Businesses marked for cleanup

Two local businesses have been added to the state’s toxic cleanup list, after a site assessment concluded cleanup efforts haven’t finished the job.
Blaine Marina and the former site of the Chris V8 auto repair yard on Portal Way in Custer were added to the list of potentially contaminated sites years ago. County environmental health inspector Mindy Miller said her department got a grant to fully assess the risk to public health this year. The state department of ecology will now work with the property owners to clean up the mess.

At Blaine Marina, cleanup efforts have been underway since a series of diesel spills in 1990 and 1991 contaminated the ground. “A contractor was hired in 1996,” said Miller. “They installed monitoring wells and have been bailing the product out of them. There’s not a lot remaining.”

The site ranked three on a scale of five, one being the highest public health risk. The rankings are assigned given a long list of factors, such as amount and kind of contamination and proximity to water sources.

At the auto repair yard in Custer, Miller found traces of lead, cadmium, gasoline, diesel, and lube oil in the soil. The site got a ranking of one, the highest on the scale of public health risks. “There are people on wells in the area as well as wetlands,” Miller said. She said the repair shop had been closed for several years, and the owner had removed some drums of waste from the site.

The party liable for the contamination pays for cleanup, said Caitlin Cormier of the state department of ecology, with some technical assistance from the state. “Cleanup can be expensive,” she said.

At Blaine Marina, Mike Dodd said most cleanup steps have already been taken. “It doesn’t change our plans or anything we’ve been doing,” he said of the site’s recent listing. “Our site, like any other site that’s been there for fifty years, all have hazards problems.” He said the monitoring wells are checked monthly and the business has put in improvements over the last ten years to prevent spills. “We’d let things get run down a little bit so we did some new diking and put covers over the valve system and where the trucks unload. The wells are there to make sure nothing is being added now.”
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