Source: http://www.times-standard.com, September 22, 2017
By: Hunter Cresswell
It’s been a decades-long process but hazardous material mitigation work at the site of an old dry cleaners in Eureka’s Henderson Center is set to wrap up this fall.
The work was necessitated by faulty hoses that started leaking hazardous cleaning chemicals into the soil beneath Norman’s Dry Cleaners over 30 years ago.
“I started the project once I knew I had issues back in 1999,” property and dry cleaning business owner Kenneth Daer said.
But according to the project report on the State Water Resources Control Board website, the contaminant of concern is gasoline.
“There was some gasoline but the majority of the contamination we were dealing with was a solvent used as part of the dry cleaning process there,” Eureka public works director Brian Gerving said.
West Environmental engineer Peter Krasnoff, a consultant on the project, said the leaked solvent is called perchloroethylene — or PCE.
“We’ve completed the electrical resistive heating to remove PCE,” he said.
Gerving said this is the first time this process has been used in Eureka.
Workers installed numerous electrodes into the ground that heated the soil and vaporized the hazardous chemicals.
“We had pretty high energy bills for a couple months, needless to say,” Daer quipped.
Those vapors were then caught and treated, Krasnoff said.
On Monday, workers will begin removing the electrodes, he said.
“We’re going to take care of the ones on the dry cleaning property first,” Krasnoff said.
He said he’s still in the process of selecting contractors to remove the electrodes that are embedded into and under E Street adjacent to the property.
“The following week we will be doing restoration of the surface of the property,” Krasnoff said.
The project — which Krasnoff said began in Oct. 2015 — was originally slated to last only until late 2016. It took longer because more time was needed to bake the containments out of the ground , he said.
“We are very happy with the results we’ve gotten,” Krasnoff said.
“We’re hoping to get it done this fall,” he added about the entire project. “That’s the plan, it’s subject to contractor availability and weather.”
Despite the delays, both Gerving and Daer said they were happy with the project’s progress.

“We just look forward to it being completed and seeing that site redeveloped,” Gerving said.
On Friday morning Daer said he was heading to a meeting with someone about possibly redeveloping the site. He said he couldn’t go into any details but said he wouldn’t be involved with whatever goes in at the site.
“It will be redeveloped. Hopefully we’ll get started before the end of the year,” Daer said.
“The city definitely hopes to see a great project go in there as well,” Gerving said.
For the full report of the work, visit geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov, and search for “Norman’s Dry Cleaners.”