Group working to 'get the goo out' of Elizabeth River

CHESAPEAKE

It looks like tar, smells like tar, and pretty much is tar. And Tuesday, workers were removing tons of it, scoop by scoop, from the bottom of the Elizabeth River, where this toxic waste has been wreaking ecological havoc for decades.

Finally, the source of many of the Elizabeth's problems - poor water quality, cancerous lesions in fish, a near-lifeless bottom - is being removed for good.

"Ooo, that was a nasty one," said Dan Dauer, a scientist from Old Dominion University, as he watched a crane snatch a bucketful of especially black goo from the river bed.

A crane operator swung the steel bucket over a waiting barge and released his poisoned load. Workers have been dredging highly contaminated sediments this way for about a week now in the Southern Branch of the river, off Money Point in Chesapeake, and have months to go before completing the job.

The work is part of the first sediment cleanup of this size in Virginia, an effort led by the Elizabeth River Project, a local environmental group, to rid the long-abused waterway of its toxic past while rebuilding shoreline marshes and oyster reefs.

Once some 15,000 tons of sediment have been scooped up and taken to a landfill in Charles City County for safe burial, crews will spread a blanket of clean sand on the bottom and build about three acres of oyster reefs along the shore.

Costing $3.1 million, the work should be complete by November, said Joe Rieger, a scientist with the Elizabeth River Project, based in Portsmouth.

Then the focus will shift to an even nastier stretch, just upriver, where similar dredging and capping will take place, probably next year, Rieger said. In all, 25 acres of river bottom will be restored, which the environmental group describes on T-shirts, buttons and bumper stickers as "The Goo Must Go!"

The pollution in question is creosote, a tar-like wood preservative slathered on telephone poles and pier pilings. On this southern end of the river, four creosote plants once operated in Portsmouth and Chesapeake, before environmental laws existed.

Wastes often were dumped into the river or they dripped off treated logs while waiting on docks for transport to markets.

"For over 100 years, it was drip, drip, drip, straight into the river," Rieger said.

The black wastes are 5 feet deep in most places off Money Point, he said.

Creosote is laden with PAHs - polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are highly toxic and known to cause cancer. In some spots now being dredged on the Elizabeth, PAH concentrations are hundreds of times higher than accepted levels.

A test strip was dredged in 2009 and wetlands replanted nearby. Scientists already are noticing a sharp increase in fish and crabs returning to the newly cleaned area.

Similarly, cancerous liver lesions in resident mummichog fish have dropped, too, said Wolfgang Vogelbein, who has studied toxic pollution in the Elizabeth River for more than 20 years for the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

In 2006, Vogelbein said, 40 percent of mummichogs had pre-cancerous lesions on their livers; last year, less than 10 percent did.

"It definitely is making a difference," he said.

All of the creosote off Money Point, an industrial peninsula, came from the old Eppinger & Russell creosote plant. When it closed in 1979, Hess Corp. bought the site and has spent more than six years cleaning up leftover creosote wastes.

The oil company will build a steel retention wall near the shoreline and will install a wind turbine to power a pumping station to draw liquid wastes out of the ground so it does not slide back into the Elizabeth, said Rieger.

Construction of the wall is expected to begin this summer, he added.

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