Great Barrington — The town released a report on its website on Monday, May 19, on potential plans to remediate the former Ried Cleaners property.
The town will hold a public meeting through its Planning Department at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, May 21, to review and receive comments on a draft analysis of Brownfields Cleanup Alternatives for the site. The meeting will be held at Town Hall and virtually via Zoom.
The property, located at 218 Main Street, was the location of a dry-cleaning business from 1952 to 2006 and has remained vacant since the company went out of business. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has reported that toxins from dry-cleaning chemicals, including perchloroethylene (PCE), that the company used during its 54 years in business have been found in the property’s groundwater and soil.
According to a site assessment profile on the town’s website published in August 2021, the groundwater beneath the property is contaminated by leaking underground tanks used to store PCE.
A report listing potential ways of remediating the property has been issued by town consultants TRC Companies of Lowell.
The report lists that the company created the assessment in order to support the town’s application to the EPA for a Brownfield cleanup grant. In May 2020, the town received a $500,000 grant from the EPA to remediate the property. However, the company lists in its report two potential remediation plans that would need additional funds to complete.
According to the company, the remediation plans are evaluated by multiple criteria, including effectiveness, short- and long-term reliability, difficulty of implementation, cost, potential risks, and timeliness.
The first potential remediation plan, which would not cost anything for the town, would be for the town to leave the site as is.
However, the company states:
[Leaving the site in its present state] will not have a reduction of the risk posed by the contamination at the site and would not reduce exposure to site contaminants. Therefore, the no further action alternative will not meet the remedial action objectives and cleanup goals and will not be evaluated further with respect to the comparative evaluation criteria.
The second potential remediation plan would involve a large-scale soil excavation from the property, along with off-site recycling and disposal of the property’s soil.
The plan would involve the excavation and disposal of 1,000 cubic yards of soil (approximately 1.5 tons), along with bioremediation that would involve the injection of an organic substrate in order to stimulate biological activity on the property for groundwater remediation.
However, the company states that “injections on the Post Office property cannot be funded by a Brownfields cleanup grant because the property is owned by the federal government.” The town’s Post Office is located next to the former Ried Cleaners property at 222 Main Street.
The company estimates that this remediation plan would cost approximately $2.5 million.
The third potential remediation plan would involve a smaller amount of contaminated soil, approximately 745 tons, to be removed from the property and would not involve groundwater remediation.
The estimated cost for this remediation plan is $1 million.
The company states that while both remediation plans would be effective in achieving the reduction of risks posed by the property’s soil contamination, the high-level remediation plan would be “quite difficult to implement due to the small size of the site, high traffic in the downtown area and adjacent bank, and combined ingress and egress to the site. These factors pose challenges for work and material staging, truck traffic for soil management and general cleanup activities. These constraints can impact the overall costs for removing the oil and/or hazardous materials from the site.”
The company lists that any short- or long-term risks for any remediation plan “are considered low to moderate.” The report clarifies:
Potential short-term risks associated with soil excavation/disposal include possible accidental spills of contaminated soil during soil transport, which could result in short-term exposure to the contaminated soil by surrounding human populations.
However, any accidental spill of contaminated soil would be immediately cleaned up so the duration of any potential human exposure to the contaminated soil would be extremely short in duration. Potential long-term risks include the remaining contamination in the subsurface causing vapor intrusion issues and continued groundwater impacts.
The company lists that the extensive remediation project would take up to three months, while the less extensive remediation option would take up to two months.
Click here for the report by TRC Companies.
