Columbus leaders and community organizers celebrated the completion of roughly 1,800 feet of new construction for the 14th Avenue ditch improvement project on Monday.
Work began late last year and included a combination project of filling in the old ditch along 14th Avenue and widening the road to build a center turn lane. In all, the project cost a little more than $1.3 million, using funding from an Army Corps of Engineers grant and the city of Columbus.
Columbus Mayor Robert Smith said the ditch improvement has been “a long time coming” and is the first phase of more extensive work along 14th Avenue, near site of the former Kerr-McGee plant.
Kerr-McGee Chemical Corporation and its successor, Tronox Inc., operated a chemical manufacturing facility at the site near the intersection of Martin Luther King Drive and 14th Ave. from 1928 to 2003.
In 2011, EPA put the site on its National Priorities List due to contaminated water, sediment and soil from the plant’s operation. Since then, EPA and the state Department of Environmental Quality have worked to clean the site to prevent further contamination.
“The National Priorities List has some of the nation’s worst hazardous waste sites on it,” said Franklin Hill, the director of EPA’s Region 4 Superfund Division. “This is one of them. But what we see today is the initial start of construction on this NPL site. It also represents the initial start of improvement in this community.”
Hill said the Kerr-McGee plant primarily used creosote to treat railroad cross ties, and EPA also found indication of pentachlorophenol use on the property. Both chemicals are hazardous.
“Our goal here is to make sure the citizens are not impacted by what they left behind,” Hill said.
The project is the result of collaboration between several groups, including the city of Columbus, EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Greenfield Multi-State Trust Group and the Memphis Town Community Action Group.
Smith said the project serves several purposes: To widen the road and create a shoulder for improved traffic flow; to remediate contaminated soil that posed a health risk to surrounding residences; and to improve drainage capacity along the roadway, which should in turn help prevent or reduce sanitary and storm water mixing during heavy rains.
“The 14th Avenue Road and ditch improvement project has proven to be a great example of what can happen when multiple entities work together to provide a common goal,” Smith said. “Every entity involved had their own set of goals, funding, priorities and perspective. But we were glad to see that everyone put their resources into one pot and unselfishly worked toward this one goal.”
Trey Hess, chief of MDEQ’s Groundwater Assessment and Remediation Division, reiterated Smith’s points and said the project could not have been done without cooperation from all involved.
“One thing that really brings us all together is the fact that we all collaboratively worked together to make this happen,” Hess said. “Regulators, we typically just clean up sites, but we worked together with the community and … city leadership to find a way to bring together both protecting help and safety as well has having the welfare looked after as well. It’s exciting to be part of a project that does take care of all of those aspects.”
Despite Wednesday’s milestone, Hill said much work remains for the old Kerr-McGee site. He said EPA is still working on a remedial investigation and feasibility study, with plans to be in the field conducting additional characterization it in the fall and to have a written report — to address a remedy for the contaminated site — by mid-2016.
“We are on a schedule,” he said. “I’ve committed to you once before that we are going to get a cleanup on this project and we will. But I am definitely proud of the outstanding accomplishments of this group and this team here in Columbus on this 14th (Avenue) ditch improvement project.”
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