Polluted to squeaky green: An environmental clean up story

Polluted to squeaky green: An environmental clean up story

Diane Dietz
The Register-Guard
April 22, 2008

	Photo: Brian Davies/ The Register-Guard

The patch of dirt under SeQuential Biofuels on McVay Highway is rapidly becoming the most famous half-acre in all of Lane County.

In May, that ground will be feted by the 6,000 members of the National Brownfields Association conference in Detroit, Mich.

Over the past four years, the site has been the scene of a night-to-day, muck-to-magificent, rags-to-riches conversion - a turnabout in which the filth was literally scoured by the light.

Credit goes to SeQuential Biofuels, Lane County and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, participants say.

"It's been challenging," said Jim Glass, a DEQ project manager. "It has been a lot of work for DEQ and a lot of work for Lane County to really make this thing happen. It took a commitment, a partnership across the board to see this through."

The story begins more than 15 years ago with a bad smell - a whiff of gasoline in the well water at a home adjacent to the old McVay Highway gas station. Soon after, utility workers digging a trench along the highway found free-flowing petroleum in the soil.

Before regulators could get to the bottom of the problem, Franko Oil, which owned the station and others in Eugene and across the state, went bankrupt, which effectively insulated the company's owners from the cleanup costs, according to DEQ records.

Along came the firm Lucky Sites, based in Vancouver, Wash., which bought the Franko filling stations.

"They basically thought they could buy all these sites and do the redevelopment and then sell them off and make some money on them," Glass said.

The company got the McVay station, which was on a freeway frontage road one-quarter mile from an exit, for a steal - $2,000, according to the DEQ.

The firm hired an environmental consultant to remove five underground storage tanks and to survey how much remediation work would have to be done, which turned out to be way more than the owner expected, Glass said.

Lucky Sites stopped work, Glass said, and the company also stopped paying the consultant.

The consultant filed a lien on the property, took Lucky Sites to court, and the judge awarded ownership of the half-acre to the consultant.

"He quickly realized the contamination was significant enough that it was an upside down project," Glass said. "The cleanup was going to be more than the project was worth."

The DEQ, meanwhile, levied $400,000 in civil penalties and fees against Lucky Sites and a related company in connection with pollution at a half dozen of the old Franko filling stations, Glass said.

"We continue to try to work with them to clean up the sites they own," said Dave Belyea, a DEQ program manager. "We still have liens on their properties and we still garnish some of the rents that they have."

The McVay half-acre, meanwhile, was essentially abandoned.

Transients came and went, leaving hundreds of hypodermic needles and a couple of camper shells in their wake. Passers-by dumped their garbage there.

The grounds were littered with drums of dirty oil and petroleum-laced waste material.

Between 1997 and 2003, Belyea visited the property annually to open a well and measure the petroleum in the groundwater.

"I would drive up there leery of who might be there and what they might be doing," he said.

When Belyea uncapped the well, he opened a portal to an underground that was just as filthy.

As much as 35 inches of gasoline floated on top of the shallow groundwater. Gas contains benzene and exposure through breathing vapors or drinking tainted water is associated with cancer.

"I actually took some home and ran my lawn mower with it," Belyea said. "I kid you not."

The underground plume of gas-tainted waters was spreading. And Russell Creek and the Willamette River were downhill from there.

The site became a "real frustration and aggravation" for the DEQ. Nobody had money to clean it up. All they could do was watch, worry and wonder.

"This property languished for a long time. How could we get this to a revitalized, reusable site?" Belyea said. "Who would ever be interested in property like this the way it is? The answer was nobody."

Then, SeQuential Biofuels came looking for some property. The small Oregon-based company was making diesel out of cooking oil left over from food manufacturers and restaurant waste - Kettle Chips, Burgerville - and distributing that and ethanol blends to retail outlets in the Northwest.

The company leaders - its founders Ian Hill and Tomas Endicott hail from Eugene - figure it pays to be green. Turning an old, polluted property into an all-new energy efficient eco-friendly biofuels station appealed to them.

"They were actually really excited to jump in, be a part of a brownfield - and to clean it up and redevelop it as a green gas station," Belyea said.

Transformation

Cleanup of the McVay Highway half-acre was a stupendous bureaucratic feat by all accounts, one that only occasionally collapsed into quarrels and bickering.

The cleanup cost was nearly $300,000, with the funds coming from the Environmental Protection Agency, Lane County and SeQuential Biofuels. Additionally, tax credits and low-interest government loans helped build the biofuels station.

The job was dicey from the start.

To start the work, some agency had to take control of the property. The DEQ proposed that Lane County foreclose on the property and then apply for the federal grant that would ultimately pay for the cleanup.

County officials were understandably nervous. The law has a "you touch it, you own it" philosophy when it comes to environmental cleanup. The county had no desire to get saddled with the bill.

"They saw how ugly the site was and wanted no part of it, but we talked them into it," Belyea said.

"The only way we could convince them to move forward with foreclosure was to show them: Here's the statute that says if you foreclose, you will not be liable."

After a complex set of agreements were forged in 2004 between the state environmental agency, SeQuential Biofuels and the county, the Board of Commissioners took a leap of faith and foreclosed.

Clean up proceeded quickly after that. Crews took down the old station and dug up 1,000 yards of heavily contaminated soil.

They took the dirt to a closed county landfill at Cottage Grove, spread it open to the sun, turned it and aerated it. The petroleum evaporated. Then the county used the dirt to plug holes in the old landfill cap.

DEQ officials said they'd be happier if they could give the site a "no further action" clean bill of health.

But while the digging was under way, they discovered the tops of several old wells that extended deeply into the aquifer below.

One of the wells had a pipe in it with petroleumlike residue inside and heavy contamination in the deep waters below.

"It looks like they might actually have been dumping stuff into that well," Glass said.

"We pumped as much of the ground water out of that deeper aquifer as we could. We did as much cleanup as we basically had enough money left to do," he said.

Eventually, more investigation of the nature and extent of the deep pollution will be needed, he said.

"We've taken the head off of the plume. All of the source material is gone. The site will continue to attenuate over time," he said.

In the meantime, SeQuential is now operating a super-duper green biofuels filling station on the land.

The super duper means that the station is completely fueled with green power from 244 solar panels on the fueling island roof plus wind power from EWEB.

The station itself is made of nontoxic local materials and its roof is covered with 5 inches of dirt and plants that hold and cleanse the rainwater as it falls.

The green-on-green operation is built on reclaimed and reused urban land, which means it didn't cause even a tiny bump in the urban growth boundary.

"When I fill my own pickup truck there today I am so pleased," Belyea said.

Neighbors, meanwhile, are quick to demonstrate their gratitude. They've brought SeQuential employees cookies during holidays, Hill said. And when it snowed, a neighbor plowed the station's lanes.

Accolades from afar

Underground storage tank cleanup is the grunt work of environmental agencies. State agencies across the nation have 200,000 of them to work through.

"They are pretty standard. A gas station is a gas station and their products are pretty much the same from one to the next," Belyea said.

It wasn't just the clean up that catapulted the SeQuential site to widespread recognition.

Only one other gas station cleanup has claimed the national Phoenix award, said Denise Chamberlain, chairwoman of the Pennsylvania-based organization that gives the award.

That project - awarded two years ago - was a 1923 Texaco Service Station with soil contamination that the town of Rosalia, Wash. (30 miles south of Spokane), cleaned up and converted into a visitor and historical interpretation center.

In Eugene, it was the night-to-day difference of going from a dirty brownfield site to a squeaky green business that clenched the award for Lane County and SeQuential Biofuels, Chamberlain said.

"We thought this was an interesting and unique twist," she said.

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