Plan to remove toxic goo from Elizabeth River approved

NEWPORT NEWS

A project to remove tons of dangerously toxic wastes from the bottom of the Elizabeth River won state approval Tuesday, the last hurdle before work can begin at a highly contaminated site off Money Point in Chesapeake.

Environmentalists and scientists were all smiles after a unanimous vote by the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, saying construction should begin in June and be completed by October.

The restoration effort, in the planning stages for three years, will cost about $1.2 million.

"This will be the first goo to go," said Marjorie Mayfield Jackson, executive director of the Elizabeth River Project.

The environmental group has popularized a slogan - "The goo must go!" - to represent its goal of ridding toxic hot spots laden with black, tarlike wastes that have harmed the river's ecology for decades.

Most of the Money Point wastes got into the river during an industrial fire and a major tank spill in the 1960s at the former Eppinger & Russell creosote plant in Chesapeake. Now closed, the plant for decades manufactured creosote as a wood treatment for pilings and telephone poles.

The plant operated mostly before state and national environmental rules existed to curb pollutants on such industrial sites. For years, for example, tainted wastewater at the plant was piped directly into the river.

As designed, the Money Point restoration project will involve dredging about 800 cubic yards of the most contaminated wastes from an 8-acre site near the shoreline. It is likely this material will be trucked to a special incinerator near Richmond and burned, said Joe Rieger, a senior scientist with the Elizabeth River Project.

Next, organizers will spread a foot-deep layer of clean sand on sections of the purged bottom and build a 3.5-acre oyster reef and a 1.3-acre tidal marsh on top of river bottom containing less concentrated pollutants, Rieger said.

Advisers from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science said they would have preferred that the entire 8 acres be dredged of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, the byproduct of creosote wastes thought to cause cancer.

A shortage of money, plus other obstacles, prevented a complete scrubbing. Still, the institute favored the restoration plan as proposed, saying it will create "a beneficial increase" in environmental health.

It is hoped that a second phase of the Money Point project, one involving the dredging of extremely contaminated sediments just north of the old Eppinger & Russell plant, can be started within two years, organizers said.

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com