year or so, it has been pretty quiet,” Filgas said. “The only thing is somewhat of a visual blight, but we understand that is temporary and they are getting their work done.”
It wasn’t always as amicable of a relationship though.
“It started out pretty rocky,” he said. “This was like two years ago when the businesses were not paid attention to, but the water board took that to heart and started holding public meetings.”
Parson said the board works hard to alleviate what could be difficult for both businesses and residents.
“Because Henderson Center is so busy, we try to do the work around schedules when there is not so much activity,” Parson said noting the work on E Street will probably take place sometime this summer.
He said the idea is to only work on small portions one at a time.
“They leap frog along so the whole thing doesn’t have to be done at one time,” he said.
Filgas said when the work on E Street begins, he wants LED signs in place on both ends of the construction.
“They basically indicated that the businesses are open during construction,” he said of signs that were used in a previous phase of work.
Lissa Danielson, who owns Dave’s Place, a bar that sits next to the former Norman’s location, said it hasn’t been all bad.
“I feel bad for the owner of the property,” she said. “They’ve been working out there for a long, long time.”
She said some of the work crews on the site frequent her bar.
She also said there have been some benefits.
“We haven’t had as many plumbing issues,” she said since the work started and some of the sewer lines have been worked on.
Cafe Nooner’s Filgas has his eyes on the not-so-distant future.
“We’re looking forward to it being completed,” said Filgas. “We can’t wait to get our neighborhood back.”