Work begins at EPA’s Vienna Wells cleanup site

By Colin Willard, Staff Writer
Posted 2/15/23

BY Colin Willard

ADVOCATE Staff Writer

cwillard@wardpub.com

 

VIENNA — The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) project to clean up the Vienna Wells Superfund Site began …

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Work begins at EPA’s Vienna Wells cleanup site

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VIENNA — The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) project to clean up the Vienna Wells Superfund Site began earlier this week.

At the Feb. 6 Vienna City Council meeting, council members spoke on the phone with EPA Remedial Project Manager Hoai Tran about the upcoming project.

Tran has worked with the city on the project since 2011. He said he wanted to call into the meeting to update the city on upcoming fieldwork and see if there were any questions to make sure everyone stayed informed.

On Feb. 14, workers had started to remove the trees from the side of the building facing Chestnut Street.

According to information the EPA published, two companies owned and operated the site from 1952 to 1996. Those companies, Langenberg Inc., and Top This, Inc., used the site to manufacture hats. The hat factory contaminated the soil and groundwater with “volatile organic compounds, primarily perchloroethylene (PCE).”

Exposure to PCE can have both short-term and long-term health effects on people.

The project will target the three contaminated public drinking water wells and the site of the old hat factory. The site sits on nearly eight acres of land that begins at the southeast corner of the 10th Street and Chestnut Street intersection.

When the hat factory ceased operation in 1996, it sat abandoned until the current owner purchased it in 1999.

The main hat factory building is mostly demolished, but the concrete foundation and sections of steel framing and rotting overhang roofing still remain. The smaller building is still intact and used for storage until recently.

The earliest cleanup activity at the site began in 2011 when the city of Vienna added an air-stripper system to remove contamination from the groundwater at the site. According to the EPA’s website, the system continues to operate and prevents Vienna residents from receiving any contaminated drinking water. In 2015, the EPA finished an assessment of some of the residences close to the site and found no adverse impacts from chemical vapor intrusions.

A 2014 demolition removed some of the site’s safety hazards, but the upcoming cleanup efforts will need to address others.

In 2017, the EPA published a decision outlining an action response to the site to address contamination in the soil and groundwater. The EPA separates the site into two operable units. One concerns soil contamination and the other concerns groundwater contamination.

The remedy for the soil contamination is excavation and disposal of the soil off-site. Work on the project will also include the demolition and disposal of the remaining building and foundation and backfilling with clean soil.

The remedy for the groundwater contamination is extraction and treatment of the groundwater. The city’s air-stripper system will treat the contaminated groundwater plume. Monitoring will also take place to ensure contaminant levels decrease over time.

Work at the sites will also use institutional controls to help with the cleanup of both operable units. The EPA defines institutional controls as “non-engineered instruments such as administrative and legal controls that help minimize the potential for human exposure to contamination and/or protect the integrity of the remedy.”

In 2022, Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, which provided funding to sites that were in the remedial cleanup queue. The Vienna Wells Superfund Site received some of that funding, and now the EPA is preparing to begin construction activities at the site.

Tran shared at the meeting that one of the biggest concerns he had seen about the site cleanup was how it would get funding. He said that sometimes projects like the Vienna Wells Superfund Site lose priority to sites that are more expensive to clean up.

“Sometimes, these kinds of sites get lost in the shuffle and put on the back burner because we have sites that have current lead exposures,” Tran said.

Since last September, the EPA has spent time getting the contractor informed about the project so they could get to where they are now.

Tran said that the owner of the site had removed everything he needed from the location, so fieldwork was about to begin.

“Obviously, in a small town like this, people are going to have questions,” he said. “We wanted to reach out to the city and everybody that’s interested and let them know that this is what’s happening,” he said. “We’re going to start taking down the actual hat factory over the course of the spring and start that excavation in the summer. We’re excited about that.”

Mayor Tyler “TC” James asked how long the project would take.

Tran said it was subject to change, but he estimated the removal of the infrastructure and foundation would take about four to five months. After that, the excavation could take another three or four months. Installation of the groundwater treatment system could extend it by another four months.

“Hopefully, construction might be done by this time next year,” he said.

Tran said he expected a fence to go up in March shortly before the demolition of the hat factory began.

Tran asked the council if there would be an issue if the cleanup project cut off through traffic on part of Chestnut Street. He said it would affect one driveway, but they would ensure the homeowners would still have access to the driveway.

“There will be some gawkers coming down there,” James said. “You’ll probably have to put in a special lane just for the people driving by checking it out.”

Tran laughed and said people would be able to see it from 10th Street. He had already talked to some of the property owners in the area to make sure they would have their access needs met throughout the project.

“I don’t think there’s any issue on our end,” James said. “As long as the landowners there have access to whatever they need to, I have no issues.”

Tran said once the project is complete, the property will still belong to the current owner. The spot where the hat factory sits now will be an empty grass field. He added that the only thing the landowner cannot do with the property after the cleanup is sell it for a profit.

More information about the cleanup site is available on the EPA’s website at www.epa.gov/superfund/viennawells.