Source: http://www.nhregister.com, June 22, 2017
By: Luther Turmelle
Work on the environmental cleanup of the defunct English Station power plant in the city’s Fair Haven section will begin in earnest next month as remediation crews start removing bags of asbestos from the property.
The United Illuminating Co., which formerly owned the power plant and is paying for its cleanup, has hired TRC, a nationally-known environmental firm with offices in Milford, Rocky Hill and Windsor. Work on cleaning up the former power site, which is located on a 9-acre island in the middle of the Mill River, is expected to be completed by August 2019 under the terms of a consent agreement between United Illuminating and the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection.
Company officials explained their plans for the cleanup to about two-dozen city residents who live near English Station at a community meeting Thursday night.
The meeting was held at the John Martinez Elementary School, which sits in the shadow of the power plant’s smokestacks, on James Street in Fair Haven.
One of the residents who attended the meeting, Adeli DeArce, lives near the plant and told UI officials she is concerned about what the company will do to protect the health of Fair Haven residents.
“I’m the mom of an asthmatic kid, that’s why I’m here,” DeArce told Tom Judge, the UI executive overseeing the clean-up project. “I don’t know if you’re going to wrap it up and cover it up while you are doing the work. What I want to know is how you’re going to notify the community if something bad gets into the air by mistake.”
Judge tried to assure DeArce that daily monitoring of the air quality around the clean-up site would take place and that chemical-laced dirt from the site would be continually dampened with water to prevent dust from getting into the air. But DeArce said later she wasn’t reassured by the company’s presentation.
“Nobody knew this was happening,” she said. “We’re so close to it here at the school that if parents had known about it, there would have been a lot more people here.”
The United Illuminating Co. operated English Station for 63 years before shutting it down in 1992, leaving a site riddled with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which are known carcinogens, as well as heavy metals and other contaminants. The company agreed to set aside at least $30 million for cleanup of the site as part of an agreement that enabled UI’s corporate parent, UI Holdings, to merge with Spanish energy giant Iberdrola in a $3 billion deal in late 2015.
The cleanup does not include the demolition of the power plant itself or another building on the site, Judge said, in part because UI does not own the property.
UI hasn’t owned the property since 2000, when it paid Quinnipiac Energy of Killingworth $4.25 million to assume ownership of the former power plant, and put $1.9 million in escrow for cleanup in an attempt to get out from under the costs associated with remediating the site. The current owners are two out-of-state companies, Asnat Realty and Evergreen Power.
Keith Ainsworth, an attorney for the power plant’s owners, attended Thursday’s meeting even though he wasn’t invited.
“I find it kind of odd that they were here to talk about the future of the site and that we were not notified about the meeting,” Ainsworth said.
Though the plants owners have some general ideas about what they’d like to do with the plant once the property is returned to them after being remediated, Ainsworth said his clients are waiting to see what use will be permitted after the cleanup.
Among the potential uses for the sites that its owners are considering:
• Mixed use with residential housing on upper floors and retail on the ground level.
• Commercial warehousing.
• Rental storage units.
• Some sort of industrial use.
Steve Fontana, the city’s deputy economic development director, said one use to which New Haven officials would be amenable is the creation of a renewable energy generating facility.
“We want to determine what is the highest and best possible use for it,” Fontana said of the English Station site.