Transforming properties contaminated by decades of industrial
and manufacturing use into community assets is no easy task
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| $2 million brownfield remediation of Festival Pier in Pawtucket is changing a former oil terminal along the Seekonk River into a public park. (Joanna Detz/ecoRI News) |
By FRANK
CARINI/ecoRI News staff
The Industrial Revolution left many New England cities and towns
with a legacy: manufacturing pollution that turned once-productive, and often
pristine, land and water into dumps. This practice of contaminating natural
resources and then leaving behind scarred remains, after the offending business
went bankrupt or left for greener pastures, continued well into the 1980s.
The result: By the end of that decade, thousands of brownfields
dotted the southern New England landscape, especially in its core urban areas.
Remediating brownfields is a constant battle that pits public health and
environmental concerns against cost factors. Clean-up efforts are often
interrupted by hidden obstacles, such as underground storage tanks filled with
waste oil, and finding the responsible party to pay the price is virtually
impossible.
“We view these sites as opportunities,” said Frank Gardner, EPA
brownfields coordinator for Region
1. “Every brownfield site is an opportunity. We provide funding to
actively clean up these properties, to make them safer for the public and for
economic development."
In the past few years, southern New England has been the
beneficiary of considerable EPA funding to help remediate brownfields. In
fiscal 2014, for example, the EPA distributed a total of $67 million to all 50
states for such projects — Rhode Island received $2.1 million, Massachusetts
$5.9 million and Connecticut $5.3 million.
Brownfield remediation projects, on average, leverage $17 per
EPA dollar expended, according to Gardner. He also said the federal agency’s Brownfields Program creates
additional benefits, such as increasing residential property values near
remediated sites by 5 percent to 12 percent, and empowering states, communities
and other stakeholders to work together to prevent, assess, safely clean up and
reuse brownfields.
The EPA notes that since the program’s inception in 1995 it
has leveraged 90,363 jobs nationwide.
But transforming blighted brownfields into community assets is no
easy task. It takes money — plenty of it — patience, often a public-private
partnership and some creative thinking. One Massachusetts program, for example,
encourages ground-mounted solar projects on brownfields and landfills.
On a contaminated brownfield near two schools, the city of New
Bedford got inventive and contracted with Con Edison Solutions and BlueWave
Capital to build a solar project. This solar installation is intended to be
used to help support energy education and encourage students to consider
working in the renewable-energy industry.
Successfully overhauling such properties also depends largely on
a site’s contamination level, according to Cynthia Gianfrancesco, who runs the
Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management’s (DEM) Targeted Brownfields Assessment Program.
The program began in 1996 as a pilot in communities, such as Providence, North
Smithfield and Woonsocket, with long histories of manufacturing and heavy
industry.
“Most of the sites in Rhode Island are heavily contaminated,”
she said. “They were once textile mills and then became sites for jewelry
manufacturing. We’re dealing with an industrial history of more than 200
years.”
Those centuries of incineration, smelting, metal plating,
concrete manufacturing, etching and electroplating contaminated much of
southern New England’s land and water. But a number of private and/or public
projects has breathed new life into long-abused properties.
Since 1994, the EPA Brownfields Program has awarded Rhode Island
$34.8 million, Massachusetts $106.3 million and Connecticut $71.8 million to
fund a three-state total of 1,422 remediation projects. That 20-year total of
$212.9 million helped clean up 301 properties in Rhode Island, 783 in Massachusetts and 338 in Connecticut, but it represents just a
slice of the money that was needed to advance those projects.
“EPA brownfields funding is just a building block, not the
entire block,” Gardner said. “Most of these projects need to cobble together
funding from various sources. EPA money is just a piece of it. It’s like
putting a jigsaw puzzle together.”
And those 1,422 brownfield remediation projects the EPA has
helped fund since 1994 represent just a fraction of the southern New England
sites plagued by contaminated soil, polluted waters and abandoned properties
rife with toxic waste, such as asbestos and lead. Little Rhody, for instance,
has some 1,800 brownfields, according to best estimates.
But the number of properties in southern New England
contaminated by the region’s industrial past is slowly declining.
Providence success stories
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| A once heavily polluted property, the Steel Yard is now a Providence attraction. (Joanna Detz/ecoRI News) |
From locomotive manufacturers to steel mills, Providence has a
long history of industrialization. While the city’s manufacturing industry gave
rise to an economic boom in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, few
operating mills remain today.
It was with a slight tip of the hat to those industries that
made Providence economically great that the Steel Yard was founded in 2002. The
visionaries who started the nonprofit artists collective also wanted to
acknowledge the legacy of environmental degradation that heavy manufacturing
has had on the city and state’s natural resources.
The Steel Yard is in the city’s Olneyville neighborhood, a once
flourishing industrial enclave for textile, jewelry and metal manufacturers. A
dozen years ago, the site was closed and in disrepair. For years, Providence
Steel had sprayed its finished girders with lead-based paint, with the
overspray leaving high concentrations of lead in the property’s soil.
The cost to transform this 3.5-acre brownfield on Sims Avenue
into a community asset was substantial. The eight-year remediation project cost
nearly a million dollars, and was completed thanks to federal and state grants,
fundraising efforts, and donated materials and labor. Today, the old Providence
Steel buildings have been converted into more than 9,000 square feet of
workspaces for artists, and classrooms for education and job training in the
industrial arts. The property has become a signature city attraction.
The Steel Yard, however, isn’t the only Providence brownfield to
enjoy an expensive makeover. Two Octobers ago, community members, neighbors and
representatives from Groundwork Providence gathered to celebrate the completion
of the Hope Tree Nursery, in an industrial area on the city’s West Side that once
housed metal manufacturers.
Situated on the former Sprague Industries site, a brownfield
still laden with residual toxins from its factory days — no soil can be
removed, so the trees are grown in pots — Hope Tree Nursery now provides the
Elmwood neighborhood access to affordable trees grown locally. The nursery’s
physical presence also has improved the look and feel of Sprague Street.
Two distressed areas along the Woonasquatucket River have been
revitalized and turned into community assets. Riverside Park, a former
brownfield and high-crime area, is now a 6-acre neighborhood oasis. Its
redevelopment brought with it a bike path, new housing and the opening of small
grocery store, and crime has fallen sharply.
Contamination from the former Lincoln Lace and Braid factory —
petroleum, metals and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) — had spread to this
industrial river. It cost $991,000 — funded by state and federal money — to
cealn up the property, which is now a passive greenspace connected via a bike
path to other urban parks.
WaterFire Providence will soon make its new home on a
three-parcel site on Valley Street once occupied by a rubber manufacturer and
machine shop. The ongoing renovation includes a stormwater management system.
The property also will be used as an incubator for artists and businesses, and
will host after-school programs.
A 25-acre site on the Providence/Johnston line and bordered by
the Woonasquatucket River, had been contaminated by lead and arsenic, until the
early 2000s, when the Button Hole Golf Course opened. Today, the nine-hole
course is a teaching center that brings golf to urban youth.
The city’s neighbor to the north, Pawtucket, another community
with a rich industrial history, recently announced that renovations to the
Festival Pier waterfront park off School Street will be completed at the end of
November. The park is expected to open to the public Dec. 1.
When finished, the $2 million brownfield remediation of the Old
State Pier property, a former oil terminal along the Seekonk River and home to
the popular Chinese Dragon Boat Races, will feature a new plaza, lighting,
benches, a canoe/kayak launching area and a boat ramp.
Brownfield redevelopment in Bristol
Mosaico, a nonprofit community development corporation, has
owned the the former National India Rubber Co. on Wood Street in Bristol for
four years. Prior to that, the brownfield was in receivership, several
buildings were in disrepair and there were outstanding DEM violations tagged to
the 14-acre former Kaiser Mill Complex.
During its heyday, this industrial complex employed more than
1,200 people, and local families set their clocks to the mixture of solids,
liquid particulates and gases belched from its smokestack at 7 a.m., noon and 5
p.m.
Mosaico applied for and received Targeted Brownfields Assessment
Program funding from DEM to complete an environmental assessment of the
property. The nonprofit then applied for and received a $200,000 EPA
brownfields grant. The money is being used to clean up contamination, address
stormwater management requirements and cap portions of the site with new
landscaping.
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| The Thames Street Landing transformed an abandoned waterfront property in Bristol into a commercial development. (BETA Group Inc.) |
Mosaico is seeking additional funding to complete improvements
on the remainder of the site, which would allow for increased occupancy and
economic development opportunities. About 60 percent of the space is occupied
by some 25 companies, which range from boat builders to sign and skateboard
makers.
This popular waterfront town also features two other ambitious
brownfield redevelopment projects — Thames Street Landing and Premier Thread.
Thames Street Landing was empty for three years before this
redevelopment project began in 1999, on property originally used as a lumberyard.
Most of the site’s contamination — lead, arsenic, petroleum and polycyclic
aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) — resulted from production of coal, coke and
lumber in the last 40 years of the 1800s. Some 20,000 yards of contaminated
soil was removed from the 2.2-acre site, and the entire project cost $8.3
million, most of it privately funded.
This waterfront property now features retail establishments, a
restaurant, offices, apartments and a hotel, transforming a once highly
contaminated, abandoned lot into a central part of the town’s economic and
social structure.
“The project spurred development around it, and the neighborhood
took off,” said Kelly Owens, an associate supervising engineer for DEM and one
of seven agency employees devoted to brownfield work. “It created some true
economic development.”
The Thames Street site of the former Premier Thread factory and
old Narragansett Electric manufactured gas plant is now high-end condominiums.
This project, Owens said, also helped stimulate neighborhood development.
“We hope our funding helps fill in the blanks and reduce some
uncertainty,” said the EPA’s Gardner. “Just about every town in New England had
a mill or manufacturing facility. The Industrial Revolution certainly left a
mark.”