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Pawtucket, RI - Tidewater

FMGP In The News  -  From The Archives      (Click here to view other sites under public scrutiny)

►  Residents React To Gas Works Wastes At Pawtucket, R.I.
      Big Arm, Montana 21 January, 2005      (full story & photos)

Concerned gas plant neighbors at Pawtucket, Rhode Island have mounted a reasoned and planned investigation into potential presence of dumped and migrated off-site toxic wastes from the former (1885) Tidewater Gas Works of the Blackstone Valley Gas & Electric Co.

This reasoned concern is becoming a model for citizen participation where local residents have come to feel “left out” of the regulatory deliberations over cleanup of gas works coal tars and other toxic residuals from gas manufacturing.     (click to continue)

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►  Nocatee-Hull Creosote Site, Florida      (Dec. 2004)
Light oils of gas manufacturing tars represented ideal wood preservation chemicals, either untreated or treated to remove water and to thereby make the tar chemicals more penetrating of the wood to be preserved from rot and insect attack. Florida, because of its timber industry, became the site of many wood treatment plants, in which the timber was embedded with the toxic light oils of gas tars, generally in finished lumber form, and shipped away for use as utility poles, railway ties and all manner of wharf and harbor works.

The Nocatee-Hull Creosote site (1931-1952) likely is typical of many of these abandoned wood treatment sites, in which the ground became saturated with spilled, leaked and discharged treatment-fluid residues. According to the cited (below) newspaper coverage, this was one of the more primitive types of treatment, in which the wood was soaked in pits dug into the ground, rather than primarily preserved by placement in pressure-injection chambers on the ground surface. Regardless of the manner of treatment, all wood preservation sites employing coal-tars are subject to consideration as representing locations of potential human and environmental threats. Some of the sites were close to the yielding forests and relative further from population centers, and the heavy, preservation-soaked wood was shipped off the centers of supply. The Nocatee-Hull site represents such a site, one for which the magnitude of numbers of potential human receptors is relatively small and therefore the shear numbers of affected people appear to have led to its relegation to a low priority for cleanup.

Interested readers can view a recent report on the human-health threats of this site, as reported by Scott Radway of The Bradenton Hearld at the link below.

►  Residents say CSX polluted community
By SCOTT RADWAY - Staff Writer
The Bradenton Herald  -  December 17,  2004

Click Here To Read Complete Story   (or copy URL below)
http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/10436426.htm

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►  Tar Ponds and Coke Ovens clean up in Sydney, Nova Scotia     (Nov. 2004)
"London-based AMEC won a contract to prepare an environmental impact statement for the Tar Ponds and Coke Ovens clean up in Sydney, Nova Scotia. The cleanup is expected to take 10 years and cost $400 million. Cleanup plans including excavating and destroying the worst contaminants, treating remaining contaminants in place, construction of an engineered containment system, and landscaping the site. AMEC has been involved at the site during the past five years, conducting air monitoring and a peer review and quality assurance program for a soil quality study.”
 - CE News, November, 2004, p. 17

Note - Dr. Hatheway adds that tar originated from coke ovens constructed in 1905, at the time the steel mill was established. The plant made use of coal mined from beneath the Atlantic Ocean and operated until 1988 when Environment Canada shut the plant down, following a 1982 discovery of PAHs in lobsters harvested nearby. The cleanup has been under study since the early 1990s.
 
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►  Two Acres in City on Priority Cleanup List     (Mar. 2003)
    Click Here To Read Complete Story

BY MARY JO FELDSTEIN
Scranton Times Tribune
The Sunday Times 03/02/2003

A former manufactured gas plant in Scranton has been identified by the
state's Department of Environmental Protection as one of nine priority cleanup sites.

Once home to a factory that processed coal into gaseous fuel, the 150-year-old site contains coal-tar residues, some of which may cause cancer, said Mark Carmon, a DEP spokesman.

©Scranton Times Tribune 2004

Internet Links To Gas Works Sites Presently Undergoing Public Attention

 Once discovered in the course of urban renewal, land redevelopment or infrastructure improvement, former manufactured gas plants quickly rise to public attention and activities generally go to quick resolution, not always to favor the environment or public health, however.

Here are a selection of Internet sites that will allow you to judge the broad spectrum of response, non-response and inaction and action.

Professor Hatheway would like to know of other links and will consider putting them up on this website for everyone's benefit.

► GAS WORKS PARK, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

Here is a former manufactured gas plant, of the Pacific Coast Oil Gas variety, known then as Lake Station, constructed in 1937 and decomissioned in 1960. The owner, Seattle Gas Light Co., donated the gas works to the City of Seattle in the early 1970s and the site has been proclaimed safe enough for daily visitations by citizens. It seems that most visitors are joggers and dog-walkers, but the old Compressor House has been cleaned-up and serves as a brightly-attractive children's energy-absorbing playground. The compressors are clean and brightly painted and undamageable from kid-climbing.

By no means is the site completely safe from the environmental and public health standpoint, but institutional controls have limited access to those portions of the site felt by the City to represent incidental dangers to visitors.

Visit the site at http://www.seattlephotographs.com/photos/gasworks_park/Gasworks_Park_photo_gallery.htm

http://www.cityofseattle.net/parks/parkspaces/GASWORKS.htm

EXCELLENT website with 360 degree Virtual tours. You will need to have Apple Quicktime installed to view them, but they are a must see: http://www.vrseattle.com/html/vrlist.php?cat_id=64

Arial Photograph: http://www.cityofseattle.net/parks/_images/maps/gasworks.jpg

Map: http://www.cityofseattle.net/parks/history/GasWorksPark.pdf

"Brownfields to Parks Examples, 1998, Gas Works Park, Seattle, WA The Trust for Public Land
http://www.tpl.org/tier3_cdl.cfm?content_item_id=937&folder_id=729

AOL City Guide: Seattle - Gas Works Park
http://www.digitalcity.com/seattle/entertainment/venue.adp?vid=33311

► REMNANTS of the SEMET-SOLVAY BY-PRODUCT COKE OVENS, MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN

By-product recovery of valuable ammonia and PAH compounds was perfected in the early 1890s by the Belgians who marketed their technology throughout Europe and in North America. The result was the By-Product Coke Oven Plant, making gas for sale by owning utilities ("Utility Plant") or as a commercial venture to make coke (from the roasting of coal) for sale to industry ("Merchant Plant") and to market the by-product gas to local utilities for distribution in their own systems. Consequently not all derelict coke- oven plant sites are owned by the utility industry.

The first American by-product coke oven plant was constructed at Syracuse, New York in 1895 and a steady rise in their popularity quickly followed, culminating with an outbreak of plants

► FORMER CICERO GAS LIGHT COMPANY GAS WORKS at OAK PARK, ILLINOIS

The former manufactured gas plant was installed in 1896 and decommissioned in 1924 as consolidation of manufactured gas at Chicago eclipsed the works with higher-pressure carburetted water gas piped to Oak Park from central stations in Chicago. On demolition, the gas works site was donated to the City of Oak Park and was converted to Barrie Park, about 3.5 acres of public ground and playing fields. The north side of the plant site abuts the Eisenhower Expressway, at Lombard Avenue.

Over the years local residents began to take notice of what has turned out to be a cluster of cancers and the site has been under a State-ordered remediation since 199_, wheren the cleanup costs have escalated upward from an estimated $3-5 million to a current tag of some $120 million. As more is learned of the site, through attention to details discovered during remedial activities, the threats become more apparent. Consequently, most of the homes surrounding the park are no vacant and a variety of protests and legal actions are in the works.

Excavation and removal of toxic gas manufacturing residuals and wastes have drawn national attention and the degree of excavation, following the trail of coal tars (PAHs) down into the hard glacial geologic lodgment till soil has reached more than 50 feet vertically. This is a case example of how light-oil tar residuals and former gas liquors (effluents) take up favored migration pathways in which their dense, nonaqueous liquid (DNAPL) nature is highly affected by gravitational attraction along natural fractures in the glacial till.

► Web sites are:

http://vil.oak-park.il.us  (using the Barrie Park link)

http://www.vil.oak-park.il.us.

http://www.barriepark.org.

http://www.lurm.com