Source: http://www.times-standard.com, July 11, 2015
By: Will Houston
A couple of faulty hose lines was all it took.
Now, more than 30 years after hazardous cleaning chemicals from a Eureka dry cleaning business seeped into the soil and groundwater beneath the E Street property near the Henderson Center, a multi-million dollar, multi-agency cleanup effort to remediate the problem is set to begin next month.
The incident began in the early 1980s at Norman’s Dry Cleaners & Commercial Laundry on the corner of Grotto and E streets in Eureka. With about 17 years of monitoring, testing and federal litigation preceding the approaching cleanup project, the property and dry cleaning business owner Kenneth Daer of KFD Enterprises Inc. said he is looking forward to getting the project completed.
“In those days, we didn’t know what was going on,” he said about environmental effects of the cleaning chemicals. “We didn’t know the dry cleaning solvent was a problem either. Obviously, it was becoming a problem.”
Businesses neighboring the property are also eager to have the project completed, but have been wary of the past construction work at the site that they claim inhibited their daily commerce.
“We want to make sure that they are not shutting businesses down to do it,” said Joe Filgas, CEO of Cafe Nooner Enterprises Inc., which owns Cafe Nooner Too on E Street. “There are a lot of livelihoods at stake.”
Not much remains of the old Norman’s Dry Cleaners site at the 2900 block of E street save for a few slabs of raised concrete foundation now bordered by a chain link fence.
The original building was demolished about six weeks ago, Daer said. The only indication that a dry cleaning business had occupied the spot is a tall sign which still displays the Norman’s Dry Cleaners logo alongside a Green Earth Cleaning brand logo with the phrase, “It’s good for everybody.”
The site was originally a gas station operated by Union Oil Company of California starting in 1964, but was bought by Daer in 1977 after he moved to Eureka from Redding. Formerly in the insurance business, Daer decided to get into dry cleaning and opened Norman’s Dry Cleaners at the site in 1980.
Business was doing well, but the some of the equipment was not.
“I had several spills coming off hoses on my dry cleaning machine,” Daer said.
Daer estimated that these “major spills” occurred in 1982 and 1983, causing tetrachloroethene, a chlorinated cleaning solvent, to seep into the drainage system and soil beneath the site.
Senior Water Resource Control Engineer Craig Hunt of the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board said there are many ways these cleaning solvents can seep into the soil and sewage systems, but said the discharge of such chemicals are currently much better regulated than they were back then.
“Hazardous material business practices now are generally overseen by local agencies referred to as ‘CUPAs’ that are implementing state regulations,” he said. “The [Certified Unified Program Agency] in Eureka is the Humboldt County Division of Environmental Health.”
At the same time, a large gasoline storage tank leftover from the Union Oil gas station had not been removed and was later discovered to have been leaking gasoline into the soil. The other tanks had been removed in 1979, but not before leaking gasoline as well, Daer said.
After becoming aware of this issue, Daer said he began testing the soil and groundwater beneath the property through private companies in 1998.
“I didn’t want to leave a big problem for my kids because they’re going to inherit the property,” he said.
Along with the petroleum, the tests found that dry cleaning solvents had also seeped into the soil and groundwater at the site. At that point, Daer said he realized that cleaning the spill would be “financially over my head.”
“That’s when we started the process with the water board and we ended up naming the city (in a lawsuit),” Daer said.
At Daer’s request, the regional water board issued a cleanup and abatement order for the groundwater contamination in 2003 and called for an remedial action plan to address the contamination.
The city of Eureka got thrown into the mix after WEST Environmental Services & Technology Inc. was hired to investigate nearby utilities in 2007. The consulting company discovered defects in the city sewer system downstream of the dry cleaning discharge site, which included broken pipes, offset joints and grease buildup. These were used as evidence in the lawsuit Daer would file against the city in 2008.
The lawsuit blamed the city for contributing to the disbursement of the chemicals due to its faulty sewer lines, which he argued presented “an imminent and substantial endangerment to human health and the environment,” according to the original complaint filed by Daer’s company, KFD Enterprises, in October 2008. Eureka filed a counter-claim against the company shortly after claiming that KFD Enterprises was responsible for the chemical contamination.
While the sewer issue sounds alarming, test results from the regional water board’s site monitoring that began in 2008 have shown “no completed exposure pathways and therefore there are no immediate risks to anyone,” according to David Parson of the regional board’s cleanups unit.
“However, cleanup must occur to comply with state laws and regulations,” Parson wrote in an email to the Times-Standard.
After five years in federal court, the lawsuit ended in a settlement last year with neither side admitting liability for the incident, but both paying into a trust fund used for the sole purpose of mitigating the contamination.
Daer’s company insurance paid $1.7 million with Eureka’s insurance carriers paying $2.3 million, according to the settlement agreement. City Attorney Cyndy Day-Wilson said the city itself is not contributing any funds to the settlement or the cleanup.
In total, Daer said the project will cost between $5 million to $6 million with other parties in the lawsuit such as Chevron — which bought out Union Oil — and the dry cleaning manufacturing company that built the faulty hose lines also paying into the fund, Daer said.
The three-part project to clean up the contaminated area is set to begin next month and seeks to remove chemicals that seeped into the on-site and off-site soils, soil gas and groundwater.
During a meeting with business owners on July 1, Principal Engineer Peter Krasnoff of WEST Environmental said they will be using an electrical resistance heater during the first two phases that will literally “toast” the ground using electricity. This $30,000 per month method will cause the contaminants to vaporize, which will be then captured and purified.
However, past testing work on the property by WEST had left the many business owners near the site concerned that the construction would further disrupt their operations and customers. Filgas, who opened the Cafe Nooner Too restaurant directly across the street from the worksite in 2012, said that previous work by WEST had blocked public parking spaces, sidewalks and even the entrance to one of the businesses.
“WEST and their construction crews were not taking our considerations to heart,” Filgas said, “and frankly they were kind of pushing us to the side and going to do what they wanted to do.”
Within a 500-foot radius of the cleanup site, Filgas said there are over 55 for-profit businesses.
But after the regional water board stepped in, Filgas said business and nearby residents have been able to meet with WEST several times over the last seven months to voice their concerns. As a result, WEST has agreed to conduct all work at night, keep all vehicles on the site, and to reopen the street each day at 5 a.m.
Filgas said he commends KFD Enterprises and WEST for being more transparent with community stakeholders.
“That’s been the great thing about this is they’ve been willing to sit down,” he said “Thus far, it’s been very good.”
Norman’s Dry Cleaners moved its operations to Myrtle Avenue in the Burre Center in December where Daer plans to keep the business. Once the E Street property is chemical-free, Daer said he’ll either lease the property for a new business or build a dry cleaning pickup station.
“I’ll never be cleaning there again,” Daer said.