Nearing the Finish Line at the State's Largest Cleanup Site
By Rebecca Castagna and Tanner Harding
They’re in the home stretch.
Employees at the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection are nearing completion on remediation of the Newhall Street neighborhood in Hamden, Connecticut, which once sat directly on toxic land.
With more than 240 homes, it is the largest remediation site in the state.
By this summer, the DEEP will be done with remediation of the neighborhood’s baseball field and park, and all that is left is the town’s abandoned middle school and community center.
The DEEP found the contamination in 2000, and the project broke ground seven years later, but didn’t start on the homes until 2010. Though it seems that this 15-year process is long, it is shaping up to be one of the state DEEP’s most efficient remediation projects yet.
“This is lightning speed because of the scope of the project, the number of folks involved, the public outcry and legislative support,” said Ray Frigon, project manager for the Newhall site, and at right in the photograph above. “The department needed funding to assist in the implementation of the remedy and they couldn’t pay for it unless the legislature authorized the funding, which they did.”
And instead of the large size of the site hindering progress, it helped Frigon get the project in motion even quicker.
“With the number of properties [on the land], that just has a tremendous impact on this type of work,” he said. “When you’re talking about so many homes, it moves it to the top of the list.”
An aerial view of dozens of the remediated properties south of Rochford Field and Mill Rock Park, both during construction (2012) and after (2015).
They’re in the home stretch.
Employees at the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection are nearing completion on remediation of the Newhall Street neighborhood in Hamden, Connecticut, which once sat directly on toxic land.
With more than 240 homes, it is the largest remediation site in the state.
By this summer, the DEEP will be done with remediation of the neighborhood’s baseball field and park, and all that is left is the town’s abandoned middle school and community center.
The DEEP found the contamination in 2000, and the project broke ground seven years later, but didn’t start on the homes until 2010. Though it seems that this 15-year process is long, it is shaping up to be one of the state DEEP’s most efficient remediation projects yet.
“This is lightning speed because of the scope of the project, the number of folks involved, the public outcry and legislative support,” said Ray Frigon, project manager for the Newhall site, and at right in the photograph above. “The department needed funding to assist in the implementation of the remedy and they couldn’t pay for it unless the legislature authorized the funding, which they did.”
And instead of the large size of the site hindering progress, it helped Frigon get the project in motion even quicker.
“With the number of properties [on the land], that just has a tremendous impact on this type of work,” he said. “When you’re talking about so many homes, it moves it to the top of the list.”
An aerial view of dozens of the remediated properties south of Rochford Field and Mill Rock Park, both during construction (2012) and after (2015).
Ron Curran, who has been an environmental analyst with the Connecticut DEEP since 1989 and is currently project manager of the Raymark federal superfund site in Stratford, Connecticut, said that this particular site is unique.
“Most of the other Superfund sites in Connecticut are actually landfills that were used for hazardous waste, so in grand scale they’re much smaller and in most cases they don’t have houses sitting on top of them,” he said. “That’s what really makes the Newhall project very complex, and Raymark also, the same thing.”
In 2001, the DEEP determined the responsible parties – the Town of Hamden, South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority, Olin Corporation and the State Board of Education. After six years of back-and-forth between the responsible parties, the DEEP and the citizens of Hamden, Frigon devised a final remedy selection plan.
The DEEP’s final plan entailed removing four feet of the contaminated soil, versus the EPA’s proposed two feet. In case residents ever need to dig more than four feet, they would not only need a permit, but would also run into a special tarp that serves as a warning layer.
Though this satisfied the DEEP, some residents wanted more.
Elizabeth Hayes lives in the Newhall Street neighborhood, and is also the leader of the former Newhall Coalition, an advocacy group for environmental and health issues. She set out to educate the community about what was happening and also worked with the Toxic Action Center to determine how the contamination was affecting residents.
Hayes and the Newhall Coalition had the DEP reach out to the EPA early on to do a study to determine how deep the contamination in the area went. What they ended up finding made the project a priority.
“The lead levels were just off the charts,” Hayes said. “And then you had children playing and it became paramount that something had to be done. So it became what we called immediate action removal.”
When the DEEP announced the final plan, Hayes and the Newhall Coalition sued the responsible parties in an attempt to secure what they saw as a more thorough cleanup from the state.
“I wanted them to dig, but I wanted them to dig beyond the 4 feet,” Hayes said. “You want them to dig, yes you want them to get the contamination out of the ground, but [we wanted them] to go and take down all the stuff. … Our lives aren’t worth a damn if you just want to do a little bit and get out of here.”
While those in the Newhall Coalition called for more action, many residents resisted. Frigon admitted working with the public was a challenge, but he was determined to follow through with a solution that was not only quick and efficient, but also cost-effective.
It took a bit of luck and resourcefulness, but costs for remediation in the residential portion alone ended up totaling about $35 million versus the initial estimate of $70 million.
They needed to find a place to dump the contaminated soil and a source of clean soil – all within the closest distance, to save costs and minimize miles on trucks traveling and the risk of accidents. On a daily basis, they averaged about 60 trucks.
Frigon found clean soil two towns away, in a 125-acre pasture that was going to be re-developed for senior housing. The alternate plan was to use land in southern New Hampshire, which would have been hundreds of miles for the trucks to travel each way.
The next step was finding where to put the waste material. Frigon found the ideal spot right on the Hamden-North Haven town line, a few miles from the Newhall neighborhood.
It was a clay mining pit, about 300 feet deep, formerly used by the Stiles Hart Brick Company.
The property owner, Joseph J. Farricielli, was running an illegal disposal operation, in which people would pay him a few dollars to dump their old tires in the pit. This “Tire Pond” eventually filled up with rainwater and more than 30 million tires, and Farricielli became a millionaire.
The tires began to breach the top of the pond surface, and posed a great risk to the surrounding communities, Frigon said. If they caught on fire, toxins would spread quickly. Once the DEEP decided to take action, they needed to find about 40 feet of soil to compress and enclose the tires within the pond.
Farricielli went to jail and Frigon was given custody of the property. They closed the pond with material from the Newhall site and also dirt from Boston’s “Big Dig.”
“When I started this project, I didn’t have any grey hair, my daughter was a toddler, but looking back at it, 10 years was really fast,” Frigon said.
And even though this particular project is almost complete, Frigon knows his work is far from over.
“Projects keep rolling in and we can’t stop it,” he said.
The number of new sites created each year has slowed down, as people are becoming more environmentally conscious than they were in the 1940s and 1950s. Curran said a great deal of the blame comes down to regulations, because there were none. People did as they pleased and landfills took anything.
“The waste practices of earlier generations, there were no requirements, money was the only requirement,” Curran said. “They were cutting corners in many cases, and in many cases these industries knew what they were doing.”
Yet while people are becoming more aware of the consequences of their actions, the DEEP is still left with a mess to clean up. Frigon and his coworkers have to prioritize whichever site is the worst and presents the highest level of risk at the moment. Public outcry regarding a site will push others to the backburner—as in the case of Newhall.
On top of having a seemingly never-ending number of sites to clean up, the Connecticut DEEP has also suffered budget and staffing cuts.
“Ever since I can remember, there’s always a budget crisis,” Frigon said.
He said after the downturn of the economy in 2009, the state asked his department for “chronic reductions” in operating expenses, which also impacts the workers’ salaries.
Frigon has seen many of his coworkers either retire or go back to school, and his department doesn’t have the money to fill their spots once they leave.
“It puts a strain on the remaining staff to implement projects like these,” Frigon said.
Additional reporting/slider image by Nick Solari, photographs by Rebecca Castagna